Authentic buffalo wings

Taichung restaurateur, Patty Coultard weighs in on the trials and tribulations of dealing with employees in a foreign land.

 

One of the misconceptions about the restaurant business is that you just make good food and everything will fall into place.  Most restaurants don’t close due to losing too much money. They close because of flat out exhaustion. One of the elements that will bring you to your breaking point is employees.  It is rare that a person that is working for you is going to care about your business as much as you will.  It is up to you as an owner to build care.  It won’t happen overnight and it will monopolize your time like no other facet of the business. 

A friend of mine came home from Subway complaining to anyone who’d listen that he was served up a mustard sandwich.  The subway artist was a new artist and she hadn’t perfected her craft and basically drowned his sub in the tasty but strong condiment.  Immediately I had sourced the problem. Years ago in my first restaurant a new staff member came into the kitchen and saw some ground beef in a bowl and asked me and my assistant if that’s what we made the Buffalo wings with.  We were on the floor laughing at the time but the following day it began a journey of learning for me that has no end in sight.

I realized that things that seem to be common sense about food to some people are just not there in others.  The chance of someone starting a job in a Subway in Canada without ever eating a sandwich is the same as me winning the NBA slam dunk contest. In Taiwan it’s probably in the 50% range. Even if they have, it’s usually from subway. They ask for everything on it because they are getting more bang for their buck. Screw the taste.  So this girl who made my friend this sandwich was a blank slate.  The manager at the time was probably busy with something else or in the worse case scenario has hit the wall. He’s starting to think that it doesn’t matter what he teaches this new person because she’ll quit anyway.

To this problem a lot of people will just say hire someone with restaurant experience.

That just doesn’t work. More often than not you’ve just hired a bundle of bad habits. It’s harder to break bad habits than to teach new ones.  Another one is that you need to pay the person more.  Pay them more for what? Until they have the skills and the knowledge there is no reason to pay them more. This is the same reason why a lot of foreign teachers in Taiwan don’t know the first thing about teaching. Whether you’ve been teaching for one day or fifty years the pay is about the same. Unless the person either loves to teach or comes across a school that has a proper training program they could be left in the dark for years.

No matter what system you set up to train employees your failure rate will be higher than the successes.   People come in all shapes and sizes and their reasons for landing on your door step for a job is varied.  The key to the whole process is attitude. The employee needs to be hard working, friendly and first and foremost have a tough outer skin.  It also has to do with your attitude.  You have to realize not to blame them if things don’t work out and instead look to see what you could have done better and begin to test your new theory.  When I was running Papas, people would tell me how lucky I was to be out of teaching. I would just nod my head and look toward the exit. In the restaurant business you never stop teaching and hopefully learning.