Confidence has always been something I’ve had, probably even when I shouldn’t have had it. And it’s always been a problem for some people.

This week I’m sharing a podcast I recorded with one of my oldest friends, Sara. Sara Abernethy is the host of Her seat at the Table, a podcast interviewing women from the hospitality and food and beverage industry about what is happening in the world, what matters, and what their experiences have been like. She is an incredible host: generous, thoughtful, genuinely curious. I am biased, I will say that upfront, because Sara has been my friend since sixth grade.

I can’t remember if we were eleven or twelve when we met, however old people are in sixth grade. We were in our first class together and hit it off right away. Maybe because we were both not cool enough to be the cool girls but not losers either. Maybe because we both loved Mary Kate + Ashley and BSB over N*Sync. We were a match. Sara is one of the warmest, most wholehearted humans I have ever known and she is a big part of why I have the confidence to be exactly who I am. Even at that age I was headstrong, dominant, opinionated. Vulnerability and true personal openness did not come naturally to me then and honestly it still does not, I just work harder at it now. Sara on the other hand has always been wide open. And even with our very different personalities she loved me and let me be me from day one, without trying to quiet any part of my personality or my reality. That kind of allowance when you are young shapes a person in ways you do not fully understand until much later. I’m grateful for it and her friendship now more than ever. She was made to host this podcast and be a voice for women in this industry.

I was just going to write a little blurb about how amazing Sara is, and how grateful I feel to be able to do this interview with her, but the interview stirred up something unexpectedly. Listening to it back and thinking about the reality of my career, some of the darker parts started to surface, and I would be remiss not to share them, because they are tied to everything we talked about on confidence.

I’ve had a private instagram for almost a decade because I had a stalker.

A former employee became unhappy and I became his fixation. I later learned this had happened before, that he had a pattern of virtually stalking and harassing women at previous jobs, but I did not know that when I started working with him. For a while we had a genuinely positive relationship. He was quiet but talented and I believed in him and tried to support his growth. He was eventually even open with me about depression and anxiety and I shared that I had experienced both and that professional help had made a real difference for me. I tried to be present for him, to draw appropriate boundaries, to be supportive without overstepping. Eventually he pivoted roles within our company and the new role was not working. He became increasingly angry and erratic. He quit, had a serious falling out with one of the partners, and then I became his problem. Emails started arriving, first from his own account, then from randomly generated ones designed to look like strangers, making threats and gross statements. I could block him but every time I blocked one address he created another. The cadence was unpredictable, which in some ways made it worse.

This went on for over ten years. I say went on because while I have not heard from him in a few years I genuinely do not know if it is over. For a long time I asked myself every question you can imagine. What could I have done differently? Was it my leadership style? Was I too direct, too demanding about my expectations? Did I set him up for a snap by moving him to a bigger restaurant? I spent years in that loop of guilt and anxiety and self examination. Questions I am completely certain he has never asked himself once.

I was not a partner in the restaurant group at that time, just the director of operations. IHe had his blow up with one of the partners and yet I was the one who absorbed his anger for years. Why? Because I was the only woman in the room. And because he had a pattern of going after women specifically. And I don’t say that with any level of wanting to pass off ownership because I think taking accountability, reflecting, and recognizing your own role in a situation is critical. I’ve done that exhaustively here. There is no version of events, no leadership choice, no thing I could have said or done differently that makes it acceptable to stalk and threaten another person.

Being afraid of what would show up in my inbox. Not being able to open packages without fear. Going to the police and being told the threatening emails were not enough to act on. That last one still sits with me. Nothing quite like showing a law enforcement officer documented threats to be told there is nothing they can do, to really make you feel safe in your own city.

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I’m a woman in the restaurant industry who occupies a space and role occupied almost exclusively by men. Most of my male colleagues have never dealt with anything even remotely close to this. When someone imposes sustained fear on you it changes you at a cellular level. I was unable to sleep, unable to feel safe, unable to move through life without thinking about it for many years. And yet I continued on anyway. I continued living and leading. I didn’t stop doing my job, I didn’t stop investing in and mentoring others, I didn’t stop growing. And most people didn’t know.

The craziest part is literally as I was writing this piece, one of our general managers called me to ask advice about how to handle a guest situation. The guests were unhappy because the server, a woman, did not smile enough. And the guests expressed that distaste to both the server and our GM. Poorly timed for that guest as I directly encouraged our GM to then confront this remark and stand up for our team member.

The podcast itself is much lighter than any of this, I promise. Do not let what I have written here deter you from listening. Sara and I laugh a lot, we cover confidence and leadership and the realities of being women in this industry, and it is genuinely fun. The reason I am sharing all of this is because a few years ago I would not have. The fear of retribution, of stirring something back up, would have been too loud. Today I find myself asking what do I actually have to lose? And the answer is I can’t predict that but I also can’t let my voice be small.

Sharing honestly and personally is going to be a slow build for me. I am guarded about the personal, as I think is now obvious, and that might surprise people who know me at work where I hold very little back. But I am working on it. Sara, has spent the better part of three decades listening to my actual life and I have spent the same listening to hers. We are two women who have lived through some real things and still feel strongly about showing up and talking about it. I hope you will give the episode a listen. And for Sara, who might just be the future Barbara Walters, and has been this engaging since sixth grade, I hope you will give Her Seat at the Table a follow. She had Dana Cowin on. I mean come on, that is cool.

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“The customer is always right”. First, who the hell came up with that saying. It’s a real lemon. It gives the same vibe as the doctor who invented residency, who, if you do not know the story, worked around the clock and made his residents do the same because he was functionally high on morphine the entire time and could not feel exhaustion. We are still running residents through that same model today. But I digress, this is about hospitality, and how the model continues to need to change.

I was trained to believe the customer is always right. Formally I was trained under folks who were disciples of Danny Meyer, arguably the most hospitable man in America. His book Setting the Table was the bible for many of us hospitality workers. And to be honest, I loved it. There is nothing quite like the feeling of making another person feel genuine surprise and delight. Honing in on what someone wants before they can even surface it themselves. Creating a moment so specific and unexpected that they will remember it years later. It’s one of the best parts of hospitality. I still feel that rush and I don’t think that will ever change.

