From my front balcony, I can see the empty restaurant at the bottom of the hill, its decks and walkways deserted, the dirt in the planters caked and hard. The silence there, the absence of that particular hum of voices, clink of silverware, kitchen whirr, and laughter seduces me to speculate on possibilities. . . . Once again I'm drawn into a fantasy shared by countless others: opening a restaurant.

It's a dream that cuts across class lines, infects all types of humanity. I've learned to recognize the look of those deep in the grip of a restaurant fantasy. They sidle up to me at parties and say, "I hear you're a chef."

"Not anymore. Lapsed. Never again."

They lean closer. "But you were a chef, right? You set up a restaurant."

In fact, my ventures into the food service world have been successful, but I remain unenthusiastic, noncommittal, for it's a conversation I've had many times. They talk about the stress of their present jobs, the pleasures involved in gourmet cooking, the conviviality of it all. Or they explain a sure-fire scheme to make money, lots of money, fast. And, besides, they've always wanted to open a restaurant.

"Don't," I mutter to myself. But to their eager faces I am less direct: "Ah? You have restaurant experience?"

"Not yet . . . "

Not yet? Oh, go back while you can, all of you would-be restaurateurs. Listen to me: You don't want to do it-at least not until you've worked in the underworld of commercial food service, been exposed to what can, and will, go wrong.

First, learn how to react when you are prepared for 65, and 110 show up. Learn not to let your face twitch as you say to a customer: "It will be a minute or two more." Learn how to explain to a new customer who looks vaguely familiar and clearly important that you hold a reservation for only fifteen minutes, while trying to quiet another who claims he's been short- changed by the cashier, who seems to have disappeared.

"But surely in a well-run place," my hopeful friend will argue, "surely if you exert some control . . . "

But that is a well-run place. I'd say as much, if it were possible to argue with people on the other side of restaurant experience, the other side of the moon. I look at them wistfully. They think, in their innocence, that just because they can create perfect oeufs en gelée for a dinner party every other Friday night they'd be able to stand the smell of a restaurant sink in the summer, or that the love of fine dining in any way equips them to handle a large kitchen when the chef is drunk and the waiter on bad speed, when equipment breaks down or blows up.

"Eighty percent of all restaurants close the first year," I say casually. But it is a thankless task to get between people and their fantasies. Their particular restaurant will be one of the few that survive. They've already chosen a name: The Silver Spoon, The Golden Bowl, Samadi's. Or a couple will tell me that they have picked out the silver pattern, decided on silk poppies in pewter vases and linen-covered tables—real linen, not cotton. Someone confides in me about A La Carte, her gourmet street-vendor idea: a fancy cart, like a flower cart, outside theaters at night, in a mail at high noon-offering Tacchino alla Canzanese or Pâté de Faisan en Croûte.

I hint gently about food costs, the high price of labor, the necessity of keeping food very cold-refrigerated, in fact. Then, the food license? And the vendor's permit?
"A permit? Well, I suppose one does have to get these things . . . "

Yes, and often doesn't. Many city fathers are not interested in street vendors, no matter how original the menu nor how piquant the sauce. At least not until they have gotten their cut or, with local restaurateurs breathing down their necks, regulated you right out of business.
The cost of setting up a commercial food service of any sort increases as a consequence of every city official from whom you must get a license. The health department might make you put in a mop sink. I had to. Right next to the kitchen sink, and not more than ten feet from a sink around the corner, but the rules say. . . . Or you might find yourself in trouble with the building inspector because the bathrooms aren't really big enough to accommodate a motorized wheelchair. . . . And the fire inspector, have I mentioned him?

The type of restaurant fantasy I most often encounter is the one that especially afflicts good cooks and devoted eaters: namely, the yearning to create a small, intimate (but exquisitely appointed) place with an exclusive, adoring clientele and a magnificently equipped kitchen. For some, the design of the kitchen holds their imagination. Others tell of the high standards they will uphold and speak of their dedication to quality.

Six months inside the pressure cooker of a commercial kitchen would teach them not to make public statements about quality control. I remember a night in a small downtown restaurant, very early in my career as chef, when I lost my kitchen help to her ex-husband and the dishwasher had temporarily vanished. Between cooking and prepping and trying to get someone to do the dishes, a plum pudding didn't go into the oven until late. I hoped the first table wouldn't order it, but of course they did. Naturally, they were trying to get to the opera by 7:30. The waiter, an Italian solipsist and aspiring opera singer, promised to get them out with time to spare even though I told him twice not to take orders for the pudding. But he wanted it right away, this minute, now. "I'll wait here until you dish it up, bitch" was the way he so tactfully put it.

