While crunching numbers, trust instinct

Sure, technology has given us all sorts of methods to break down the intricacies of our business. But don’t forget one factor that makes being in the business worthwhile: instinct.

Okay, maybe I was a little hasty. Last month I was ranting and raving about the evil guv’mint, having received a ticket for expired tabs when the state had never even sent them to me. This, I explained, is typical of the cynical abuse of power in the modern, overregulated Big Brother state: Blackjacking the honest citizens from behind, rifling their pockets, and leaving them crumpled on the sidewalk—then, as an afterthought, gently lifting an arm of the unconscious victim to tuck beneath it a $60 ticket for obstructing a walkway.

So it was with a modicum of embarrassment that I discovered those tabs buried on my dresser beneath a pile of credit-card offers and student-loan consolidation Ponzi schemes. But it didn’t really affect my sensation of being unjustly used: Mere facts have little to do with underlying truth of the matter, as our government itself has consistently maintained. My irrational irritation with government, if you look at it properly, is not only government-endorsed, but an endorsement of government. Patriotic.

And really, I get a little tired of beating the drum for rationality. The Analytical Approach to Foodservice—you know, the menu-mix evaluation, the dollars per square foot, the gram scale in the test kitchen, and the endless parade of three-letter acronyms (or TLAs) that we use to make us appear to know what we’re doing—is exhausting after a while. This is the romance of restaurants—this jumble of numbers and paperwork, these market-driven product profiles and the self-important jargon? Whatever happened to 2 a.m. menu meetings at the strip club next door, rolling the customer double or nothing for dinner, and bribeable Maitre D’s? What happened to the owner who could sniff the dining room at five and guess what the till would hold at ten?

Most of the best operators I have known were as superstitious as a voodoo priest. I think this is pretty much inevitable when you’re in a repetitive activity that can change radically from things you can’t control or predict (sure, you knew your dishwasher was going to break parole, but did you know precisely when?). Think of deep-water sailors in the days of wind power, or baseball players in a pennant race. I used to come to work to listen to Cal tell me how he was managing his luck at the track, and how he could feel when it was about to turn. All he had to do was keep betting and keep the amounts low during the bad stretch, and jump it up when he felt it turn the corner.

And he was at about the median of the scale for belief in unseen forces; this was in San Francisco where you eat dessert first because the ground can shake you into a crack at any time it chooses. Many of the guys gambled because they felt obliged to—they didn’t feel like they had any way to change their lives except trusting to luck, and that they owed it to themselves to try. Six of them—experienced track rats all—took our barback down to the races one day to show him the ropes. They explained arcana like “closers” and “mudders” and “leading apprentice jockey to place” (bad system, by the way), and everybody lost money except him. He’d ask a stranger “What’s your favorite color?” And the man would say “Blue” and he’d place two bucks on the horse with the blue saddle blanket and win $63.75. There was a man who understood luck.

Mind you, I’m not proposing that we all cower under a blanket of superstition and burn incense to choke the evil spirits. Not all the time, anyway. I just think that, as we watch our revenue streams on little blue screens, we should stay alert to movements in the air around us. Instinct is still a big part of the business, and if you forget it, you forget a lot of what makes the business worthwhile. Inspiration uses numbers as a trampoline, and makes its jumps into the dark, trusting instinct to point the feet toward the ground at landing.