Most of us can remember special dining experiences and moments of pure hospitality. My first meal at WD-50 was sixteen years ago and I can still tell you what I ate and more importantly how the team made me feel. That kind of impression was curated, intentional, and so strong that it has stayed with me and informed how I run my restaurants to this day. Danny Meyer and the leaders who followed him taught us we could make that the standard, not the exception.

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But there was a flaw in what he preached. His philosophy, and how it got twisted over years, often put hospitality workers in the position of being less than the guests, and for the true believers it sometimes meant being subjected to real abuse by guests who had learned that the restaurant would absorb anything. And maybe more importantly that the person serving you would absorb anything. Danny Meyer’s “Enlightened Hospitality” lit the match on a growing expectation by guests that a good dinner was simply not enough. Connection, surprise, uniqueness, over the top recovery from any misstep: that became the expected baseline. I have had guests describe to me, in complete seriousness, how an overcooked piece of chicken or a cocktail with too much ice ruined not just their evening but their entire day. And yet I still take their feelings and energy every time.

The pendulum swung so far it created an untenable reality. And then the pandemic happened, forcing restaurants to change shape and scope multiple times over. Simultaneously the country was being forced to confront generations of racism and inequality as we watched George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery be murdered and the realities of the work we need to do as a society started to take center stage. A lot of us started reevaluating our relationships to other people, to community, to what we were willing to absorb and what we were not. Some operators abandoned Meyer’s “enlightened hospitality” entirely and moved toward mirroring: giving guests back whatever energy they brought in.

I have wrestled with that and I am still wrestling. I’m not for mirroring. I still believe we’ve all had a terrible day, we’ve all been the most drunk human (proverbially), we’ve all been the most difficult version of ourselves publicly, we’ve all been misunderstood. I want folks to give me grace, so I give it to them. But my team and I are human. We make mistakes. We have to say no sometimes. And there has to be a level of understanding that runs in both directions. Feeling like my core value of staff + guest centricity was shifting without a clear replacement was genuinely uncomfortable for me, because having firm values with clear edges is something I have historically relied on. How do we keep creating a safe environment for my team where guests are expected to treat them with basic dignity, while still holding space for the guest who walked in carrying something heavy?

The answer I keep coming back to is mutuality.

We have put the entire burden of hospitality solely on the restaurant workers for decades. But any relationship that actually works requires cooperation, give and take, mutual accountability. As a coach one of the most foundational things I learned is that you have to see your client as whole and complete, not broken and in need of fixing, and show up as a partner on their journey with no agenda beyond being present. It is a relationship built on mutuality. The same principle needs to apply here.

Historically guests have not been expected to show up as partners in their relationships with restaurants. The great ones do, but it hasn’t been required. You go out to dinner, and if you do not love it you can immediately blast your experience on OpenTable, Google, Yelp, or anywhere else you want to broadcast your feelings. You paid so you get the say. And tipping: do not even get me started. There is no other industry I can think of where a stranger can walk in, observe two hours of someone’s work on what may be their hardest day, and then unilaterally decide to cut that person’s pay based on a completely subjective read of the experience. Everyone has off days. Everyone has moments of learning or personal struggle bleeding into their professional one. Restaurant workers are the rare people who get financially penalized for being new at a job, sometimes overwhelmed, maybe in the learning process, basically for being human.

And then Airbnb came along. It was, as far as I can remember, the first time mutuality existed with real recourse in customer relationships. It was built right into the product. Airbnb designed a two-way rating system. Guests rate the home. Homeowners rate the guest. Reviews for homes are public. Consequences are real on both sides. Too many violations and a homeowner loses their listing. Too many bad reviews and a guest loses access to the platform. Uber and Lyft followed. So did eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and others. And in most of those cases something genuinely positive happened: behavior improved because there was an incentive to behave well on both sides.

So why don’t restaurants do this? We are subject to every expectation, opinion, and one star review our guests want to throw at us. Why are guests not subject to behavioral expectations we have set? What if restaurants publicized their expected code of conduct and then rated guests on how they performed? What if guests were actually incentivized for good behavior and high ratings? What if they were even rewarded for it? For example, Every time a guest earned five stars from us they could accumulate points toward a gift card, a discount, something with real value. They have reason to treat our team with respect, arrive on time for their experience, not linger two hours past a reasonable dining time, maybe even be adventurous in their ordering. We have even more reason to continue delivering on food, beverage, and hospitality that makes them want to come back. That feels like a genuine win on both sides.

Ben Leventhal is probably getting the closest to this with Blackbird. His newest platform, Blackbird, incentivizes loyalty and payments in a whole new way but it doesn’t require mutuality of behavior. It only rewards for showing up and spending.

This is the shift I am hoping to see in my lifetime in this industry. The positive ripple effects, for restaurant workers, for communities, for the culture of dining itself, would be significant. While I keep envisioning what this could look like we will remain committed to doing what we believe in. Seeing guests as whole and complete, extending grace when someone comes in as less than their best selves, and also being a little more honest about our limits. Saying no when yes would cost too much. Pushing back when behavior crosses a line or even gets close to it. Holding our side of the relationship with the same care and accountability we are asking guests to bring to theirs.

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Over the last three weeks 5 locally owned, independent, beloved restaurants in Boston (owned by friends) have closed or announced their upcoming closures. More and faster than I have seen in a long time. It’s incredibly sad, scary, and should cause us all alarm. I want to start with something I referenced in a previous piece I wrote. A post I saw on Threads that said, “If I told you I wanted to open a coffee shop but could not afford to rent a building or buy coffee machines, you would tell me I cannot afford to open a coffee shop. But if I tell you I cannot afford to pay my employees a living wage, that is somehow fine. Labor is part of operating a business. If you cannot afford to pay a living wage, you should not be in business.”

I understand the sentiment. I also think it is missing about a thousand pounds of context.

I have been doing a deep dive into our own numbers year over year and some of what I found is staggering. At SRV, our ten year old restaurant in Boston, wages and salaries have risen between 20 and 50 percent depending on the role from 2016 to 2026. Looking specifically at 2019 versus today, the average hourly wage is 1.5 to 1.8 times what it was then. Average salaries have risen between 15 and 51 percent depending on the position. I love that we are paying people more. I am proud of it. But the reality on the other side of that pride: our total sales have grown roughly 4 percent over that same period. Four percent. For a ten year old restaurant that is actually a win. Most restaurants stop growing and start declining around year two. And the growth in the last three years has been miniscule. We are also limited by physics: we only have so many seats and so many hours we can be open, and we are already at capacity on our busiest nights.

