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Posts Tagged ‘SPENCER O’MEARA’

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RUNNING A RESTAURANT–PART FIVE (END)

In Bureaucracy, Business on September 30, 2010 at 2:20 pm

Restaurants do more than serve food. In fact, serving food is simply the final product of a complex management process. And students of bureaucracy can learn a great many lessons from a successful executive chef.

Such a chef is Spencer O’Meara, who has run San Francisco’s Paragon Restaurant snce July, 2000.

Those who work in restaurant kitchens need a thick skin to cope with those moments when they will inevitably make mistakes–and will be brutally called to account for them.

“It’s the whole chef mentality,” explains O’Meara. “One minute you’re joking and talking a lot of crap, slapping each other on the ass, and then the next minute it’s like, ‘Here comes the buzz saw, what just happened here?’ All of a sudden something happens and it’s like ‘Bang!’ you want from the top of the mountain to under the mountain.”

Nor does the gender of the chef make any difference: “My girlfriend’s a chef. I might be a little more abrupt than her, but if you push her buttons good enough she’ll turn on you. I believe that, either male or female, we’re all in the same boat: Get the product out, make the customers happy, and let’s get through the day. You’re only as good as your last plate.

“Everybody I know—we’re all pretty similar,” says O’Meara. “You’re demanding, because you have to be. You hold huge accountability on everybody. You’re stern because you can’t let anybody get sideways on you. You’re forceful, too—if you don’t want to do what I want you to do I’m going to force you into it or I’m going to get you out of here.”

For Spencer O’Meara–and every other executive chef–there is one factor that overrides all others: Keeping costs in line.

And for this he holds himself alone accountable: “If costs aren’t in line, then the only person who needs to go is me, ‘cause that’s my responsibility.

“My line cooks do not design dishes. They don’t put a steak dish on the menu that is making no money. I put the steak dish on the menu. And if it’s not making any money, then I’m the dumb-ass who put it there. So I need to go.

“If you burn it, then I have to throw it away. So if you’re repeatedly torching stuff up…. But if you’re doing the dishes the way I showed you to do ‘em, and you’re keeping your station clean the way I want you to, there’s no reason for you to go, you’re a quality employee.”

O’Meara believes the makeup of the restaurant business has changed radically–and not necessarily for the better: “I think that now what fuels the restaurant business more than ever is people thinking they’re going to go to culinary school, come out and be huge and be a celebrity.

“The Food Network has instigated so many cooking schools in the world it’s ridiculous. And I love the Food Network and watch it all the time. But it is such a high profile job now, whereas before, back in the 70s, 80s, 90s you were just the guy in the back yelling at everybody. Now you’re the star.”

Nevertheless, there are celebrity chefs that O’Meara respects. One is Mario Batall: “He seems extremely knowledgeable and passionate about what he’s doing. I’ve eaten at several of his restaurants and thought they were all delicious.” Another is Bobby Flay: “I’ve never eaten at a Bobby Flay restaurant, but I like him as a personality and respect him as a chef, thinking he can cook.”

Usually, celebrity chefs who own restaurants hire an executive chef who is responsible for everything. “And the celebrity chef puts his name on it and then works with that chef. But on a day-to-day basis, the celebrity chef is not responsible for it.”

With so many stresses to face, who should become a chef? According to Spencer O’Meara:

“Just because you like to cook at home doesn’t mean you’re a chef. Just because you go to culinary school doesn’t mean you’re a chef. Just because you like to cook at home doesn’t mean you should go to culinary school.

“If you like to cook at home, go work in a restaurant for six months. If you like it, go to culinary school.

“A lot of people say, ‘Oh, I love to cook for my family. I’m going to culinary school.’ Culinary school is $60,000.” There’s a high washout rate in culinary schools. And if you graduate you may decide, “‘Holy shit, I never wanted to do this.’ And you’re on the hook.

“You’d better know what you’re getting into,” warns O’Meara.
“And you’d better go out and experience it before you drop the money. And it’s hard to get into it because nobody wants to hire you because you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.

“You have to go to a chef and say, ‘I think I want to go to culinary school, but I’m not really sure. Is there a way I could work with you for a little while, even if it’s for free?’

“Everybody always says, ‘Mom’s pot roast is always dry.’ You can’t say that in this business. And nobody ever looked at Mom and said, ‘Hey, my dinner’s supposed to be on the table at six o’clock—where in the hell is it?’ She’d be like, ‘Go clean the bathroom—it’ll be ready in awhile.’ So it’s different pressures.”

