Adam Reiner

It really gives the employee the opportunity to come in and experience the restaurant the way the guests do.

Oh, absolutely.

I'm not necessarily proud to say that, but restaurants are a business and having food waste is not the best thing.

So generally, I would say it's the chefs that are the ones who are conveying that to the wait staff, not necessarily the managers, because the chefs are the ones that really see the P&L reports and they're the ones that know

you know, the damage that can be done if you have unsold product.

But in my experience, particularly when I worked at a lot of like really, really high-end steakhouses, you might have, for example, like a Chateaubriand steak where the chef is only doing like a limited amount of these giant Chateaubriands that cost $200 or $250 for, you know, a steak for two.

I can remember situations where they would like, there would be a spice rub that would be kind of basically pre-seasoned the meat so that it would have great flavor.

And if you only had two steaks, there would be nights where you'd sell both of the steaks by 6.30, and the first few tables would order them right away.

But if you had one left toward the end of the night, that steak, because it had been rubbed with seasoning, would not be something that they could sell the next day.

It wouldn't be the same... They wouldn't want it to be sitting overnight in that spice rub.

So in those cases...

you know, and this is getting really inside baseball here, you might get a message from the kitchen where you're asked to come back and be like, hey, listen, Adam, we really need you to sell that Chateaubriand, do the best you can.

The biggest thing for me is that nothing that you ask for in a restaurant is ever easy.

Like the natural state of a restaurant is chaos.

And all of the people that are working behind the scenes, their job is to try to guard you as the guest from the chaos behind the scenes.

So whenever you're asking for some sort of special, you know, change to your dish, or you're asking for

something unique and different, it has the potential to kind of throw off the rhythm of restaurants, which generally have these systems in place that are designed so that they can be consistent and efficient in their behavior.

So I think that's definitely one thing that you realize when you work in restaurants, like right off the bat, that, you know, when people behave like they think something they're asking for is super easy, that you really just know that it's not.

Thanks so much for having me.