So the math is what it is. Labor costs have risen dramatically. Revenue growth has a medium hard ceiling. And layered on top of that are factors none of us control: an unstable economy where prices (COGS) are outpacing consumer earnings, inflation, tariffs on goods and shipping, rising oil prices, GLP1s changing how much people eat, younger generations drinking less. Wallets and appetites are shrinking while expectations have stayed exactly the same.

The broader picture is not more comforting. Roughly 30 percent of restaurants close within three years. About 50 percent shut down by year five. Only around 34.6 percent survive past the ten year mark. This year SRV hit ten years and it genuinely feels like a milestone worth celebrating. But in Massachusetts, 38 percent of full service restaurant operators reported being unprofitable in 2024, with nearly all of them citing food and labor costs as the core challenge. Nationally that number is tracking at 42 percent. Nearly half the full service restaurants in this country are not making any money. Now it becomes more clear why restaurants that we love are closing.

I could spend this whole piece on those challenges and there would be plenty to say. But the thing keeping me up at night right now is something else. National chains, private equity and big money have entered the restaurant industry and they are squeezing small operators out. This is not anecdotal. Between 2014 and 2024 private equity invested $94.5 billion in the bar and restaurant industry according to Pitchbook data. That number is growing every day. And a 2019 study by Harvard Business School and the University of Chicago found that private equity takeovers result in average job losses of 4.4 percent in the two years after acquisition relative to comparable companies that were not acquired. For restaurant workers specifically the picture is even starker: PE acquired firms become more sensitive to wage costs, meaning when wages rise, PE owned restaurants shed jobs at a greater rate than their non-acquired competitors. Workers’ income has been found to decline by an average of 1.7 percent following a private equity acquisition. So the firms promising to professionalize and grow the industry are doing it on the backs of the very workers we are all trying to pay more fairly. Make that make sense.

In October Massachusetts passed legislation requiring all job postings to publicly list salary ranges. Transparency is generally a good thing. But transparency without context can be a gut punch, which is exactly what it was when I started looking at what other restaurants in our market are offering for the same roles we hire for. Out of state operators, large national companies, and those backed by private equity and venture capital are dramatically outpaying what small independent operators can offer.

A concrete example. Danny Meyer, arguably the most famous restaurateur in America, has been moving into the Boston market. He has opened two Daily Provisions locations with a third on the way, and he is about to open a Boston outpost of his critically acclaimed New York restaurant Ci Siamo, with Chef Hillary Sterling, inside the new Fidelity headquarters. They are posting executive chef salaries of $130,000 to $150,000 per year plus significant bonus opportunities. The average executive chef salary listed on Boston Chefs, our local industry job board, for an independent small business is $75,000 to $100,000 per year. And, I can almost guarantee those paying at the 100K mark as independent operators are crossing their fingers it pays off and risking more financial instability in their own business. We are talking about a gap of one half to one third less. We cannot compete with that. We do not generate the revenue that large national brands do. We do not have the initial investment capital to operate at a total loss for a year or more while we establish ourselves. The model simply does not work that way for us.

What that also means is that real homegrown Boston talent, people some of us spent years training and developing, will get pulled into larger national operations. And I understand why they would go. I would not blame anyone for taking that salary. But it is another blow to Boston’s local food scene and to the small businesses that have been the backbone of it. And here is the part that never gets mentioned in these conversations: we pay the same taxes (sometimes more) and operate under the same laws and regulations as these large businesses. We just do not have the legal resources or lobbying power to shape those laws in our favor or to get through sharp operational transitions required by new legislation. They do. I should also mention, in case you need one more piece of context: Danny Meyer started his own venture fund. It is called Enlightened Hospitality Investments. Make of that what you will.

The NPD Group found that for every chain restaurant that opened between fall 2014 and fall 2015, more than two independent restaurants closed. That number has only grown in the decade since. If the current trajectory continues the picture is not complicated to draw. Small businesses close. Competition shrinks. Consumers are left with a handful of large operators whose vision, values, and yes, food, reflect the priorities of their investors rather than their communities. Corporate slop bowls for dinner, not just for lunch. The amazon of the restaurant world.

So what are we doing about it? Because I am not interested in ending here.

When I returned to the Coda Group I came back with some specific goals and we have been putting them into motion, some loudly and some quietly. One is being in service to our community more. We do community action every quarter, from serving at our local emergency shelter to fundraising for immigrant rights and donating portions of proceeds to MIRA, the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition. I joined the board of the Massachusetts Restaurant United and served as co-chair of the legislative committee to help move policy that protects small independent operators and the communities we employ. We have doubled down on leadership development, meeting monthly as a leadership team to keep getting better even when that work is uncomfortable and requires more hours and energy. We have invested in new approaches to pre-service education to sharpen our teams’ knowledge and curiosity and improve the guest experience. We maximize every seat and every seating with hours spent on our reservation books. We have expanded off premise options like takeout and catering. We are creating more content, more unique dinners and tastings, more ways for people to connect with us and try something new. We say yes to (almost) every PR opportunity that comes our way. We are pushing. Very hard. And with the same number of people as we had before. Doing more with less. And I cannot tell you yet whether any of it moves the needle enough. What I can tell you is that it makes us more locally connected, more Boston, and it makes me personally more proud to be doing this work. For now that has to count for something.

My own Instagram algorithm gives me equal amounts of hope and fear. So much virtue signaling of “shop local, shop small, we want community, we want connection”. Those are the things we believe in and the things we are delivering every single night. The fear is watching people preach one thing online and do another in practice. I am not exempt from this. Every time I say no to oligarchs and then open Amazon I am part of the contradiction too.

So I want to leave you with a few questions, because I am a coach at heart and I think the right questions matter more than easy answers. When you think of your favorite dining memory, what actually made it special? What do you want the landscape of your city or town to look like in ten years? Is convenience and price the ceiling of what matters to you, or does diversity of voices, new ideas, and real equitable competition for your dollar rank somewhere too? How are you spending your money and what does that spending say about what you actually value?