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RUNNING A RESTAURANT–PART FOUR

In Bureaucracy, Business on August 31, 2010 at 2:40 pm

Spencer O’Meara, executive chef at Paragon Restaurant in San Francisco, is a man passionately in love.

Yes, he has a girlfriend–a sous chef at a competitor’s restaurant. But, during business hours, his love is reserved for his single greatest passion: preparing food.

“To me, the whole restaurant business is, you work really, really hard, and you play pretty hard,” says O’Meara. “You don’t have a lot of time to play, so you play hard to try to get it in. I work 65-70 hours a week.

“So when I do play I play pretty hard. But I’m getting older though, so I don’t play as hard as I used to.”

He turned 40 in July.

“I’m extremely thankful and fortunate that I found the restaurant business as a whole,” says O’Meara. “I don’t know what I’d be doing if I didn’t.

“I know I wouldn’t be earning what I’m earning, I know I would not be as successful as I am, because I was clearly unable to hack it in the other world—colleges and all of that.

“I can go to work every day and say, ‘I like my job.’ Even when it sucks, I still like it. And I wouldn’t sit there and say, ‘This sucks and I wish I did something else.’ And I’ve been in this business 20 years.”

O’Meara likens the people who make up the staff of a restaurant with those who comprise a circus “family.”

“Back in the 1980s and 1990s, before the Food Network and culinary schools got huge, you weren’t attracted to the restaurant business, you fell into it, because you had nowhere else to go, and you could be accepted into the Carney family. I got into the culinary business because I got kicked out of three different colleges, and I needed to make money.”

On a case-by-case basis, O’Meara applies compassion or discipline to keep the restaurant running smoothly.

“It’s a constant babysitting, teaching, mentoring job. If I fired everybody [who made] a decent-sized mistake, I’d be rolling over staff all the time. It’s the restaurant business. You’re dealing with different kinds of people.”

If a cook shows up drunk, O’Meara will pull his shift–once. “I’m going to do you the favor. I’m going to send your ass home, and you’re going to screw me tonight, but you’re indebted to me now. You pull it again on me and I’m done with you. But I’ll give you one, because I’ve been that guy. I’ve done it, so I can’t be a hypocrite.”

But there are offenses for which there is no appeal: “You steal from me and I’ll fire you on the spot. You punch the line cook next to you in the face and you’re done,”

O’Meara has also fired employees with a repeat history of drug- or alcohol-abuse. “We fired a server a couple of years ago who was completely wasted on her shift. She already had one or two write-ups in her jacket, so that was ‘adios.’”

Another touchy issue: Coping with the sort of humor that gives ulcers to lawsuit-conscious HR managers and CEOs.

Restaurant kitchens are staffed overwhelmingy by Latinos in their 20s and 30s, and their machismo takes the form of near-constant jokes or jibes of a sexual–and especially homophobic–nature.

The anonymous author of Waiter Rant relates that on his first day on the job, a cook asked him, “So, you take it up the ass?”

When the new waiter asked, “What kind of question is that?” he got the reply: “You’re a fag. We all know you are. It’s okay. You can tell us. C’mon. We know you’re queer.”

“As a 31-year-old baby waiter learning the ropes,” the author writes, “I’m quickly discovering that the hot topic of kitchen conversation is figuring out which waiter’s gay and discussing the merits of inserting foreign objects into other people’s rectal cavities. Ah, restaurant kitchens–they’re all about tequila, buggery and the lash.”

Says O’Meara: “In corporations—including restaurant corporations—it’s a huge HR nightmare. There’s lawsuits, you’ve got to watch out for them.” Smaller, more independent restaurants are especially at risk for such lawsuits.

You need a thick skin to work in a kitchen, warns O’meara. And if you don’t have one, “you’re the one who gets your feelings hurt” and files a lawsuit. Such people usually don’t last long in restaurants. “They usually sue you and move on.”

Those who work in restaurant kitchens need a thick skin for another reason: People will inevitably make mistakes, and they will inevitably be called to account for them—“maybe a little more harshly than in other businesses,” says O’Meara.

“Do I consider it to be right or wrong? Not necessarily. Do I consider it to be an everyday part of life in the business? Yeah. I don’t want to sit there and deliberately berate somebody, but when I sit there and say ‘What the f—?’ I don’t want to get sued for it, instead of ‘Excuse me.’ So there’s a fine line.