In truth, if I waited until the pudding was done, other things would pile up, get out of line, snag. In the interest of restaurant ecology, I sacrificed the gooey middle of the plum pudding-covered with sauce anyway-on the altar of expediency. Then one of those diners came up to the kitchen-opera or no opera-and beckoned me to the serving port. My heart dropped. I'm ready to hang my head in shame over broken standards, but she tells me that mine, without a doubt, was the best plum pudding she'd ever tasted, and what was my secret? Quality control? Ah la.

For it's not the obvious boor who gets to you, the diner who wants the vichyssoise heated or the peach flambé cooled, who asks for A-1 for his cold salmon mousse. No, it's the enthusiast, the admirer, who finally breaks your will and spirit. Admirers—they come in to praise the least complicated thing on the menu, to tell you that you are almost as good a cook as their Aunt Harriet, and that they'll give you her recipe for, say, sweet potato Pie, their favorite thing on earth.

Keeping admirers at bay and maintaining the quality of a perishable product is a cinch, however, when compared with other restaurant problems. Help, for instance. Food may rot and burn, eggs may turn against you in the pan-but at least food doesn't talk, doesn't get religion and try to save you, doesn't steal money out of the till to play the numbers or run off to Alaska with an oil-pipeline worker before lunch. Help, on the other hand, manages to do all of these things and more, much more, creating an anarchy that acts upon the kitchen's atmosphere like a handful of sand thrown into a spinach salad.

Help has to be constantly trained. And once people are trained, once I've finally drilled into them not to soak the mushrooms in water, not to serve the wine until they've shown the label, they leave. A transient population, kitchen workers and dishwashers and waiters and waitresses. It's rumored that inmates are given $20 and the address of the nearest restaurant when discharged from mental institutions. Nothing I have ever seen has made me doubt this.

Of course, even those who become part of the core staff will have to be gone sometimes, but they all seem to be gone, always, at the same time. When the kitchen or dining room is short you end up doing two jobs, three. You're stirring and peeling and chopping and counting the number of cans left in the pantry, planning tomorrow's menu, trying to figure out if the deposit of last night's receipts got to the bank before the check to the butcher. And wondering who has started to steal and how far it has gone.

Stealing. Once stealing begins in an epidemic develops. At first, it seems you never have enough coffee packets. Can the dining room really use that many? Not dramatic on the surface but, like a leaky faucet, the overall wastage is devastating. And gets worse. The dishwasher's pocketbook bulges and drips as she takes food home for her children, her children's children, friends from the neighborhood, the church supper. Whole hams disappear, cases of tomatoes, steaks by the dozen.

The damage is to your psyche as well as to the cash receipts, for once things start disappearing, everyone falls under suspicion. Paranoia distorts, magnifies. Is the waiter tearing up tickets and pocketing the money? Is the bartender lying when he says he makes his friends pay for their drinks? As owner, you finally have to fire the best pastry cook in town because she is the one you caught red-handed carrying cartons of butter and bags of raisins out to her car-to say nothing of the bottle of Grand Marnier under her coat. You have to fire her publicly, with large announcements and threats and inventories of stock. You must retrain, the staff accommodate, the kitchen routine readjust to a new person. And then there is the problem of learning to trust again.

Suspicious of everyone, the will to mastery overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the undertaking, your belief in food as art broken, you suffer a personality change. The easy, relaxed manner in which you once viewed the world is gone; the spirit of the restaurateur who loved and wished to be surrounded by people dining in a convivial setting has soured, grown antagonistic, colored by rampant exhaustion.

And always there are money problems. A restaurant must be able to make it through the first six months without a return, or without much of one. As a new restaurateur, you spent more than you planned in getting ready to open, then came troubles with the plumbing, but after five months you see signs of the tide turning. Then suddenly everything is all right. In one week, you clear a thousand, the place is packed every single day, everything is busy, beautiful, humming. You think maybe you should ... expand? You talk to the man next door about leasing his building. Through the following week you buy double, take on extra help, gear up. Then, wham, it's over: the restaurant deserted, nobody for lunch, a mere few for dinner. No way to predict what customers will do, unable to chart the tide and flow.