We cannot do this alone and we want to do this with you. After all, the people make this industry and this industry makes a community for people.

My astrologer once told me my deepest power lives in one on one conversations and in leading through high stress situations, read: chaos. Yes, I just said my astrologer. Yes, I recognize how that lands for some people (“woo woo”). Talk to me about your big three any time, I am here for it.

Years before that conversation I already knew it was true. I have always loved the idea of being truly present for another person and actually hearing them. Helping someone work through where they are. Seeing something in them they have not quite named for themselves yet. That recognition eventually pushed me toward higher education in coaching. I knew I wanted to help people but becoming a therapist never felt right for me. I love business and I love work, (gross I know), so becoming credentialed as an executive coach made the kind of sense I couldn’t argue with.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of recording the Meez podcast with Josh Sharkey. Josh is a genuinely impressive person: a credentialed chef who became a multi restaurant owner and then made a pivot most people would not have the guts to make, starting a tech company built to actually help restaurants. Meez is a recipe building tool that helps operators scale, create consistency, and run their BOH operations with a little more ease. We use it and we love it. I met Josh at a summit we both spoke at in April and was honored when he invited me to come talk on his podcast.

The conversation covers a lot of ground I care deeply about. Principles around coaching and how the way we frame things shapes our actual reality. AI’s current and potential impact on the hospitality industry. How we think about building restaurant concepts that are genuinely connected to the neighborhoods they operate in. The idea of skill thinning, which deserves its own piece honestly, and more.

This year I am trying to say yes more. Podcasts, speaking engagements, writing and actually sharing it. And it is a little scary. Before I decided to post this with the embedded podcast I texted a colleague and trusted friend to ask whether I should share this podcast here and with our teams. Because the nature of being vulnerable enough to put yourself out there is that you open yourself up to people disagreeing with you, which is not a bad thing, or worse, feeling like you are being a hypocrite. I say that because if you listen you will hear a lot about how I prefer to lead and coach. And if you have worked with me in the last few years you know I believe every word of it. You also know I am human and I miss the mark more often than I would like. I just think that is worth saying out loud before you press play.

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Tuesday night I went to the Noah Kahan show at Fenway Park. Night one of four sold out nights, which makes him the first artist to ever sell out four nights at Fenway for a single tour. Tickets were not cheap, they sold out in hours, and we were lucky to get them, shout out to Cassie who made this happen and whose organizational skills I will never publicly take for granted again. But yesterday it rained. And when I say it rained I mean the sky opened up and delivered what I can only describe as a deeply personal attack.

Because of our current capitalist hellscape, concert tickets are now rain or shine, which is a phrase invented by someone who has never stood in a poncho for three hours with wet socks. I digress.

We geared up. And when I say we, I mean my partner geared up appropriately and correctly, and I, against his very specific and loving advice, wore entirely the wrong pants and shoes. My attitude upon arrival was, let’s say, not my best work. I have a tendency when I feel physically uncomfortable and out of control of a situation to become a version of myself that nobody is thrilled to be around, including me. It is something I am actively working on and occasionally still failing at. Last night was an occasion.

Two songs in and my attitude was handled.

Thirty eight thousand people screaming and dancing in the pouring rain together is something I did not know I needed until it was happening to me. Looking out at the epic rainbow of ponchos felt like a celebration, which felt fitting given we had just wrapped an incredible Pride month. Just humans, being together, soaking wet and not even a little bit mad about it anymore. And because of the rain and my general paranoia, my phone was wrapped in a plastic bag, inside my jacket pocket, under my poncho, and completely inaccessible for the entire show. No texts. No videos. No checking the time every eleven minutes. Just existing with thirty eight thousand strangers, fully present for once.

During the pandemic my friend Ashley used to say she could not wait to be in a club, sweaty and dancing with people she did not know. I understood what she meant but last night I actually felt it. Not sweaty. Wetter. Same energy entirely.

There is something about sharing something honest and uninhibited in person with other people, especially strangers, that is becoming genuinely rare. We have so few spaces left where that kind of connection happens naturally, and even fewer where we are actually off our screens and present with each other. It is part of why I have always been a bar person over a table person. Being in community with strangers, even silently, even just existing in the same space, is one of the last regular places where that still happens organically.

The show was incredible. Truly impressive, playful, a stage full of genuinely talented musicians. And yet the night was not perfect. We were far enough back that seeing the artists’ actual faces required looking at a screen, which feels like an irony nobody needs to point out. The tickets were expensive. Getting them required the specific kind of rat race that makes you feel like you need a nap before the event even starts. And I was soaked to my core for three consecutive hours. My shoes made sounds, and then did not make it. RIP.

And yet. Worth it. Completely, entirely, unambiguously worth it.

There is always a cost analysis of worth it, and I think about this constantly as a restaurant owner. How often can you access something? What is the perception of supply and demand, accurate or not? Does it fit your budget or is it a stretch? The Boston Globe’s food critic Devra First ran a piece recently on higher end restaurants and their more affordable counterparts doing similar things. She did a genuinely good job being thoughtful about both ends of the spectrum. And yet almost every comment was about how the “affordable” options were not actually affordable. Which may be true for some people and not true for others. Worth it is deeply personal and I understand that more right now than I ever have. What I have less patience for, and I will own this bias openly, is the commenter whose noted frame of reference for a good steak is Outback telling the rest of us that a local independent restaurant is overpriced. I am simply not the audience for that opinion, and I will not pretend to be.

But back to the good stuff, because that is where I actually want to live in this piece.

We are lonely. We are isolated. We are, a lot of us, deeply uninspired right now. And yet the opportunities for connection are still there if we choose them. What if we actually leaned in when those opportunities showed up instead of hedging, canceling, or half attending while scrolling? What if we put our phones away at dinner, at an actual restaurant where real people are genuinely excited to cook for you, serve you, pour something good into your glass? I am so lucky to be in this industry. I mean that without a single drop of irony even as I also acknowledge that it is hard and long and that I just missed my niece’s third birthday because I could not take the day off. Restaurants require sacrifice. But they also give something back that most industries simply do not: creation, connection, and the particular kind of authenticity that happens when humans make something for other humans in real time.