“I believe that as you come into the chef world, it’s sort of what you get molded into. Starting out as a line cook and being in the business 20 years, I don’t know a single chef that walks up to somebody and says, ‘Excuse me, you just burned that.’

“Every single chef I know is going to say, ‘What the f— did you just do?’ I don’t care if you’re in a hotel with a big toque on, to the guy working in a taco truck.”

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RUNNING A RESTAURANT–PART THREE

In Bureaucracy, Business on August 23, 2010 at 11:13 am

Restaurants do more than serve food. In fact, serving food is simply the final product of a complex management process. And students of bureaucracy can learn a great many lessons from a successful executive chef.

Such a chef is Spencer O’Meara, who has run San Francisco’s Paragon Restaurant snce July, 2000.

Among his duties is constantly juggling the demands of a series of bureaucracies: Regulatory agencies, restaurant staff, his corporate bosses, and his customers.

If a customer complains that his steak is dry or too well-done, “I’ll pull a dish off the table myself,” says O’Meara. “It’ll be ‘Let me take care of that,’ and people will be, ‘Oh, no, no, no, it’s fine.’ I’m like, ‘Fine’ is not what I’m looking for. Let me fire up a new one, I’ll get it out to you in the next five minutes. I’d like you to experience it the way it was meant to be experienced.’”

Besides running the Paragon restaurant in San Francisco, O’Meara oversees three others–in Berkeley, Portland and Kauai, Hawaii. Each one has an executive chef that reports to O’Meara. And each one must submit a monthly Profit-Loss-Net (PLN) statement that quickly lays out the financial condition of that restaurant.

“The PNLs break it down into different groups,” says O’Meara. “I take a scan through the first page—here’s your liquor, wine, beer costs, your front of the house servers, bus boys, bartenders, kitchen help. I either call you up and say, ‘Hey, great job, keep it up,’ or I say, ‘Hey, you’re shittin’ a bed of labor—what’s going on out there?’”

The most trouble-plagued Paragon restaurant has been the one in Kauai, Hawaii. Says O’Meara: “I probably spend the most time on Hawaii, which is the furthest away, but I have rolled through a few chefs out there. I’ve been out to Hawaii four times this year already and I’m getting ready to go back in [August].

“The guy I have out there right now is probably the greenest guy I have out there in the group. So I’m spending more of my attention on him to help him get to be to the level he needs to be.

“He’s green because I got sick and tired of hiring a mainlander and moving him over there and paying for the expense of moving him over there to have a mainlander implode to get hooked on crystal meth or booze.”

Kauai—the smallest of the islands of Hawaii—has a population of 64,-65,000. So it’s hard to find somebody among the locals who’s qualified. “We had a local there about ten years ago and she got hooked on crystal,” says O”Meara. “The problem is you don’t know anybody else on the other islands.”

O’Meara readily admits that drug- and alcohol-abuse are “huge” problems within the restaurant industry. He attributes much of this to the tremendous stress that comes from expertly preparing and serving good food in a timely manner to a seemingly endless series of customers.

“It’s constant—every day, every night. You’re racing to get it set up. Every customer, every dish is a judgment on you. And you’re producing 300-400 dishes in a day. That’s 300 or 400 judgments. Every ticket that comes in is a timeline—a ticket just came in, you’ve got ten minutes to get that out. And you’ve got 200 tickets a day coming in on you. You’re running on adrenaline all day.

“When it gets over, you’re still looking for that adrenaline high. And you’re also sitting here saying, ‘It’s been a long day, I need to go unwind.’ Your friends are all in the business—you don’t know anybody else because you get out at midnight. So your friends are other restaurant people. So you’re gonna visit your friend at his place, and he says, ‘You want a beer and a shot?’ and you say, ‘Sure, what the hell?’

When it comes to firing people, “it’s difficult to draw that line” between what’s acceptable as an accident and what’s a firing offense.

“Mike, who’s my nighttime guy right now,” says O’Meara, once accidentally overcooked 17 steaks to be served to a party of about 20-30 people. “I almost thought I was going to kill him. I screamed at him for a minute, but then I realized, ‘The customer doesn’t give a shit about what’s going on back here.’

“I had enough steaks and we re-fired all the steaks on the fly. We tossed all 17 overcooked steaks and fired 17 new ones. We managed to get the whole party on.

“Most chefs would have fired him right then and there. I thought I saw that there was a little more of something to this guy than the fact that he had just burned 17 steaks. That, no matter how pissed I was at that moment, that, in the future, he could be, with proper attention, somebody who would be better for me.

