Lessons from Working at Restaurants
Welcome to the 37th entry of my public journal, where I share *some of the things* I've been thinking about, learning about, and exploring across work, tech, wellness, and life.
Dear Friends,
In this journal entry, I reflect on what I learned working at two very different types of restaurants during high school and college. The first was a busy breakfast spot in a vacation town, where I had to hustle nonstop during the morning rush to collect tips in singles and fives. The other was a tavern and popular dinner spot where the work was slower, easier and more lucrative. Guess which one was better?
And as always, I share a collection of links to things I’ve been finding interesting across the internet, and a few pictures of what I’ve been up to since I last wrote.
Life Lessons from a pancake house and a tavern
The Pancake House
For a few summers during high school and college I waitressed at a very popular breakfast restaurant in a busy beach town at the Jersey Shore.
From 7am to 1pm it was a mad rush. Greeting tables, bringing coffee and drinks, taking orders and translating them into shorthand codes for the cooks (all on paper, there was no technology), carrying trays piled high with food from the sweltering kitchen to the hungry customers in the noisy dining room, clearing empty plates and taking them back to the kitchen, handing out bills. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Vacationing breakfast customers aren’t a patient crowd. After waiting for over an hour for a table, they wanted their eggs and pancakes fast. They ate just as fast, so they could hit the beach and enjoy their vacation.
That meant that we had to be fast. The 6-hour shift was a single, adrenaline-fueled sprint. No breaks, no rest, no time to think about anything other than serving customers.
After the breakfast rush quieted down but before we could go home, we had to do our assigned side jobs. Wipe down the condiments, consolidate all the half empty ketchup bottles to make full ones, clean the coffee station, clean the bar, put away dishes, polish the silver, vacuum the carpets, break down boxes, take out the trash.
By 2 PM, the restaurant was spotless and ready for the 7 AM breakfast rush the next morning.
The last thing I did before leaving was count my tips. On a good day I’d count $80 - $120, mostly in singles and fives, with a rare ten spot if I had a large party that day. I was making 3 or 4 times the minimum wage, quite good for a summer job for a teenager.
It was a great feeling, the end of the shift. I was sweaty and exhausted but felt accomplished.
I have nothing but fond memories of my summers working at the breakfast restaurant and can count many lessons learned:
How to earn money.
The relationship between performance and earnings. Back then people actually tipped relative to service and the good servers outearned the worse ones. The harder I worked, the better I performed, the more tips I earned.
Sense of pride for a job well done and the value of high standards. My boss was the restaurant owner and was tough; we couldn’t leave until the restaurant was spotless at the end of our shift, if he thought we weren’t doing a good job serving customers we would hear it from him. But I felt good after a day of hard work.
The Tavern
I worked at the breakfast restaurant for 3 or 4 summers, but then one summer decided to stay home and not return to the beach town. This summer I got a job close to my home at a tavern, a local favorite that was famous for their crab cakes and ribs.
My responsibilities as a waitress at the tavern were the same as the breakfast restaurant - take care of your tables, take people’s orders, bring them food, handle the check. But the dinner scene at a tavern is a world away from a beach town breakfast scene.
The dinner crowd was slower. Cocktails, not coffee, to get started. I couldn’t yet drink myself, but I learned about Manhattans and Old Fashioneds, the difference between a Gibson and a Gimlet (the “O” for onion, the “L” for lime). Crab cakes and ribs were much more expensive compared to eggs and pancakes, and they took longer to come out of the kitchen. I had more time. Fewer tables. It was almost relaxing. Average check size for two people was $60 to $80 instead of $10 to $20, which meant average tip was more than ten dollars instead of two or three bucks. During my shift I remember standing around a lot. Waiting. Waiting for the kitchen to have our food up. Waiting for our tables to finish eating. Servers would hang around the bar and chat. After eating a full meal, customers would order coffee and dessert, adding another $20 to their check (translating to another $4 for me!) and all I had to do was pull a pre-sliced piece of cake from the walk-in fridge and bring it to them.
When the dinner shift was over, we counted our tips. I walked away $120 to $150 in tens and twenties. We didn’t stay to clean the restaurant or the kitchen. Those chores were saved for the people who opened the restaurant the next day.