When I talk to guests their hunger for that connection is still there. I would argue it is more present than most hospitality professionals are reaching for right now. We have a real opportunity in our small corner of the world to create the same thing that happened at Fenway last night. Thirty eight thousand people, wet socks, bad visibility, expensive beer, and still completely transported and engaged. We can do that at a dinner table. We just have to actually try.

And if you are reading this and you dine in restaurants but do not work in them, I want to say this as directly and warmly as I can: restaurants are one of your best available solutions to loneliness and disconnection. But you have to show up for them the way they show up for you. That means being present when you are there. It means understanding that nothing, not a concert, not a dinner, not a night out with people you love, is going to be perfect, and that the imperfection is usually not the point. The rain was not the point last night. The thirty eight thousand people in it together were the point. You ever cancel plans last minute and then wonder three weeks later why you never see your friends anymore? Yeah. That. We have quietly handed away our own agency and accountability around connection and then acted surprised when we feel disconnected.

I am not trying to be preachy. I am trying to be honest, which I know sometimes looks the same from the outside. I am sitting alone in my living room at 7am after a concert, mildly damp in spirit if not in body, writing this with my dog judging me from the couch. And somehow, talking to you, sharing this, putting something honest into the world, makes me feel more connected, more human, and more hopeful than I did when I woke up.

Pruny fingers and all. Worth it.

Life is full of paradoxes and contradictions. To think you yourself are not one of them is foolish, and I am just learning this in the (cough) latter part of my 30s.

We crave black and white. We want hard, exact truths in spaces where they simply do not exist. People say “this dish is good” or “this wine is bad” as if those are facts rather than opinions. The internet in particular has built an entire industry around delivering opinions as facts, and the more firm and divisive the opinion, the more clicks, views, and money it generates.

I recently saw a post on Threads that said something like: if I told you I wanted to open a coffee shop but could not afford to rent a building or buy coffee machines, you would tell me I cannot afford to open a coffee shop. But if I tell you I cannot afford to pay my employees a living wage, that is somehow fine. Labor is part of operating a business. If you cannot afford to pay a living wage, you should not be in business.

I agree with parts of that. I also think there is a lot of context missing. What determines a living wage? Is it solely on a business owner to keep pace with an ever rising cost of living? What happens when the cost of living rises faster than any realistic or feasible business growth can match? What factors actually limit that growth, and does the business even control those factors? Are the other components of cost of living, rent, healthcare, groceries, inflation, utilities, transit, taxes, being addressed anywhere else in the system? And when we say cost of living, do we mean the actual cost to survive or the cost to live the way we want to live? I am not going to turn this into an economics piece on labor and wages, that is a different piece I will write, probably more than once. I bring it up because it is a clean example of something that can be both true and not true at the same time. Context is everything.

Our ability to hold two true things at once is critical. I call it both and thinking, as opposed to either or, and once you start looking for it you cannot stop seeing how much of life actually runs on it. I am not talking about rejecting science. I believe strongly in peer reviewed research and the truths it uncovers. I am talking about the fact that something can be both invigorating and exhausting. That someone can be kind and well meaning and also, sometimes, a real pain in the ass. That a person can be guarded to protect themselves while still wanting intimacy more than almost anything else.

I have been plenty guilty of this contradiction myself. A friend once told me I was the most principled person she had ever met. It was both an insult and a compliment, and she was not wrong. I have sat with that statement for years and landed somewhere true: principle matters. It is what creates boundaries, high expectations, protection for the people around you, a moral compass. But it can also become an unrealistic chokehold. It can leave people feeling excluded, unable to measure up, unable to just be who they are. It can leave the principled person constantly bracing for disappointment and, eventually, alone. Being highly principled is, in its own way, a search for black and white inside an incredibly gray world.

Learning to hold two things as true at once has been liberating, growth oriented, and exhausting, often all in the same week. As a leader, as a participant in society, as a friend and a partner, it is one of the most important skills you can develop. The more you learn, the more you realize how little you actually know, and that should make you more open to other ideas and other people, not less. We cannot stop the contradictions and paradoxes. They live in us and all around us, whether we acknowledge them or not.

A few examples.

My business partner Jim has always pointed out something he sees as a contradiction in me. I am deeply curious and genuinely engaged with what most people would call academic territory: politics and world affairs, research and science, anything that provokes curiosity. I care about those things. I care about people, about justice, about progress, about building something more equitable. And I also love celebrity gossip and reality TV, specifically Bravo. I love watching rich women be absolute bosses and completely unhinged on camera in the same episode. I love when they posture as being more or having more than reality. Getting drunk, spilling each other’s carefully guarded secrets, all the scandals, all of it. It gives me genuine life. Jim says he does not get it, it doesn’t match with the rest of me. And yet here I am, a walking contradiction, perfectly comfortable being one.

Bravo itself is a contradiction, one I still wrestle with. Andy Cohen took an underperforming affiliate channel at NBCUniversal and pitched shows nobody else was making, Queer Eye, the Real Housewives franchise, and turned Bravo from the brink of cancellation into a genuinely massive cultural force, arguably the backbone of Peacock’s success. Andy is a gay, outspoken liberal man who regularly calls out bad behavior on his own show and on his own platform. He has also, for years, cast openly MAGA women across multiple Housewives franchises and allowed people with documented racist and bigoted histories to stay on air. Is that okay? No. But also, maybe more complicated than a clean no. Would Andy have built the platform that lets him speak openly against Trump and conservative nationalism on national television if he had not built a complicated, big tent network full of people across the entire ideological spectrum? Some of the very people who made Bravo successful are the same people whose presence on the network is genuinely hard to defend. There is a real world cost to giving people with racist, homophobic, or misogynistic views a platform, and it is rarely a positive one. Both of those things are true simultaneously, and that is exactly the kind of tension this piece is about.

Leading might be the ultimate paradox. Mentorship itself is a contradiction. Think about the phrase cruel to be kind. The best leaders I know are, in the truest sense, cruel to be kind. They are the ones willing to say the hard true thing to someone they are developing, with real care behind it. It is not fun to hear and it is not fun to say. Brené Brown was right that clear is kind. Good leaders have to become comfortable being complex, contradictory creatures themselves. They want their people to grow, and growth requires honesty most people would rather avoid giving.

