There are many common pitfalls that strike managers across all professions: micromanaging, dealing incorrectly with problem employees and losing focus. A restaurant kitchen, with its mix of personalities and dangerous equipment, is an interesting microcosm of the entire entrepreneurial experience — including the move from front lines to managing your former peers and the next generation, as well as handling day to day disasters and long term administrative challenges.
Toronto chef Steve Gonzalez has spent 30 years in kitchens, starting from slinging buns and fries at Canadian chain St. Hubert at the age of 13 to his current multi-storey restaurant, snack bar and event space Baro. From his early experiences with Hilton hotels, golf clubs and banquet/wedding spaces at The Old Mill in Toronto, Gonzalez learned the institutional side of cooking and management. He worked for local celebrity chef Claudio Aprile periodically for 15 years, first at molecular gastronomy temple Colborne Lane, then Aprile’s back to basics Origin. He has a three year stint at ownership with Valdez, which ultimately closed down and relocated, transforming into Baro. In between, Gonzalez kept the brand moving with a food truck, pop ups, and even appearing as a contestant on Top Chef Canada. During a recent phone interview, he shared some of the hard won tips he’s learned along the way about management from the school of the restaurant kitchen.
Chef Steve Gonzales offers up management tips from a restaurant chef’s perspective.Photo courtesy of Baro.
1. Don’t be sentimental
Restaurant margins are often razor thin, and with rising prices in food and labor, it’s important to separate budgetary concerns from any sense of nostalgia. “You’ve got to hit your numbers, or you’re not going to survive,” says Gonzalez. “And when it comes to labour costs and food costs, it sucks. Emotionally, you grow attached to people and products and dishes, and sometimes you’ve got to make decisions for the better of the business and it can’t be personal.”
2. Forget about the dream space
Similar to shopping for a house, falling in love with a restaurant space can be a risky, as well as expensive, mistake. Gonzalez looked for the perfect spot for Baro for three years, finding nothing but disappointment along the way. “You can have one in your hands and you’re ready to sign the deal, and something just doesn’t seem right — listen to that feeling,” he says. “You can’t get emotional over a space and say ‘This is my dream, it’s got to happen.’ Your restaurant space has to make sense, financially and physically, because if you buy a fixer upper, how much work can you realistically do?”
3. Show up to work
The life of a chef often means celebrating other people’s milestones while ignoring your own. Major holidays, birthdays and anniversaries are spent in the kitchen making sure that someone else’s night goes perfectly — and that often means sacrifice. “No matter what you’ve got going on in your life, you need to show up for work,” says Gonzalez. “For thirty years, that was my life as a cook.”
4. Being hands off is a hard lesson to learn
One thing managers often miss is the hands on component of their work — overseeing someone else’s achievements is not as tactile as accomplishing the task on your own. As a manager, Gonzalez still misses the elements of service, and has had to come to an understanding with his kitchen staff. “I’m not allowed to do prep: I change the recipes, and I cut something different, and someone else will get in trouble for it,” he says. “I made a rule with my sous chef, that forbids me from prep, but I’ll do service for however long it’s needed.”
5. Communicate
As a head chef, running the kitchen is a natural extension of your skill set, much like the move to middle management in the business world. As an owner, however, suddenly the chef is overseeing not only the kitchen crew but also the front of house staff and other areas that they may be out of their realm of comfort. Gonzalez stresses the need for upper managers to take a step back and think about how they are going to talk to people without getting emotional. “Don’t get me wrong. I’ve had my moments where I just wanted to fucking kill somebody. I’ve come kind of close, and I’ve learned,” he says. Among the procedures that Baro has in place is communication via apps: the team uses the Slack app for sous chefs to communicate and Push for a managers-only channel.
6. Handling team conflict
Kitchens are small spaces, and in confined areas, tempers can flare. Rooting out the problem and creating solutions is a learning process for any manager. “Don’t just wait for all the answers — find them. In our weekly chef meetings, sometimes we have conflicts. And I ask, ‘You’re actually becoming more of a problem right now. If you want to come bitch at me, I want you to have solutions. What can you do to make this better?’ says Gonzalez. “And it’s worked. Now I just sign off on stuff and just let the team do what they do best. That’s why I hired them.”
7. Always think big
Some of the corporate rules that Baro has in place may seem out of the question for independently owned restaurants, but Gonzalez thinks that it’s worth considering. “I think, in order for them to sustain business, they’ve kind of got to look at these things. Because, you know, I came from small, freestanding restaurants, some without systems where you got trained as you went along,” he says. “And we had to figure a lot of things out because that recipe book may be missing pages and it was broken telephone between the chef who says two cups of onions and the kitchen preps two liters. It may have made us better cooks, but we’re in a different world now.”
8. Consider work-life balance
Gonzalez has either worked out the perfect system or ultimate nightmare for keeping an eye on his restaurant: he lives across the street from Baro. Although it means that he can pop into the restaurant at any time to fix a problem, the key is setting boundaries (and leaving once the issue is fixed). “My guys know now, if I don’t need to be here, I’m not coming. But if shit does go down, call me, and I can be there,” he says. “But don’t be the boy that cried wolf. One of the greatest things I learned from working for two years at a Hilton in Fort Lauderdale and getting to tier three in their management system was coaching for empowerment.”
9. Be ready to make the investment
Running a restaurant is hard, but owning a restaurant, it could be argued, is even harder. Not only is it difficult physically and emotionally, but especially in the beginning, restaurants are often financially challenging. “The return on investment is probably not as fast as some people think it is,” says Gonzalez. “I don’t know how many conversations I’ve had with people saying, ‘I think I’m going to open a restaurant, and make some quick money.’ I figure out how much experience they have, and if they have none, I say ‘Listen, why don’t you give me 100 grand. I’ll piss it away, and we’ll call it a day, and you go back to your desk job’.”
10. Know when to walk away
Although Gonzalez is only 43, he is already considering life beyond the line. “I’ve been blessed, being a cook for the last thirty years, and I’m just looking to build this brand, make some money, and retire,” he says. “Would I totally retire from the game, from the hospitality industry? I don’t think so: I’ll always have my foot in it somehow. But to be a chef or a cook, I probably have maybe, I don’t know, ten years.” The physicality of a kitchen can take its toll on a chef’s knees (or, as Gonzalez puts it, “My everything. My knees, my elbows, my fingers, my ribs, my back, my neck, my soul”) which he tries to combat with yoga and stretching. As a manager, he’s keeping an eye on the future and practicing self care now. “My original idea was to open a small restaurant, be able to touch everything, be able to do everything, but… this is me now. Now, I have a team that does everything, and I can just be creative and go through my process and create menus and mentor, and teach some techniques to different cooks. It’s been a learned life experience, and you know, I get to see sunsets again. I got a dog, we go for walks,” he says. “But there’s been so much to learn. That whole evolution took me years, and I’m still learning.”
For more on how the team at Baro manages the logistics of a three-storey restaurant with a main dining room, snack bar and event space, read “Behind The Scenes Of A Busy Restaurant From A Chef’s Perspective.”
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