1 · About this project

Why this exists

I started writing this because I don't want to forget what the last months actually felt like.

Late last year, the restaurant I manage was in real financial trouble. Not the kind you fix with a good weekend — the kind where you're looking at the P&L and the seasonal dips and wondering if the model even works anymore. I didn't have the luxury of stepping back and thinking about it in the abstract. I had to go through the numbers line by line: food cost, personnel cost, the hidden costs nobody had bothered to flag before. I had to rebuild forecasts, question every fixed cost, and make decisions about people and schedules that weren't comfortable to make.

Some of it was operational — migrating the systems we ran the business on, fixing scheduling gaps, building structure where there wasn't any. Some of it was harder than that: having difficult conversations with staff, being the one who has to hold a line when it would be easier not to. There's no clean way to write about that part without it sounding like advice, so I'm not going to try. It was just hard, and I did it anyway, one decision at a time.

What I didn't expect was how good it would feel when the numbers started moving the other way. Not fixed — restaurants are never fixed — but moving. A forecast that finally made sense. A new service day that actually added up. Watching something you almost lost start to hold its own again. That's not a feeling I knew how to describe to anyone outside the business, and I think that's part of why I wanted a place to put it down.

This isn't going to be a handbook. Every restaurant's problems are different, and anyone telling you they've found the universal fix is usually selling something. I'm not trying to teach anyone how to run a restaurant. I'm just going to write down what I actually did, what worked, what didn't, and what it cost me to get through it — mostly so that if I'm ever in it again, I can look back and remember that it moved, even when it didn't feel like it was moving at the time.