Acknowledgments

A book like this is assembled out of other people's hard-won knowledge, and most of it was earned in buildings, not libraries.

To the operators. To everyone who has counted a walk-in at eleven at night, defended a price to a guest who thought it was too high, written a schedule twice because the forecast moved, or made payroll out of a personal account and told nobody: this book is a transcription of what you already know. Any part of it that rings true is yours.

To the people on the line and on the floor. Cooks, dishwashers, prep, servers, bussers, bartenders, hosts, porters. The industry has spent a long time describing this work as a stepping stone and pricing it accordingly. It is skilled labor performed at speed under conditions most professions would not tolerate, and the operators who figured that out first are the ones whose restaurants are still open. Chapters 17 through 21 exist because of that.

To the standing literature. This book stands on a small shelf of genuinely good ones. Roger Fields's Restaurant Success by the Numbers remains the clearest treatment of restaurant financial reality written for people who are not accountants. Danny Meyer's Setting the Table made the argument — that hospitality is a business strategy and not a soft skill — better and earlier than anyone, and the third theme of this book is essentially a long footnote to it. The Restaurant Manager's Handbook by Douglas Robert Brown and Elizabeth Godsmark Rowe is the reference the working manager actually keeps. Michael Kasavana and Donald Smith gave the industry menu engineering, and Chapter 12 is their framework with its limitations stated out loud. H.G. Parsa and colleagues did the unglamorous work of actually measuring restaurant failure, and the correction in Chapter 1 is theirs, not ours.

To the public institutions. The FDA's Food Code, the Department of Labor's wage-and-hour guidance, the Small Business Administration's loan programs, and the state and county health departments that publish their inspection standards are all, whatever else one thinks of them, enormous free public goods. A great deal of what a new operator needs to know is already written down and available at no cost. This book tries to point at it clearly.

To the inspectors, lenders, and landlords who said no for reasons that turned out to be correct. Nobody enjoys those conversations. Several of them are the reason a restaurant in this book's author's past did not open in a building that would have destroyed it.

To the readers who will find the mistakes. Some number will be wrong; some regulation will have changed between writing and reading; some passage will describe how something is supposed to work rather than how it does. Tell us. The book is open-licensed precisely so it can be corrected, and a correction is a contribution.

This book is released under CC BY-SA 4.0 in the belief that the knowledge required to run a small business responsibly should not sit behind a tuition payment. Teach from it, translate it, print it, fix it. Share alike.