Slack economy and wary consumers equals opportunity. Really!

Rising food costs, rising fuel costs, rising utilities costs—if you build Murphy’s Law into your business plan, it’s the perfect time to open a restaurant.

Hardly anyone asks me when I’m going to start my own restaurant any more. After the first few times that I answered the question by running out of the room screaming and tearing my hair, I seem to have gotten the point across. I’m always happy to help other people start them, y’know; I just have issues with long-term commitment.

And now, of course, the subject doesn’t come up. Even people outside the industry seem pretty well aware how choppy the waters are—everybody eats, and what’s happened to food prices is obvious. Insiders know that life is even bleaker on the wholesale level, where all the stages of the supply chain are squeezing their margins as much as they can in a desperate effort to hang on to skittish customers.

Let’s say that you are a prospective restaurateur. You’re building that business plan in your head while swirling the filberts in your gimlet (have a double; it’s worse than you think), and ticking off the reasons you should have started a decade ago. Variable costs: raw materials cost a hell of a lot more, and will keep costing more as long as we feed cars and hogs the same dinner. Wages are unlikely to stay flat because cooks, as everyone knows, have to buy premium fuel for their Lamborghinis. Fixed costs: you probably don’t need to worry about the mortgage; nobody’s lending money anyway. And utilities…did you think they were a fixed cost? Ha!

On the revenue side of the teeter-totter, you have a bunch of customers who have lost equity if they’re lucky, jobs and houses if they’re not. They’re looking at a $1,000 a month for high-deductible health care, college tuition which can only be paid for in gold bullion, and gasoline which costs more than milk, (and soon, cream). Collection agencies are leaving icy messages on their answering machines, either for their own debts or for someone else with the same name, which has them running to their credit reports to see if some poor schlub has stolen their card numbers to buy Cheerios. They are as calm about the future as a father who has loaned his teenage son the keys to his Corvette.

Add to all of this a nationwide outbreak of salmonella whose precise vector is uncertain, although we think it’s one of three things that are very good for you and you should eat every day, if they weren’t toxic, which they aren’t, except when they are, but we’re not sure when that is. The sum of the tally of woes?

It’s a perfect time to start a restaurant.

I suppose this reflects a cynicism born of more than three decades of hanging around the industry. If you live with the assumption that everything that can go wrong eventually will, and that these awful possibilities would like to meet for drinks at your place to discuss what to do next, then this is your moment. As those silly former optimists wail about the injustice of fate, you, who have built Murphy’s Law into your business plan, can eat their lunch.

It begins with an understanding of your customers. You know they’re struggling, you know they’re cutting back their “fun” expenses as gloom clouds their futures, and you also know they would like nothing better than to have a good time and forget about it. You must, therefore, offer them an experience that they are confident will give them pleasure, and one for which they won’t hate themselves in the morning.

Exemplia gratis: The “small plates” trend began as an importation of tapas, dim sum and mezethes by bar owners who had gone as far as onion rings and mozzarella sticks could take them. They have moved from an aesthetic phenomenon to an economic one: the price point and the number of choices makes for a modular menu, which can expand and contract with the sentiment of the customer.

Similar “modularities” can be built into the design of both kitchens and recipes. Business rises and falls through the dayparts, and a well-built kitchen allows the staffing to follow suit. With recipes, a menu which has too much printed detail can be a trap: if what comes on the side of the petrale sole is delivered orally, then your polenta, orzo, potatoes or rice can be chosen by the price that pains least. And soup is likely to resurrect its honored place in the world of inventory control—you don’t make it from recipes, you make it from whatcha got.

Crummy economic times do serve a purpose; they restore a discipline that gets lax when customers are lined up outside the door. I’ve worked in more than one restaurant that never took inventory, and that estimated foodcost percentages without knowing if they had 15 bucks or 15,000 in the cooler. Try that now. And try throwing new items on the menu without production testing or market testing. All those dreary fundamentals—don’t waste, watch costs, talk to your customers, listen to your staff—are reclaiming center stage, as if they had stayed relevant all along. And, since they all point to survival and even to profit, a convincing mastery of them might even get a loan.