I was fourteen years old when I first went to work in a restaurant, although by that point restaurants were already familiar territory to me. My grandparents owned Craig’s Coffee Shop in a Midwestern town with a population of 977, so I had grown up around grills, coffee pots, regular customers, and the peculiar rhythm of a business where everybody can be perfectly calm one minute and running in six directions the next. I understood that restaurants were noisy, hot, unpredictable places where people expected to be fed whether you were ready for them or not. What I did not understand yet was that knowing how a restaurant worked was very different from knowing how to manage one.

My first real experience in a large restaurant operation came with Lucky Steer Family Restaurants. The location where I started was brand new, only the third restaurant opened by the brothers who owned the company, and to me it seemed enormous. The place seated roughly five hundred people and operated from early morning until late evening. When it was busy, it was really busy. There could be customers lined up waiting for tables while the kitchen was buried in tickets, dishwashers were trying desperately to keep up, and somebody in management was wondering which employee was going to call in sick next.

I started at the bottom, which turned out to be a very good place to begin. I was a busboy and dishwasher, and there is no quicker way to lose any romantic ideas about the restaurant business than spending a Saturday night standing over a dish machine. I cleared tables, carried tubs, washed plates, scrubbed pans, hauled garbage, mopped floors, and learned that every elegant meal eventually ends with somebody dealing with what is left behind.