“And here it is, a year and a half later, he’s no longer just the grill guy, he’s my all-around guy who works every single station. And he’s my go-to guy when I need something done,” says O’Meara.

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RUNNING A RESTAURANT–PART TWO

In Bureaucracy, Business on August 11, 2010 at 7:10 pm

Restaurants do more than serve food. In fact, serving food is simply the final product of a complex management process. And students of bureaucracy can learn a great many lessons from a successful executive chef.

Such a chef is Spencer O’Meara, who has run San Francisco’s Paragon Restaurant since July, 2000. It’s located just across the street from AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants.

Among the bureaucracies an executive chef must deal with is the Alcoholic Beverage Commission (ABC).

A restaurant buys a liquor license, and then pays a yearly tax to the ABC to retain it. “They’re expensive—they can be up to $200- to $300,000,” says O’Meara. “I think the one for Paragon is $150,000. But you own that license, and when you sell the business you sell it, too.

“The thing you have to worry about with the ABC is they’ll do spot-checks on you. They send undercover people in to an establishment to order drinks, and then try to nab you for not checking ID. They send in people who deliberately look underage. But they’ll also send in people who are underage but look old enough.”

It is the responsibility of the restaurant to check the IDs of anybody who looks underage or is close to that age. In San Francisco, drinkers must be 21. It’s the legal responsibility of the restaurant to ensure that underage would-be drinkers are weeded out.

“If that person looks 30 but is 19 and I serve him a beer, it’s my ass,” says O’Meara. “And, with that, it puts your liquor license in jeopardy. And if you’re repeatedly—two times in a row—caught by the ABC, they can pull your liquor license.”

O’Meara estimates there are 5,000 restaurants in San Francisco, and about 20,000 in the Bay Area. So how does the ABC police so many restaurants?

“The ABC works on complaints,” says O’Meara. “So when somebody says, ‘This place is serving underage people,’ that’s when they send ‘em in. Then when they nab you they watch you, and they keep sending them in. And if they get you repeatedly, you’re done.”

There is also the danger of “deep pockets” lawsuits. These can be brought by customers who drink too much–and then slam their cars into other unfortunate drivers or pedestrians. Or they can be brought by the victims who survive–or by the estates of those who didn’t.

Says O’Meara: “We talk a lot to our bartenders about over-serving. And when somebody’s hammered, shut ‘em down. Don’t serve ‘em any more.”

Different customers have different limits on how much they can drink and remain unimpaired. “That’s why communication between management staff and bartending staff needs to be wide-open, so that the bartenders are empowered and knowledgeable, and not sit there and go, ‘I thought he was fine.’ “Well, you just fed him six double-Crowns, come on.’”

Yet another layer of bureaucracy an executive chef must deal with is that of the restaurant’s own employees.

“Most executive chefs do not have the interaction that I do in this restaurant,” says O’Meara. “Most executive chefs do not cross the line from the kitchen to the front of the house. That would be a job for your general manager (GM).”

By “front of the house” O’Meara means servers, bartenders, customers and sequence of service. The “back of the house” would be line cooks, dishwashers and all food-production.

The general manager (GM) usually manages everybody, including the executive chef. In some restaurants, the GM and the executive chef are on the same level. At Paragon, “I’m the executive chef but I’m also generally managing everybody,” says O’Meara.

Bevin Bunch is the GM. Her jobs include overseeing the servers and the costs for labor, liquor, beer and wine.” Her Assistant GM is Matt Dondenville.

O’Meara does not hesitate to assume tasks that most people would believe fall well below the level of an executive chef. When a line cook hasn’t shown up, O’Meara has taken over the job.

“I’m a hands-on executive chef,” says O’Meara. “I know every station inside and out, lunch and dinner. Any issues that arise, at the end of the day this restaurant is my responsibility. I’m not going to look at an owner and say, ‘That guy didn’t show up, that’s why the restaurant failed that evening.’ At all costs, the restaurant must succeed every day.”

Paragon’s customers form yet another layer of bureaucracy for O’Meara to address. “Some chefs like to hide in the kitchen, and aren’t that good with people,” says O’Meara. “We have a whole stigma of being egotistical bastards, and there’s a reason for it.

“Some chefs don’t work well with going out into a dining room and asking somebody how it is. They’re like, ‘Screw off, I think I made a great dish. I don’t care if you like it or not.’