The best leaders I know also change their minds. They let new context inform a decision, and when the context shifts again, they let their mind shift with it. That is a delicate dance to do well. You have to stand for something or you will fall for anything, and that same conviction can leave you behind if you refuse to ever move. A growth mindset and flexibility is necessary for leadership to thrive.

Black and white feels easier. It is neat. It is a box you can check. It lets you know instead of forcing you to sit in the unknown for a while. But it is rarely realistic. The longer I am on this earth the more that becomes true. Everything has a consequence, good, bad, or often both. Everything exists in context because almost nothing exists in a vacuum.

Restaurants create community and connection, and when a night is going well it is easy to be convinced that restaurants are a little bit magic, even altruistic. They are not, not entirely. They are capitalist businesses built on the exchange of goods for money. And yet they are also some of the most genuinely human spaces left in this world. Places where chefs and beverage directors pour real creative energy, real talent, real vulnerability onto a plate or into a glass, only to have that work judged by a guest’s opinion as though it were settled fact. That single sided opinion, posted, starred, reviewed, then carries real consequences for whether the people behind it keep their jobs. And yet the other side of that coin is real too: guests have every right to enjoy how they spend their money and their time, and a meal that disappoints them is a legitimate disappointment, not just an inconvenience for the business.

That contradiction, that restaurants are both businesses and something closer to sacred, both capitalist and deeply human, both judged fairly and unfairly and still worth defending, is one I plan to come back to. There is a lot more to say about how the rating systems we have built treat restaurants, about what gets lost when small, independent places are squeezed by bigger players with bigger marketing budgets, about who actually gets to thrive in this industry and who does not. For now I just want to leave you with the contradiction itself.

Both things are true. That is the whole point.

In his 2019 special “Asian Comedian Destroys America!”, Ronny Chieng has a bit about Amazon Prime that is somehow more true now than when he wrote it. He talks about the absolute rage people feel when something they ordered does not arrive the same day they ordered it. The indignation. The offense. As if waiting twenty four hours for something that did not exist in your life yesterday is a human rights violation. Guilty as charged, by the way. It is one of the funniest bits I have seen in years and also one of the most accurate mirrors held up to what we have become as a society. We have engineered so much friction and discomfort out of daily life that we have lost our tolerance for any of it entirely. That might almost be fine if it stayed in the realm of shipping speeds. But it has not stayed there.

I fear we worked so hard to remove discomfort and inconsistency from people’s lives that now, when those things inevitably show up, a lot of us genuinely do not know how to move through them.

Trying to avoid discomfort is like trying to never get wet. It is not possible. You have to shower. The rain will find you. That water you are precariously holding will spill. The puddle will jump out from nowhere. Discomfort is not the enemy. And I want to be clear because this matters: there is a massive difference between the discomfort I am talking about and actual abuse or being genuinely unsafe. Those things are not discomfort, they are harm, and they are not what I am describing. But I do think the word trauma, which gets tossed around as often as Cher Horowitz said “like” (and when I say Cher Horowitz I mean me, because I am after all an elder millennial woman), and it is causing a lot of us to lose the plot. Feelings are real. Feelings are also not always facts. And we cannot build a life, a team, or an industry entirely around avoiding them.

Glennon Doyle was right when she said we can do hard things. We really can. Like building muscle it takes time, it will hurt, you will not notice every change, and then one day you will be able to lift something you never could before. The research actually backs this up. Post-traumatic growth goes above and beyond resilience. Rather than just persevering through challenging circumstances, it represents the capacity to reflect, grow, and truly shift one’s perspective. In other words the hard thing is not just something to survive. It is often the thing that actually changes you for the better. And on the flip side, when children are raised by psychologically controlling or overprotective parents, they are more likely to show elevated stress responses when facing normal life challenges, putting them at a physiological disadvantage before they even begin. We do not outgrow that dynamic just because we become adults. The pattern follows us.

One thing I carried out of a religious upbringing I otherwise left behind is this: everything is for a season. Hard things come and go. Good things come and go. Nothing is permanent. That single idea has been one of the most practical tools I have for moving through difficulty without unraveling, and I think we forget it constantly.

And because this space is a mix of personal musings, leadership thoughts, and ideas about the restaurant industry please let me share that here is where I went wrong as a restaurant leader, and I think it is still a widespread problem today. When I came up in the restaurant industry the abuses were rampant and real. Sexual harassment, misogyny, addiction, toxic power dynamics, just to name a few. I primarily grew up as a manager in a moment when people were starting to push back on all of that, and I came into leadership on the heels of two genuinely difficult environments. The first, in Chicago, where I was told more times than I care to remember that I was valuable because I had a nice smile and that male customers liked that. The second, my first job in Cambridge, MA, where multiple male managers were regularly using their positions of power to sleep with staff, fueling a culture of drinking and general hostility. It was actually toxic and it was hard to do good work inside of it. I got to a point where I thought I could do something about it and set out to build something better. And for the most part I did. But I overcorrected in a significant way.

For years I tried to shield my team from discomfort entirely. I took on the weight of every hard moment so they would not have to feel it. I worked a million hours so no one would feel a schedule change when a co-manager went on vacation or was sick. I covered closes so someone could get out of the door early because I was afraid they’d be too tired. I jumped in to deal with challenging guest conversations, staff conversations, and to give answers right away so they didn’t have to be without one. It bought me a lot of trust, a ton of expertise in their roles, extremely high blood pressure, and burnout that took a long time to come back from. And here is the irony: it did not make my managers or my team members more capable or necessarily happier. There were real moments where it actually denied some of them the opportunity to learn. I was so busy protecting them from the hard parts that I accidentally kept them small.

This is a fine line and I want to honor that. Creating a genuinely sustainable environment is the goal, and not an easy one. Restaurants are AM and PM operations with long hours, thin margins, and a requirement for real flexibility. That is the reality. But what I have found is that when you treat people like glass they are more likely to break. When you are honest with someone about what the job actually requires, and then you genuinely believe in them and give them the agency to advocate for themselves, they tend to be remarkably capable. Belief in someone is not softness. It is one of the most powerful tools a manager has.

