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I worked in the restaurant and bar business for a long time as an employee. Not losing your shirt in a food business takes a LOT of experience. According to the

I worked in the restaurant and bar business for a long time as an employee. Not losing your shirt in a food business takes a LOT of experience. According to the National Restaurant Association, 60% of restaurants fail within the first year and 80% fail within five. Most people realize they don't know enough to open a small lab or IT consulting firm, but drastically overestimate their knowledge of the food business. It makes sense-- these businesses must hide the mountains of back-breaking low-pay manual labor from customers lest they become uncomfortable and patronize somewhere that makes it all feel calm, relaxed and easy. And for all that, particularly successful restaurant owners get a margin of maybe 5% after a few years when you really nail down your expenses and processes, though the numbers for coffee shops are a bit different. This successful restaurateur's businesses in Boston yield 2% (though she takes a paycheck not included in that 2%.) https://www.eater.com/2020/3/9/21166993/how-much-to-run-a-restaurant-cost-mei-mei-boston-finances https://www.eater.com/2020/3/9/21166993/how-much-to-run-a-re... Particularly, white collar people who pride themselves on knowing about their local restaurant scenes are prone to this hubris. I bristle at their misguided confidence when discussing the business but will take the time to empathically but forcefully discourage any considering it professionally. A few years ago, an old friend contacted me in a panic because she'd invested her entire retirement in her brother's dream brew pub which was failing before it opened. I couldn't help them. Anybody with experience could immediately see how hare brained their ideas were, but they were just in too deep. Months later, they opened and quickly closed, and she'd lost everything. Tragic.

tayo42 4y ago
I read kitchen confidential and it did a good job of convincing me to never work in a restaurant. I still day dream about cooking somehow, since I enjoy it as a hobby. I snap back to reality kind of quick.
- shagie 4y ago
  A company I worked back in the dot com boom days... one of the sysadmins was a bit on the grumpy side. He had been there from the start and had some nice options to be able to cash out on and try something. So he cashed out and pursued his dream of being a chef - finished up some certificates and such... and became a chef. About a year later, he came back to working as a sysadmin no where near as grumpy. He got a job as a chef... and realized that as much fun as the cooking is he really didn't like being a chef. A submission of mine from a few years ago - Find The Hard Work You're Willing To Do - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26209541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26209541
  - DrewADesign 4y ago
    Yeah totally. Cooking is amazing. I love cooking. However, I will do anything in my power to not have to rely on cooking professionally again.
- spacemadness 4y ago
  I worked in a kitchen and it is intense grueling work. Everyone drank a lot at a minimum and had plenty of other vices. My coworkers were much more interesting and fun though than most people I’ve worked with in software development since. Even so, I’d probably be an absolute mess today had I stuck with cooking. I’m impressed with anyone who can make it in that biz without going insane.
  - DrewADesign 4y ago
    Indeed. I will forever value the friendships I formed in my younger years.
- DrewADesign 4y ago
  Working as a cook and the art of cooking have very little connection for the first 5 or 10 years of your career and most 30 year olds, even, probably aren't willing to put in what it takes, physically, to work their way up in the food business. Even as a chef, you'll spend 95% of your time managing a highly complex production line that can crank out identical units on demand and if you're lucky, 5% on creativity. You'll rarely, if ever, want to cook for pleasure. It's kind of a meme among cooks how most of them end up eating hot pockets and microwaving frozen pizza on their days off. There are some people who I usually encourage to become line cooks. People in their early twenties who are toughened up a bit by life, intelligent, passionate about food, don't have skills that will yield them a financially viable but less punishing career path, kind of lost, and seem capable of self-regulating around alcohol and other substances. That's a rare bird, especially in the HN crowd. Having known many hundreds of service industry workers, I do know one person who got into restaurant cooking as a fully-matured adult and didn't dejectedly leave it within a year or two. Importantly, he graduated culinary school in his twenties, worked in other service industry jobs for a few decades after, and despite also being a professional musician, didn't drink or use hard drugs. It's hard to emphasize to most people how important that last part is. I briefly worked at a well-respected, fun, vibrant, relatively pricey restaurant with an open kitchen that did 100 covers per hour on Saturdays. They wanted the customers to think the cooks were having a ton of fun, so a six pack was part of our station prep and customers could buy beer for the line at a discounted price. I have no idea how that line afforded so much cocaine on such a small salary but that was some scarface shit. Uppers are borderline a safety requirement when you're drunk and always seconds away from permanent disfigurement. A guy I know who cooked there for like 5 years went in kind of dorky and is still a slurring-every-night drunk decades later. The first night I worked there I saw my boss passed out drunk sleeping on the floor of a nearby ATM. A few years before that, a good friend and consummate drinking buddy was looking for a big change so I connected him with a third shift job cooking at a 24 hour restaurant. The most consequential things he picked up from it was an intravenous drug habit and a new career as a drug dealer. I love Kitchen Confidential but I do think he glamorized that grittiness to some extent. From the outside it seems a little exciting and everybody likes to think they're just dangerous enough to ride it or upstanding enough to stay above it, but that's pretty naive thinking. I just don't think most folks used to living in polite society can grasp the negative implications of that lifestyle. For many of those people, those coping mechanisms are all they've got, and sadly, these jobs will let people rely on them until they're dead.

