The first time you walk into a restaurant as the manager, almost nothing looks different and almost everything feels different. The dining room is still the same dining room. The line still sounds the same when tickets start coming in. The dishwasher still manages to run out of racks at exactly the wrong time. Somebody is still late, somebody else still wants Friday night off, and the guests have no idea that anything important has happened. Yet the job has changed completely: yesterday you were one of the people doing the work; today you are responsible for what happens when the work does not get done.

I remember that feeling very well. I began my professional restaurant life young, long before I understood that it would become a career. My grandparents had a small coffee shop in a tiny Midwestern town, but my first serious restaurant job came at fourteen, when I was hired as a busboy and dishwasher at a new Lucky Steer Family Restaurants location. It was nothing like the little coffee shop. The restaurant had roughly five hundred seats, opened early, stayed busy through dinner, and regularly had a line out the door. I started at the bottom, moved into the kitchen, became a cook and then a head cook, helped with openings, and eventually received the chance to run a shift. By then I knew a great deal about doing restaurant work. I was about to learn that knowing the work and managing the whole operation were two very different things.

The preparation for my first management shift was not elaborate. I got a short conversation and the unmistakable message, "Don't screw it up. I'm watching." Then the office door opened and I was expected to manage. I was excited, confident enough to walk the dining room, and awkward enough to feel exactly what I was: a cook wearing a tie. I talked with guests, worked the waiting line, made menu suggestions, and tried to do what my instincts told me mattered. Before long, my manager pulled me into the office and told me I was not managing. It was an uncomfortable but useful lesson: good instincts are not the same thing as a complete field of vision.