NAME: Simon Lamb, 30 / EMPLOYER: Marche restaurant / SALARY RANGE: $45,000 to $75,000 a year, plus bonus
Why did you choose this field?
It was my mother’s influence. She was a chef. The way she hooked me into it, (was) we didn’t have a very affluent family . . . and my mom said, “You’re old enough to pay rent now. So you have two options. You can pay me X amount of dollars at the end of every month as your rent or you can cook us one meal a day.”
I was reading my mom’s textbooks and then I was reading her cookbooks and watching it on TV and then I’d try to recreate those dishes because I didn’t want to pay her the money to live in the house. And then I decided this is kind of fun, hey, I get to make people happy, but a big smile on their faces and I don’t have to pay rent. I like it when things are teetering on the edge of chaos, which is pretty much the restaurant business. It was actually a conscious decision. A mentor of mine told me to do what you love and the money will come.
What is your educational background?
I went in for pre-med. I have a psychology degree from Gustavus Adolphus College, a small liberal arts college in Minnesota.
Describe an average day/week.
There’s no such thing as an average day or week. Schedules generally flip-flop. Some nights you come in at 2 or 3 in the afternoon and you’ll get home at 3 o’clock in the morning. Other days you’ll have to be here at 9 a.m. and you’ll leave here at 9 o’clock at night. You don’t have a normal cycle, a 9-to-5 Monday through Friday cycle. Typically you’re here in the 60-65 hour range. It’s always nights and weekends. About 70 percent of your business is done after 5:30 at night.
The big thing is interacting with guests. You want to talk to as many people that come through the door as possible because that’s how we get our feedback. That’s how we design our menus, our wine lists and (decide) the direction that the restaurant’s going to go. The other half of it is you are always thinking about financial constraints. And you are controlling a staff, which is especially interesting because this business is a bilingual business. You’re trying to deal with a staff where half of them speak English and half of them don’t.
What is the best thing about the job?
Constant change. Just meeting new people. And when you see the same person every day for a week, that’s a great feeling. Just the whole excitement of the thing. It’s like having people over to your house every day for a party. It sounds kind of ridiculous and kind of corny, but it’s like, please come into my house and have a great time. And sometimes when it’s really busy and there are people that you know and you’re having a great time, I forget I’ve been doing this for a living.
The worst thing?
Trying to balance the demands of scheduling and your time here and your time at home has been difficult. I have a wife now and thank God she’s in the business, because we can at least try to coordinate our schedules. To have friends and acquaintances that are outside of this business is incredibly hard to do. Because when they’re off, you’re at work.
What three attributes are essential to doing your job well?
You have to have an even keel. You can’t get too excited. You can’t take this business too seriously. The bottom line is we’re serving food. It’s not brain surgery.
You have to be good with people. As a manager, you’re one of the key things that sets the tone of the restaurant, which generates new guests and repeat guests, which generates money.
You have to be good with numbers. That’s the part people forget sometimes when you compare it to other businesses. Everybody wants to own a restaurant, everybody wants to be involved with a restaurant. But it’s a horrible investment. I mean, you make more money just putting your money in the bank than you would running a restaurant.
Where will you go from here?
I think everybody who’s in the business, when they get to a certain point always has always got it in the back of their head of opening up their own place.
What advice would you give to people interested in this area?
Stick with it. It’s a business that burns a lot of people out early. At 30, I’m our oldest manager, I think. And it does take a while to establish yourself.
You’ve got to have computer skills and you’ve got to have language skills. And as the consumer becomes more educated and requires more from you, you have to be able to supply them with that knowledge, and I don’t think it’s necessarily something you can pick up. There are people I know who have worked their way up, but there’s a feeling you can only go so far with that. (Education) is something you should have on your resume. This company has a policy where they pay us continually to go to school, to go to cooking classes, to buy cookbooks, to go take trips to other cities and see what other people are doing.
There’s always something to learn, but it’s also work. That’s if you count going to the Hudson Club and drinking six glasses of wine as work.
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