Or, right on the brink of success, your money gives out altogether. No one will give you credit, let you slide for a month, a week--it's cash on the line before delivery. Bills come due, become past due. Close, so close, but finally a fire in the kitchen, not even big enough to ruin equipment ... and off you go to file bankruptcy papers. It seems so unfair and arbitrary, that last blow, whatever it is, the crisis that does you in altogether after so much work.

Not all of this is always true, of course. If 80 percent of new restaurants fail, 20 percent succeed. They say a restaurant that can survive for three years has a chance to make it big; then all the work pays off. Restaurant chains and professional restaurateurs know the pattern, they can accommodate a wider margin of operational cost than the beginner, who has less money and makes expensive mistakes.

Yet not everyone who succeeds starts out with experience. A highly established restaurateur told me he opened his first place with no more than the idea of the sort of atmosphere he craved, somewhere he would like to go as a customer. He did most of the work himself, using O.P.M.-Other People's Money. Yes, he had prob-lems. The building inspector told him to put in stoves with hoods, and the lowest estimate for the job ran to $8, 000. But he checked the regulations himself and found that convection ovens didn't have to be hooded. So he
put the whole convection system in for a few hundred dollars, total. No, he'd never had restaurant or food-ser-vice experience before, but he did have brains, and something else: the blessings of the restaurant gods.

But they frown, too, these -restaurant gods. They scowl and belch and send forth destruction to the most likely-seeming eateries-prime locations, good menus, trained help. No one knows why. Last fall, for instance, a new restaurant in our town, a sure thing, made its grand opening, but a week later there was trouble with the gas main, the street out front was torn up, closed to. traffic for months, dirt and rubble all but covering the entrance. This spring, the restaurant stands deserted, abandoned with a sign in the window: Win This Restaurant. Raffle. Tickets $150,000.

But even if your restaurant makes it through the maze of untrained help and financial difficulties, even if it becomes one of the successful 20 percent then comes the hard part: You have to run it. It's up to you to maintain balance, crisis after crisis, as you steer through the dangerous shoals of chaos not once but daily, hourly. An immense exhaustion settles over you. Even when you go home, you keep listening for the knock, the ping, that warns you the intricate machine is somehow off, about to go. You call the restaurant just to make sure, you drop by again. Until finally you can't keep up, and something snaps in you.

Several months before I abandoned the kitchen altogether, the term "burned out"' took on profound shades of meaning. I felt plucked. Minced and boned. Pureed, reduced by half. I turned against food altogether and began to make angry little messes in the kitchen: viciously stir-frying bits of black olive and onion quiche with walnut torte and the rest of the pork vindaloo. Or I'd attack the last croissant with a cleaver, not stopping until I'd mashed every little flake of pastry into a greasy mass.

Afterward, a full year passed before I stopped twitching when eating out, crossing myself if I looked into the kitchen. Another year went by before a slight, interest in unusual food combinations returned. During this, my third year as lapsed restaurateur and chef, I occasionally feel a pang of nostalgia when I see a five-pound tub of sour cream or handle an eighteen-inch whisk. just the other day I felt a stab of longing as I caught a glimpse of the inside of a walk-in refrigerator.

As I sit on the front balcony amid pots of herbs giving off their cool delicious smells, I watch the twilight play out Its magic on the Santa Ynez Mountains before me. My eye wanders to the empty restaurant down the block and suddenly it occurs to me that if all the planters on the deck down there were filled with culinary herbs and a menu worked up around them.

I run the tape just once, the little temptation from the restaurant gods: I see large bushes of rosemary at the entrance, dill growing riotously over by the fence, an
endless supply of basil. In the planters ... aphids in the chives by the salad bar.

Aphids in the chives? Ah, yes: the reality. Let someone else watch for the encroaching blights, the unseen, unknown dangers lurking in the dark, ready to attack. I know too much ever to think of opening a restaurant again. It's just an idle exercise to imagine people sitting between coriander and thyme, dining on Five Herb Soup, Marjoram Mushrooms, pistou.

But still. The herb motif would go over big. I could dry herbs, make little bouquet garnis to sell. A combination herb boutique and greenhouse and cafewould catch on right away. Within six months, I could expand, go into spices....

Originally published in Savvy, July 1982