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Comment by smogcutter | Hacker News Reader

The first big red flag for me (besides that the whole thing pretty obviously started as a mid life crisis) was how little time it sounds like he spent working at his friend's bar in the three months he needed to put in to qualify for the liquor license. How could he not take that seriously as an opportunity to learn about the industry? I would bet money that the answer is he was afraid to learn that running a restaurant is actual work, not an episode of chef's table.

His lack of preparation is mind boggling, but completely deliberate: the less he knew, the more room there was for fantasy. Beware working with people like this, who want to skip straight to the end.

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Yea, it doesn’t take long working a kitchen or bar to see how fast you can bleed money, employees, reputation—you really have to enjoy the work. You’re going to to into debt, you’re not going to get vacation, you’ll have constant employee turnover and drama (mood issues? Drug issues? Both common in a kitchen.), you have to do shady shit to pass inspection (throw the food out and hit the lights to scare the mice, the inspector is in the lobby!), you’re battling bitter customers who find your food fine but can’t get your accent so they give you a two star yelp review and call you rude—it’s fucking endless.

That said, the community is to die for. I can’t recall ever being close to my coworkers in that way since moving into tech. Nothing tastes as sweet as a cigarette, liquor, and stories after your shift. Kind of necessary with the hours you work!

You won't go into debt if you have enough capitalization.

Of course, you almost never have enough capitalization.

Right, i should note that not all the things i’ve seen are smart.... avoiding going into personal debt is fairly straigtforward.

But, I frankly can’t imagine a restaurant business not taking on some debt in some seasons, at least at first.

Whether you go in to debt or not is about how much money you start with. ;-)

That was a red flag for me, too.

Though honestly, the first big red flag for me was that he wanted to open a restaurant because he loves to cook. This is a little surprising, the way people don't distinguish between the art and the business. It's as if a screenwriter decided to open a production studio, or a guitarist decided to open a music venue. The only finally successful guy I know in the music business (he got into booking and organizing) loves to jam, but he's not very good. Me? I love playing music, but I know that opening a cabaret wouldn't be the way to fulfill that. Honestly, sounds like the best way to ensure I'd never have time to play music again.

The funny thing is, I actually kind of like the financial and operational concepts in restaurants. I studied industrial engineering and ops research, and I loved the examples of restaurant queuing, batch processing, methods to reduce lead time, even supply chains, the way one decision cascades through he others. The idea of discovering that the marginal cost of one dish is much lower than the average cost because it can be prepared using the idle time during the prep and machinery for expensive dishes, that interests me.

No, not that I should open a restaurant, ha. But the guy who wrote this article does mention that he had a copy of "kitchen confidential", and in that book, Bourdain specifically talks about this, recounting the successful restauranteur who lives for these sorts of operational and financial challenges, takes a kind of joy and fascination in them, kind of how a tax lawyer loves finding ways to profit in the details, and that's why he's well suited for the business.

But yeah, anyway, your "big red flag" raised a big red flag for me too. Phoning it in on the pre-reqs and a learning opportunity is certainly a bad sign.

I'm talking about this because the issues are fascinating - I don't want to harp on the dude who write this, though, cause he clearly paid.

Even worse, he took $20,000 from an old friend and burned through it.

And then began borrowing money from family and in-laws.

His lack of financial planning was the most astonishing part of the story to me, even more than the naive optimism around starting a restaurant which seems to be a trap lots of people fall into.

Chancing your family's meager nest egg on a long shot gamble when you have a wife, kids and a mortgage is shockingly negligent.

Well the red flag was he didn’t even bring in someone that knows how to check out a kitchen and inspect the damn place before committing to it

Agreed. His plan might have worked if he was a millionaire and hired an expert to do all the stuff he didn't know how to do, living off savings until the place got profitable.

It didn’t get the same coverage as the more “expose“ aspects of the book, but in Kitchen Confidentiall Anthony Bourdin gets into just what makes a failing restaurant, which is most of them. A particularly illuminating section of the book in my opinion, and one which got into just how difficult it is to run a successful restaurant, and how unprepared most owners are.

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