The Life of a Restaurant Manager

I'll try to make a long story short; Recently i'v been trying out for a position as "Team Leader", which is a fancy name for Assistant Manager, with a big company, Withbread to name names, and going through the job description with the Manager i had clouds of dark thoughts going through my head.. that can be summed up by the word "boring".
Yep, instead of thinking how hard the job is going to be, my head was already on the "oh this is going to be tedious".

If you have any experience in the restaurant business you will know that a manager's job is anything but relaxing - essentially, you are a waiter who also does a million other things, and generally speaking you are the onoly one who really gives a crap about the business, with everyone else interested in one of the following, instead : Tips, Not Working, and Getting Out.

Withbread instead have a structure in place where managers do the management, and staff does the work, which is .. nice, if you think it can work, but i have my doubts.. if only, for the fact that i believe in "lead by example", and after all, what a restaurant really needs is really good staff, if hey had that, management needs would be minimal.

So, Withbread's managers do exclusively the management work. And apparently, so do many other businesses, here and elsewhere.
In fact, i was watching once again an episode of Kitchen Nightmares USA, and Gordon walking in to be greeted by a formidable looking lady claiming "i am the manager"; my thoughts were "and so you take the blame for everything that's wrong in here". But apparently no, a manager doesn't actually manage the restaurant.

You see, a restaurant is - like many other businesses - a system : 1) money is used to buy food and to transform it into the sold product 2) the product is sold to the customers 3) the cycle repeats. Other subsystems include the cleaning of the premises (part of 2), the serving (also 2), the cooking (part of 1), keeping all the structure functional , i.e., bills paid, machines working, etc.. (part of both 1 and 2), customers booking and table orders (part of 1 & 2), and so on. In my short experience, the person who makes sure the system works is called a Manager; if the general consensus is that this isn't the Manager's job, ok then, i will admit i am wrong, but then i am curious as to who exactly does that.

Or perhaps people think that this role can be split amongst different people, but then it leads to problems that we see happening every time a new episode of Kitchen Nightmares airs.

To be fair, there are many problems a new food business can have, but when we look at Kitchen Nightmares, the problem is always the same - in Chef Gordon's own words, "the food is shit".


Now, customers are normal people - believe it or not - and they *will* put up with poor service; hey, there's even a famous restaurant back home where the waiters yell obscenities at the customers (properly called "The Insult"), and it's packed every day.
But if the food's bad, there is no way you will stay afloat - nope, you'r going under.

End of story, i have a really, really hard time understanding what keeps today's managers from successfully managing a food premise : you know what the system is, if the food is bad, where can you go to locate the problem ??
Right, the Chef.
And if the Chef is bad, what do you do ?

I have never had an instant of hesitation to fire an inefficient staff person - people would not put up with a mechanic, a doctor or a plumber not doing their job properly, but for some reason they are willing to put up with a chef that is incompetent and/or does not perform properly.

In the end, dear Gordon, it's not the Chef who deserves a bollocking, it's the Manager; their very job description is "take shit for everything that happens here", and if you are not able, or willing to do it, don't call yourself a restaurant manager. It's an insult to those of us who really do the work.




Cheers,
Bokken