In a few hours I’ll interview a chef who learned to speak English by reading Dr. Seuss during his afternoon break. I’ve been told that when he became a U.S. citizen, his employer threw a party for him at the restaurant where he worked his way up.

One of the questions I’ll ask him will be at what position he started. Before chefs became celebrities and culinary school was considered a practical alternative to a liberal arts college, chefs started as pot washers. Having stood over a steaming sink and scrubbed crusty burnt residue off sheet pans in restaurant kitchens, I know the wisdom in this.

A watched pot shouldn’t burn.

After gaining this, and other experiences from the hospitality business, my writing appeared in print more regularly. But I never forgot that feeling of kitchen teamwork when the evening rush began, how even if things weren’t working perfectly, you had no time to do anything more than follow through, and that, when the rush ended and you could see clear to end of the working night, you felt that you had helped make good things happen.

The chef I’m interviewing opened his restaurant at a time when restaurants are struggling for too many reasons: food costs are high, inflation has taken some–if not all–the money people would spend on a night out, take-out delivery services cut into what is already a narrow profit margin. My news feed sends me stories of customers balking as restaurants add junk fees to checks, post-pandemic work-at-homers aren’t patronizing office block eateries anymore, how a new drug that suppresses human hunger might kill off the fast-food industry, and a Michelin starred establishment that closed because the owner felt that prices were too high.

I’ve learned from the many food and hospitality stories I’ve done have that there aren’t any good times to open a restaurant. The majority fail within two years because landlords raise the rent, it’s too hard to find and keep good employees, bad employees steal too much, or what seemed to be a great kind of cuisine or concept didn’t catch on quick enough.

I’ve also learned that there are optimal qualities for restaurant chef/ownership. The first is that you shouldn’t need more than four hours of sleep a night. The second is the capacity to work constantly during the other twenty or so hours. The joy in cooking, or the shared pleasure in making people happy with great food, is not enough.

Once in my life I actually made a difference in a restaurant’s success. A husband-and-wife had just opened in a converted gas station and were struggling to define themselves as different from a more famous competitor–and their location on the main drag made it difficult for people driving past to slow down quick enough to turn into their rather small parking lot. I interviewed them, showed that they were just two people with two young kids who loved this kind of cuisine and had everything tied up into this dream.

The day the piece appeared, people began to find their way into their parking lot.

Publicity, happening exactly at the right time, isn’t enough. You need courage. The you need it to persuade suppliers, contractors and landlords to wait a little bit longer for your to pay them. You need it to believe, not only that your dream will come true, but that great big gobs of pure luck will help you succeed, no matter how hard you work. You need it to believe that you really can do this, when the compressor in the walk-in refrigerator dies, the plumbing backs up, or you have a pandemic that equates a meal with friends with death.

You need all that to make it to the fifth year, when restaurants have paid back their start-up costs, found a loyal customer base, a group of dependable suppliers, a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t, and have established a reputation good enough to withstand the reviews people post on line.

By then you might forget when the first food writers came to your place and asked you what you’re going to do that’ll put your place on the map.

I hope this chef makes it.