Look for outside advice on the inside

How to get through a recession: Drink, and consider the opinion of your cooks—they’ve dissected your business many, many times.

You get a lot of opinions these days, that’s for sure. Half of the restaurant people I know claim that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, and the other half agree but think it’s the headlight of an oncoming train. The world is a confusing place: this is why we have alcohol.

Dining out, we are informed, is discretionary income. Economists tell us that from the perspective of our customers, we sit in the rarified air on top of an enormous pile of debts that have to be paid—doctors’ bills, mortgages, adult chat lines—and our oxygen tends to get cut off first. It’s funny, but as chilly as things now are at the top of the mountain, it isn’t like we haven’t been here before.

This was brought home to me in the mid-’90s, when I first began to do some corporate recipe development. It was still early in the era of the celebrity chef, but people who wore houndstooth were definitely beginning to take on a cachet, so I got some work in the Pillsbury kitchens, which had been the exclusive domain of home economists. They thought I was entertaining and weird as hell: I would sing while I put oregano on the gram scale, tell stories about the seamy side of the restaurant world, and generally act like your average line cook. They assumed I was kidding when I told them that every downtown restaurant had Goldberger Bail Bonds on its phone list, right after “Fish.” I was insulted—where else would it be? You think we can’t alphabetize?

My other peculiarity in that context was my work history. I came into a large building full of people who regarded their jobs as secure, many of whom had had only this job since they got out of college, and expected to have it until retirement or the Rapture. I had been in restaurants for 20 years by then, in at least a dozen places (one or two of which were still in business) and had a somewhat jaded picture of job security. And when the company began shedding employees to make itself a more attractive commodity, I felt a kind of horrified wonder that many of my new ex-colleagues had never been fired before.

I can remember drinking my way through several previous recessions, and I highly recommend it. (I would prescribe this to our truant customers as well, and suggest that they accompany their drinks with dinner and dessert.) Here’s what it looked like: At the end of a lousy night, the cooks would gather at the bar with beers, and begin a gripefest which would, as often as not, turn into a late-night strategy session. Everything would be dissected, from the food to the servers (that tended to be messy) to the way the bosses were presenting the place, and we’d swap stories about joints that were worse. Once in a great while an owner would drop by and overhear something that was taken to heart; more often we used the time to solidify our own ideas of how a restaurant should be run.

Everybody does this. If you are reading this after midnight, your cooks are doing it now. It’s been a boon to my consulting life—when I get a job refurbishing a menu, I invariably head to the kitchen to talk to the cooks. They never have to think for a moment about how to make their restaurant better; they talk about it every night and have the answers all prepared. I write them down and give them to the executives with my bill.

This might be a time to look for outside suggestions from the inside. We’re in this together, after all, and many a keen eye is disguised in humble houndstooth.