Restaurant Operations Quotes

We have two day-parts, lunch and dinner. We don't have breakfast. We don't have drive-thru. We don't have late night. We don't have 24-hours.

I always worked in institutions, I never had a restaurant of my own before, but I have opened over 30 hotels, restaurants and casinos. I understand what it takes to keep them running.

There's no media training. In cooking school, there's not even manager training. You learn the fundamentals of cooking. Everything else is learning by doing.

I wanted to work in corporate restaurants.

With chefs, the problem is we have to be very confident because people are looking at us for that. So pretty soon, you think you're a plumber, you think you're an electrician, you think you're an accountant.

A good chef has to be a manager, a businessman and a great cook. To marry all three together is sometimes difficult.

In the restaurant business, there's the concept of pivot. Pivot to the stove, pivot to the refrigerator.

He brought a sensibility and a hard-edged reasonableness to operating restaurants that had a lasting impact on me and still affects how I run all our restaurants today. The passing of 'Restaurant Man' - the original gangsta 'Restaurant Man,' my father - was the passing of an era. No one can replace him.

I won't quit my day job. I like restaurants. I don't do a lot of television, either, even though people come to me with projects all the time. I have to spend time in the kitchen.

While some people may think being a chef only entails making enticing dishes and pushing the culinary boundaries, being a part of the food industry involves much more.

During one of his uncannily well-timed impromptu visits to my restaurant, Union Square Cafe, Pat Cetta taught me how to manage people. Pat was the owner of a storied New York City steakhouse called Sparks, and by that time, he was an old pro at running a fine restaurant.

When our employees walk in in the morning, they see food. They have to cook. At the restaurants, we chop cilantro, onions, and limes two or three times a day. We make guacamole from fresh avocados.

I assumed when I was first selling the franchises that everyone would be as excited as I was to wake up in the morning to bake bread and slice vegetables.

You know, running a restaurant is something you have to be working at each and every day; it's not a foregone conclusion that you're a success.

As a restaurateur, my job is to basically control the chaos and the drama. There's always going to be chaos in the restaurant business.

You've got to be in your kitchens, or it all falls apart.

Well, I got people that help me with the restaurant. I don't have to be at the restaurant 24 hours a day.

Chefs are leaders in their own little world.

In New York, we're always confined with spaces. Our restaurants are difficult to navigate as cooks and to operate. We fight against the buildings we run in New York.

I believe that if you have good organizational skills, then creativity can come out of that, but it's hard to be really creative when everything is a mess. And in a restaurant, organizational skills are imperative.

Students can do experiments and investigate for themselves what's going on in restaurants, in our food system, and begin a process of learning.