The pendulum has swung. We came from an industry full of real abuse and we are now sometimes operating with kid gloves in ways that are not serving anyone. We cannot build strong teams by insulating people from every difficulty and every negative feeling. We cannot spend all of our time validating feelings and acting as therapist (for one most of us as not trained and licensed as such). We cannot be okay with someone calling out every week because they are not up for it. We cannot get angry that the item we bought expecting one day delivery to us (that is built on the backs of other people’s work and often suffering) took two days. But we also cannot go back to the way things were, and I would never want to. The answer is not to bring back the rod. The answer is to trust people more. To tell them the truth about what is hard, to stand behind them while they figure it out, and to stop treating the occasional difficult feeling like a five alarm emergency that requires everyone to stop and manage it. And to be ok with the time it will take for someone else to learn that this too shall pass.

“It’s ok not to be ok” is a phrase I have always had complicated feelings about because it ends there, with no next step and no path forward. What I would rather say is: it is ok not to be ok, and we are going to keep going anyway. That is not cruelty. That is actually the deepest form of belief in another person. The research and our own lived experience point to the same thing: we do not grow in comfort. We grow in the push through. And the people who work alongside us deserve to be given the chance to find out what they are made of, rather than being quietly, kindly, well-intentionedly kept from it.

In April I had the privilege of speaking on a panel at a Boston University School of Hospitality Administration summit. The summit’s premise was “EI through AI”, focusing on the intersection of tech and more specifically AI and hospitality. Following our panel I stayed to listen to other speakers, including a fascinating conversation between OpenTable CEO Debby Soo and BU SHA Dean Arun Upneja.

Debby Soo has been the CEO of OpenTable since mid 2020 and she has largely been credited with turning around what was essentially a business losing all of its market share to competitors. OpenTable’s model had been hugely disrupted by Resy, a reservation platform founded by Ben Leventhal and now owned by Amex. Watching her employees react to her in that room was genuinely spectacular. They are fully bought in, and that kind of organizational trust is hard to manufacture. But as a restaurant owner and operator, my perspective is there is still a lot of work to be done, which to her credit, Debby also noted.

Let me give you some context on what we are actually talking about here, because if you have never managed a restaurant or worked with OpenTable the price structure can be startling. Historically OpenTable charged a high monthly subscription plus a per person charge that varied depending on whether the guest booked via the restaurant’s own website, via OpenTable search, or via OpenTable discovery. That per person charge can be upwards of $1 per cover. We had a restaurant on OpenTable doing about $4 million in annual revenue and our bill for subscription and cover costs came in just under $40,000 for the year. For a restaurant, that is not a line item, that is a person. $40,000 was (at the time years ago) a new manager’s salary. And for a long time OpenTable was the only player in the game, so it was them or pen and paper. That is not a choice, that is a hostage situation.

To Debby Soo’s credit, this has changed. She noted during her talk that there have been meaningful shifts since she came on, including a more flexible pricing model and reductions in per guest booking costs, which I know to be true based on offers OpenTable has made to my own businesses. I will also note that those offers are not consistent business to business, and they require you to sign an NDA, which tells you something about how they want that information to travel. The strategy of knowing who to offer what and how to get the right operators on their platform has become much more sophisticated under her leadership. It is genuinely impressive to watch an older business start to pivot. But it is still wildly expensive and the profit of OpenTable is still derived exclusively from restaurants.

Here is where it gets interesting to me, and where I have been noodling since I left that room.

Before Debby Soo spoke, our panel had a candid conversation about the tension points between restaurants, AI, and tech innovation. It was a good mix, two operators and two tech people, and our facilitator Eli Feldman, who also conceived the summit, created real space for operators to say what we actually think. I shared my belief that restaurant tech has made massive promises for the last decade. This product will reduce your workload. Save you time. Introduce you to new guests. Help you make more profit with less stress. And yet the data collected every year by the National Restaurant Association (and my own experience being a restaurant owner) shows that restaurants have not gotten more profitable, or easier, or less stressful. When we mess up a dish we comp it or make it right. When a tech product does not perform as promised, the accountability tends to disappear behind a renewal contract and a new feature announcement.

Debby Soo responded thoughtfully and wove a lot of what she heard from the panelists into her remarks, which I respect. But there was one tension point that sat in the room unaddressed, and I have not been able to let it go.

Soo told the original story of OpenTable, founded by Chuck Templeton. The origin story goes that his wife had called and called and called restaurants trying to get a Saturday reservation in the mid/late 90s. It was so frustrating that he thought, now that the internet exists, let me find a way to make this easier. He set out to build an online inventory of reservation availability. In the early boom of the internet, that was a genuinely innovative idea and I give him full credit for it. But here is the thing: that story is about a diner. It is a guest solution. It was built to solve a problem for the person trying to eat, not the person trying to run the restaurant. Sure there might be upside for the restaurant, less calls to answer, new guests to meet, but it wasn’t designed for a restaurant, it was designed for the guest.

And yet Soo stood up there and told us that OpenTable’s mission today is to “serve the restaurant so they can serve the world.”

So which is it?

Because if the origin story is guest first and the revenue model is restaurant funded, exclusively, then the mission statement is not a pivot, it is a reframe. You can change your motto. You can change your marketing language. But if the core product and the core financial model remain the same, the mantra is just something a very good PR team wrote to make the harsh reality seem shinier. Restaurants pay 100% of the OpenTable bill. Guests pay nothing. And the product was designed, from day one, to make the guest experience easier. That is not serving restaurants so they can serve the world. That is restaurants subsidizing a guest convenience tool and calling it a partnership.

This is bigger than OpenTable. Restaurants are one of the last true vestiges of human connection. We are where people celebrate and grieve and fall in love and sit with their families. We do the physical, human, back breaking, feet aching work of creating something for another person, absorbing their feedback and often their feelings, and crafting it into an experience worth having. Tech is supposed to make all of that more, better, faster, and less costly for us. Instead, much like OpenTable, it has created reliance on tools that have not changed the fundamental economics of what we do, all while calling itself a hero of the industry.

What would I actually like to see? Independent operators informing tech at scale, and actually being heard. Government stepping in to break up monopolies before they calcify the way OpenTable did prior to Resy coming along. Tools that talk to each other, reduce real labor, and improve real decision making. And transparency. If the value proposition is connecting restaurants to new guests then as an operator I should be able to see how a guest found me, what attracted them to book, what their booking patterns look like, what they spend and buy at other locations, and where else they go and why. Without that, discovery is just a word on a sales deck.