“I like to get the customer feedback and the interaction, because everybody loves knowing the chef. The more people who know the chef, the more come back. In a way, chefs that don’t do that are missing a very easy marketing tool.”

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RUNNING A RESTAURANT–PART ONE

In Bureaucracy, Business on August 7, 2010 at 9:11 am

Restaurants do more than serve food. In fact, serving food is simply the final product of a complex management process. And students of bureaucracy can learn a great many lessons from a successful executive chef.

Such a chef is Spencer O’Meara, who has run San Francisco’s Paragon Restaurant since July, 2000. It’s located just across the street from AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants.

According to its website, Paragon serves “American brasserie-style cuisine combining a sophisticated dining experience with a fun and lively bar atmosphere.”

Besides running Paragon, O’Meara administers three other Paragon restaurants–in Berkeley, California, Portland, Oregon, and Kauai, Hawai. All of these are owned by the Moana Hotel and Restaurant Group, which is headquartered in Mill Valley, California.

O’Meara’s responsibilities include overseeing menu and recipe development, food purchasing, hiring and training kitchen staff and chefs, and keeping “food and labor costs in line. I’m also responsible for profitability across the board.”

O’Meara got his chef’s degree at Arizona’s Scottsdale Culinary Institute in 1993. He worked at Le Bec Fin, the Striped Bass and Michel’s, all in Philadelphia. In 1996, he moved to San Francisco.

He couldn’t find a sous chef job so he worked as a line cook at Scala’s Bistro. In time, he rose to sous chef, executive sous chef and chef de cuisine. After running Scala’s for a year, “I came down to the lovely old Paragon, affectionately known as ‘The Big P.’”

He started working for Paragon as the executive chef in July, 2000–once the previous chef had been fired. “They were too pricey, they had inconsistent food. I hear he was a head case—a lot of chefs are,” says O’Meara.

“I worked it for 30 days. I’d never worked across the street from a ball stadium, and I was like ‘Holy crap!’ So after 30 days we gutted the entire menu, closed the restaurant on a Saturday night at normal business hours, and opened Monday with a completely different menu. That was a rough one.”

July 2, 2010 marked O’Meara’s ten-year anniversary as executive chef of Paragon.

Many people dream of owning a restaurant. And many of them take the plunge–with disastrous results. “Ninety percent of restaurants fail in the first year and a half, and if you can make it to three years you’re considered to know what you’re doing,” says O’Meara.

“It doesn’t mean you’re making money, it just means you’re able to keep it afloat. The general rule of thumb is if a restaurant turns 10% profit, it’s a very successful restaurant. If you can hit 10%, everybody’s really stoked.

“Everybody has a misconception that, ‘It’s a restaurant, of course it makes money.’ It’s truly not the case—with rents, costs of goods, labor—especially in San Francisco. They’ve got the highest minimum wage in the state—$10 an hour. Plus the Healthy SF tax. With all the legislation that’s gone down in this city over the last two years, it’s actually making it harder and harder to make a buck in the restaurant business.”

A restaurant is not an island unto itself. More than most businesses, it falls under the regulatory authority of at least three major agencies: The local health department, the fire department and the Alcoholic Beverage Commission.

Of the first agency, O’Meara says: “I personally welcome the Health Department. If I’m doing something wrong, I want to know so I’m not hurting anybody. And if I go out to dinner, I want to make sure that nobody’s hurting me. I think we’ve all had food poisoning at some point in our lives.

“We try very hard to be sure we’re on top of our game. The last time a health Inspector came through we were awarded an an award for being an ‘A’ for a year straight and never dropping below that. I think our general rating is a 94 out of 100,” says O’Meara.

“When they do their write-ups for any infractions they see, it’s my responsibility to see that those infractions are cleared up. If it’s a major infraction, they’ll say they’ll be back in x-amount of days to make sure that infraction is cleared up. If it’s a minor infraction, they say, ‘Next time we come through on our visit, we’ll want to make sure it’s cleared up.’ A major infraction would be improper holding temperatures.”

As for the fire department: “They make sure that your safety routes are clear in case of a fire, make sure that all your tags on your fire extinguishers are up-to-date.

“We have hood-suppression systems, which fire off a powder in case there’s a fire in the kitchen, says O’Meara “Those have to be maintained every six months—it costs me $1,000 to have them maintained” each time. They also make sure your exit lights are working, that your gasses for your beers and sodas are chained properly to the wall so they don’t fall over and shoot across the room and kill somebody.”