One of the most difficult facets of managing a restaurant is keeping within the limits of the vague laws regulating restaurants. Lawmakers are not doing restaurants any favors by writing laws that leave critical issue unclear. This ambiguity is often left to the courts to be clarified. The courts have handed down three very significant […]
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The Pre-Shift Meeting (Part One)
I have worked for a number of companies over the years that held pre-shift meetings with the servers. They have been called a variety of things. Line up, fresh talk, jump start, family meal, and many other names have been used to refer to these meetings. I have also managed at a handful of restaurants […]
How To Make Hostile Guests Love You (Part One)
One of the most difficult situations any server faces is the hostile guest. I call them hostile, because they are angry with you long before you have even greeted them. Some people just bring all the hostility of their day in to a restaurant and dump it on their server. From the moment you greet […]
The Lost Art Of Suggestive Selling
“Subtlety is the art of saying what you think and getting out of the way before it is understood.” –Anonymous We as a society have really lost the power of subtlety. It could be because we have lost the patience to unravel it. We receive far more information on a daily basis than our ancestors […]
Leadership: Empowering Others
“If you don’t understand that you work for your mislabeled ‘subordinates,’ then you know nothing of leadership. You know only tyranny.” -Dee Hock You have two choices as a manager. You can force every staff member to do things as you would do them or you can encourage them to achieve the results you […]
Aspirational Dining in a Recession
(Note: In the previous post I defined the growing market segment of “aspirational dining” restaurants. This is valuable background to this post and merits a read.) What sets the “aspirational dining” market segment apart was their creation of the perception that their food cost more because it was worth more. This perception is what made […]
Aspirational Dining Defined
I am a Mac guy. This means only the occasional interruption for updates from Microsoft. These are most often for Word for Macs. Yet in none of these updates have they added to my spell check dictionary words like “Barack Obama, Al Qaeda, or Facebook.” If they do implement this change they can use this […]
The Greatest Customer Complaint Response Ever
I had lunch today with my friends Emma and Senor Esparza. They ate at Justus Drugstore last night. Justus is on the outermost outskirts of what could be considered Kansas City. In the few years that it has been open it has developed a reputation of being well worth the drive. I personally have never […]
The Disadvantages of Set Schedules
Saturday night I spent some time on the patio with one of the newer servers at my restaurant. He is low on seniority, but has spent more years serving than I have. I estimate total the two of us have between three and four decades of serving experience. I am pretty high on seniority at […]
My Response: 25 Things Chefs Never Tell You
I am trying to fight through the worst bout of writer’s block I have had since I started writing this blog. I started at least three different posts yesterday that ended up in the recycle bin. In my last post I promised to get back to some server related posts, but my brain has forced […]
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About The Author
David Hayden was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. He took his first serving job in 1996. Since that time, he has worked for over a dozen different restaurant companies. He has held both hourly and salaried positions at independent and corporate restaurants. He has waited on over 100,000 guests and trained hundreds of servers. He has been named "Best Server in Kansas City" the last three years by the local weekly paper.