So what would a restaurant first actually look like in practice? It would start with pricing that is structurally tied to an individual restaurant’s reality, not a flat rate that hits a $10million property and a $2million property the same way. It would mean support that exists during the hours restaurants actually operate, nights, weekends, holidays, because that is when things go wrong and a bot or a Monday morning callback is not support, it is theater. It could look like a model where guests pay a small fee to hold a prime time reservation on a Saturday night, the way you pay a convenience fee for a concert ticket, and that fee kicks back to the restaurant as a hedge against no shows that cost operators real money every single service. It would mean accountability for guests who regularly mistreat reservations including kicking people off the app, charging them, and being direct when they continuously no show or late cancel - from the tech company, not just making the restaurant the bad guy. It might mean finding your revenue elsewhere, like from CPG companies or wine companies that want to advertise to guests who just enjoyed a delightful experience at a beloved restaurant and then either kicking that dollar back to the restaurant or subsidising restaurants costs through that revenue. It would mean giving data that actually belongs to the operator: not just how many covers you did but how guests in your market are booking, what nights are trending, what cuisines are seeing a surge, so that operators can make real decisions about pacing, staffing, and programming instead of flying blind while OpenTable sits on a goldmine of behavioral data we helped them build. It might mean product development informed by operators who have actually closed a restaurant at 1am, not just surveyed them in a focus group. It would mean ensuring the product actually works how the restaurant needs, not just how the guest needs, to maximize its effectiveness. None of this is radical. All of it is possible. The question is whether the will is there to build it, or whether the current model is just too profitable to meaningfully disrupt, even from the inside.

Debby Soo is doing real work and I mean that. But good leadership inside a flawed model is still a flawed model. The question is not whether she is the right person. The question is whether the industry she is serving will still be standing long enough to benefit from the changes she is making, if the changes do not go far enough, fast enough.

The restaurant will always set the table. The least tech can do is help us fill the seats without taking the tablecloth and the silverware with them on the way out.

Once in a while I have the privilege of time with a team member I don’t usually get to spend much time with. Two Saturdays ago it was one of our Maître d’s, someone who is coming up on her 5th anniversary with our company. A little secret: she is one of my favorite people to talk to because she is stunningly smart, genuinely open minded, and we share a deep interest in how the world works and why.

We got into it a bit on Saturday evening about the concept of curiosity. Something I have been noticing lately, and shared with her, is how much curiosity has felt absent from some of our team. There was a time when talking about food and wine with folks in my company made eyes sparkle and hands go up. Now sometimes when you look out at a pre-meal it feels like a chore, for everyone in the room. And that is not the whole story. Recently a new member of our leadership team led a pre-meal on oysters in her first few weeks that was so inspiring I heard about it directly from most of our front of house and some of our back of house. And when something travels back to me through the team you know it landed, because I am reliably one of the last people anyone runs to with good news.

So curiosity has been on my mind. The way it can lie dormant for a while and then get lit back up. It reminded me of a moment in graduate school when I was taking a full course load, reading dense scientific research papers by the dozen every week, and working full time. I had coffee with someone who had completed my program a few years before and she said something that stopped me cold. She said, “it sounds like you’ve had too many inputs and you need a period of outputs before you can be ready for more inputs.” The simplicity of it was remarkable. When we take in too much without time to process or apply any of it, everything starts to become noise. The noise dulls the curiosity. It all just becomes too much. We need to apply what we have learned, or shake some of it loose, before we can get genuinely curious again. And curiosity also needs intentional investment. It does not just happen. It requires asking yourself: am I spending time with new ideas? Am I letting different voices in? Or have I been living inside the same echo chamber for so long I stopped noticing?

I have been asking myself lately where the real opportunities for growth are, in my business and in myself. I am a partner and the CEO of a multi-unit multi-concept restaurant group. So much of what the people that I work with do is genuinely great. The energy and effort they bring, the culture of respect, the commitment to creating real moments for others. But one thing I keep coming back to as a real opportunity for all of us is curiosity. We each have different natural levels of it. Mine will probably be what does me in eventually (hello to the old adage “curiosity killed the cat”). Others are more drawn to consistency and comfort, which is its own kind of strength. But I think most of us have more to unlock here than we are currently accessing.

It took me a few months to name this and a few more to really understand the why behind it. We are living in an extreme era of inputs with almost no space for output or application. I mean I thought about this substack for a year plus before I actually just did it. Social media, political instability, wars, constantly shifting social climates, basic rights being contested, fear, propaganda, rising costs, economic uncertainty, and then on top of all of that, a 2026 that has been meteorologically determined to break everyone’s spirit. It is genuinely hard to feel inspired right now. Hard to find the spark. Hard to act on it even when you do. For me personally this has been one of the lowest periods of curiosity and inspiration I can remember. I have been going back and forth between wanting to give everyone, including myself, more grace and patience, and wanting to push because I know what my teams are capable of and I do not want any of us to leave it on the table.

So here is where I land. This is not a note that says it is fine to stay where you are. I have always felt that “it’s ok not to be ok” is an incomplete thought because it has no next step and no forward motion in it. This is an argument for consciously and intentionally rebuilding curiosity. When curiosity is intentional the results are not small. It opens minds. It creates things, sometimes genuinely extraordinary things that nobody saw coming. It brings energy back into the room. It makes problem solving feel less like survival and more like craft. And then all of that becomes the thing that keeps feeding itself.

So how do we do it? That part is personal. I shared with my team that I am making two commitments to start. I am going to listen to one new podcast a week, people send me recommendations constantly and I am finally going to dive in and hear some new voices (don’t worry I will not be giving up my commitment to Giggly Squad). And I am going to spend two mornings a week writing, giving myself space to sit with my own thoughts and questions over morning coffee instead of immediately opening Instagram or a blog and pouring more input in before I have done anything with what I already have.

I asked my team, and I will ask you, what is your version of that? Keep the goal small and realistic because the smaller the goal the more likely we actually do it. And if you feel like sharing what you are trying or what has been sparking something for you lately, I would love to hear it. There has never been a better time to try than right now.