Compared to the breakfast restaurant, I was making a lot more money and putting in a lot less work. Not bad, huh? Just like the breakfast restaurant, I have good memories of working here and learned a valuable lesson:
Not all work is the same. The relationship between effort and compensation made sense within one restaurant (the best servers earned the most, both at the breakfast place and the tavern), but the link between effort and compensation broke down when you compare across different restaurants. I could make much more money on fewer tables at a fancy expensive dinner restaurant than the breakfast restaurant.
Main Takeaways
Ask me now, which job did I enjoy more? Which job did I learn more from? It’s not even close. The work at the breakfast restaurant was fulfilling. It felt great to work hard. The owners cared about quality and had high standards. I saw them fire people who weren’t up to the job. I saw them stick up for me when I messed up a customer order and got publicly berated (picture a grown man screaming at a teenager “Are you a complete IDIOT?). I learned leadership lessons from them.
Working at the Tavern wasn’t as thrilling or as fun. I wasn’t proud to be working there. But I did enjoy having more money in my pocket.
I think about this experience as I think about what advice to give my kids as they get older and have to start navigating their own paths.
Volume vs. Value. The breakfast restaurant was a volume play. We served hundreds of people eggs and pancakes and coffee for a low price. People put more value on dining out in the evening and are happier to spend a lot more money for a cocktail than a soda. In the real world, you don’t get points for working harder. All other things being equal, you should look for value work over volume work.
Value Beyond Money. Harder to quantify of course are all the other benefits I got from the breakfast restaurant. There is value in working hard and feeling good about a job well done, and leaving every day with a sense of accomplishment.
In my scenarios, these two concepts were at odds, but there’s no reason you can’t find an opportunity to optimize for both.
Some of the things (around the internet)
Adam Miller on scaling Cornerstone (podcast) - I worked at Cornerstone for 10 years, 9 under the leadership of founder and CEO Adam Miller. It’s probably not a coincidence I didn’t stick around much longer after he left. He was a phenomenal leader. Cornerstone didn’t have the same name recognition as other SaaS companies but my time there was incredible and filled with nonstop learning and growth, surrounded by really smart and kind colleagues. I really enjoyed listening to Adam talk about the ups and downs of his 20 year founder journey on this recent Masters of Scale podcast.
One million checkboxes is a website that has one million checkboxes. Every time someone checks a box, it’s checked for everyone else. Unchecking a checkbox, unchecks it for everyone else. It’s fun and whimsical, like the internet should be. And if you think it should be easy to get all million boxes checked, guess again. NY Times wrote about the challenges of organizing strangers.
How to Win Friends and Influence People - Shane Parrish from Farnam Street summarizes this century old book in a handful of bullet points. Smile. Become interested in other people. Never say, “You’re wrong.” Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.
City Builder - “In this satirical city builder, your goal is to convert walkable cities into parking lots and use propaganda to convince everyone it's what they want”
Full stack learning - Explaining “full stack”, insights into how stack overflow saw the tradeoffs between hiring generalists vs specialists, and how and why you should become a specialist generalist in the age of AI
Quadratic Voting - Nice explainer about what quadratic voting is, how it works, and how it improves upon one person, one vote and one dollar, one vote mechanisms
Farcaster Writing Hackathon submitted to the Base Buildathon
Some of the pics
What I’ve been up to, in pictures.
Top row: Happy dog in East Hampton, the sunset over the bay in Montauk, a URL to IRL connection with one of my favorite Farcaster friend’s Ted
Middle row: An onsite GM Farcaster brainstorming sesh in Mystic, CT
Bottom row: Looking through pics from last summer’s travel (finally creating a photo album) and was reminded of these life lessons from a Cambodian restaurant
A Note to My Subscribers
I started this substack in December 2022 as an experiment to see if developing a writing habit would help clarify my thinking and/or provide other benefits. You can read about my original intentions in my first post or my more recent reflections after sticking with it for a year.
I write about twice a month and share musings, meditations, and links to things I’m finding interesting as I build out a farcaster-native media company, a modern technology consulting company, raise my kids, and have fun creating and learning in the worlds of crypto, tech, finance, science and wellness.
Thank you for supporting my writing and journey. If you’d like to get in touch you can reply to me here or find me on X and farcaster.
Until next time, keep putting good into the world. —adrienne🌏❤️