tayo42 4y ago

I read kitchen confidential and it did a good job of convincing me to never work in a restaurant. I still day dream about cooking somehow, since I enjoy it as a hobby. I snap back to reality kind of quick.

shagie 4y ago
A company I worked back in the dot com boom days... one of the sysadmins was a bit on the grumpy side. He had been there from the start and had some nice options to be able to cash out on and try something. So he cashed out and pursued his dream of being a chef - finished up some certificates and such... and became a chef. About a year later, he came back to working as a sysadmin no where near as grumpy. He got a job as a chef... and realized that as much fun as the cooking is he really didn't like being a chef. A submission of mine from a few years ago - Find The Hard Work You're Willing To Do - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26209541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26209541
- DrewADesign 4y ago
  Yeah totally. Cooking is amazing. I love cooking. However, I will do anything in my power to not have to rely on cooking professionally again.
spacemadness 4y ago
I worked in a kitchen and it is intense grueling work. Everyone drank a lot at a minimum and had plenty of other vices. My coworkers were much more interesting and fun though than most people I’ve worked with in software development since. Even so, I’d probably be an absolute mess today had I stuck with cooking. I’m impressed with anyone who can make it in that biz without going insane.
- DrewADesign 4y ago
  Indeed. I will forever value the friendships I formed in my younger years.
DrewADesign 4y ago
Working as a cook and the art of cooking have very little connection for the first 5 or 10 years of your career and most 30 year olds, even, probably aren't willing to put in what it takes, physically, to work their way up in the food business. Even as a chef, you'll spend 95% of your time managing a highly complex production line that can crank out identical units on demand and if you're lucky, 5% on creativity. You'll rarely, if ever, want to cook for pleasure. It's kind of a meme among cooks how most of them end up eating hot pockets and microwaving frozen pizza on their days off. There are some people who I usually encourage to become line cooks. People in their early twenties who are toughened up a bit by life, intelligent, passionate about food, don't have skills that will yield them a financially viable but less punishing career path, kind of lost, and seem capable of self-regulating around alcohol and other substances. That's a rare bird, especially in the HN crowd. Having known many hundreds of service industry workers, I do know one person who got into restaurant cooking as a fully-matured adult and didn't dejectedly leave it within a year or two. Importantly, he graduated culinary school in his twenties, worked in other service industry jobs for a few decades after, and despite also being a professional musician, didn't drink or use hard drugs. It's hard to emphasize to most people how important that last part is. I briefly worked at a well-respected, fun, vibrant, relatively pricey restaurant with an open kitchen that did 100 covers per hour on Saturdays. They wanted the customers to think the cooks were having a ton of fun, so a six pack was part of our station prep and customers could buy beer for the line at a discounted price. I have no idea how that line afforded so much cocaine on such a small salary but that was some scarface shit. Uppers are borderline a safety requirement when you're drunk and always seconds away from permanent disfigurement. A guy I know who cooked there for like 5 years went in kind of dorky and is still a slurring-every-night drunk decades later. The first night I worked there I saw my boss passed out drunk sleeping on the floor of a nearby ATM. A few years before that, a good friend and consummate drinking buddy was looking for a big change so I connected him with a third shift job cooking at a 24 hour restaurant. The most consequential things he picked up from it was an intravenous drug habit and a new career as a drug dealer. I love Kitchen Confidential but I do think he glamorized that grittiness to some extent. From the outside it seems a little exciting and everybody likes to think they're just dangerous enough to ride it or upstanding enough to stay above it, but that's pretty naive thinking. I just don't think most folks used to living in polite society can grasp the negative implications of that lifestyle. For many of those people, those coping mechanisms are all they've got, and sadly, these jobs will let people rely on them until they're dead.