What Vivian Olkin really loved was ice cream. So when the 57-year-old career counselor noticed that her new hometown, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, didn’t have a really good ice cream parlor, it began to seem like destiny.
She opened the Inside Scoop, a funky little storefront shop serving flavors like Guinness stout and homemade oatmeal cookie. The high-butterfat ice cream won a cult following and Best Of awards from local papers.
But the business faced one challenge after another: a quadruple rise in the price of vanilla, a failed attempt at catering, a dearth of walk-in traffic. After six years in the red, kept afloat by Olkin’s husband, the Inside Scoop went kaput in 2004.
Olkin is certainly not unique. She suffers from what Anthony Bourdain terms “Owner’s Syndrome” in his book Kitchen Confidential. It’s the destructive urge on the part of someone who has been successful in a non-food-related field to sink his or her hard-earned cash into a bound-to-fail restaurant venture.
But in the eight years since the publication of Bourdain’s bestseller, the fantasy of second careers in food has only become more widespread. Thanks in large part to media attention like the Food Network’s Recipe for Success, which chronicles the giddy early days of ex-professionals’ new gigs, it seems half of the country’s bored middle managers, bankers, and computer programmers are jumping ship to become butchers, bakers, and sausage-makers. Too bad most of them will flounder.
I worked in a pizza restaurant right after graduating from college. I preferred cooking to waiting tables, and had a great time. That said, I worked my little tush off, and came home exhausted after every shift. And I was just an employee! My experience pretty much cured me of working in food, though I've been told by friends and family that I should start a cafe, based on my home cooking. When I read Bourdain's book, the "owner's syndrome" concept completely made sense. I'm happy to pursue my profession (art/teaching) and let the food professionals be food professionals.
You think you want to get into the restaruant business? You have no experience? Everyone tells you you make the best Flimflamafoofoo and you should open your own joint? Try fast food management, if you can handle that for about three years you might maybe have the stuff to start thinking about a possible career in running your own joint, MAYBE! I've been in and out of it for thirtyfive years, the food business is the roughist and sometimes the most rewarding. Oh and by the way if you can't pay cash for all your start-up, forget it, you'll never get out of the hole, And then theres the help...............
Very, very true. My parents worked in a restaurant (my dad was a cook for 17 years) and the life is extremely hard. Long hours, hot gruelling environment, staff issues, etc. People need to work in the business to really understand what it's like.
There's another small, but strange group of people who think they should open up a food place: people who "love" to cook, have cooked at a children's camp for a week, and think they are wonderful cooks - even though I think their food is too crappy or mediocre to serve in a restaurant. Not sure where this delusion comes from.
I've added this to my favorites so I can come back to it and read it every time the idea that I could totally open a cafe crosses my mind.
So no one has looked at this from another angle; there are a lot of sucessful crappy restaurants out there so it's certainly no all about great food and great chefs. I'm 51 and currently enrolled in culinary school and though I don't have any grand illusions it's the most fun I've had in a long time.
Well, add me to that list. I owned a cheese shop for 3 years- thinking it was exactly what the affluent community I lived it needed. But you know what? Even if you have a superior product, and at a better price than the Whole Foods with amazing care given to the product, knowledgeable service and tastings and classes and pairings and education and all your energy and money...
When your shopper that you've spent so much time educating is in Whole Foods anyway- you've trained them well enough to increase their confidence when they reach for that easy purchase. And then you are gone.
Well, I wouldn't say that this article makes me want to open my own bakery/cheese shop/flimflamafloofloo charcuterie joint, but it does make me want to go out and buy my products from those places to help them make it!
I thought about opening a wine tasting bar in the early 70's, when I got out of the service. Would have been unique at that time. Then I thought, 'Do I really want to stand behind a bar every night?' I eventually got a job as an engineer, which is what I was trained for. Good thing, too. I would have hated it.
I *loved* the Inside Scoop, and I was crushed when I saw its doors close. I love the pumpkin, I loved the buttered rum raisin, I loved the cheap art for sale, and I loved the funhouse mirrors. My husband has never found a coffee ice cream he liked as much as yours. When I asked for an ice cream maker for my birthday, I think I might have secretly been wishing for a time machine to take me back to Ms. Olkin's ice cream counter. Cook books aren't quite as risky are they? I would buy a collection of Inside Scoop recipes in a heart beat.
Wow! I have issues with this article on many different levels!
First, I'm lucky and proud to have a second career in food that has succeeded! I have a Masters degree and Counseling and was working hard (physically and emotionally) as a therapist until after a few years I hit the brick wall. Hard. So I did what any sane person would do...I decided to follow my passion and go to culinary school.
Yes, I have opened a small business that failed. Yes, I lost money and gained debt. But it all led me to where I am today: Happy in my career. I teach at a culinary school and operate a sucessful Personal Chef business on the side. Not a day goes by that I don't stop and remind myself (and others!) that my job does NOT suck!
There are loads of career opportunities in the industry that don't involve losing your life savings or working the line forever. Remember that Americans spend over 60% of their lives at the work place! If you ask me, that's a lot of time to be miserable!
I was still young when I opened my own prepared food/catering business.Not a huge business but not tiny either around 20 employees, a retail location and separate production kitchen I Purchased an established business with a good client base in a fairly affluent town in Massachusetts.
We were doing very very well the 1st 6 months we were open and then a couple of things happened that caused problems.
Our biggest competitor in town built a new space quadrupling their size, Whole Foods opened aprx. 4 miles away, and when we needed to really ramp up things in the shop we just did not have the money to aggressively stay competitive with these much bigger operations.
Under capitalization was our biggest problem, we functioned on a monthly basis, paying salaries, operating costs, etc. we had a little cushion but not much. I found that you need whatever the cost to either buy or open the business in reserve as well (if you spend $750,000 on a business make sure you have that much of a cushion) you need at least that much in reserve to weather the slow times and make improvements when needed as well as increased advertising and marketing
Operating the business is key, it will take up more of your time than anything. You need to keep an eye on costs, on insurance, on everything besides putting on your apron and cooking.
It is a 7 day a week 24 hour a day industry. It can be rewarding, As crazy as it was I still miss it. But it is the toughest business I have ever been involved in. Id encourage anyone with the dream to take the leap just make sure you have enough money..money money money...its the key ..and be aware of all that is involved.
In 1963 or '64, The Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who had bought a vacation home in New Hampshire, wrote a funny article in the "Reporter" magazine about the couples who escaped the rat race in New Youk and brought their life savings to open a quaint little restaurant in the vacation country in NH.
The vacationers and the locals loved and appreciated these little restaurants and patronized them faithfully until the owners' savings ran out, the couple closed up the quaint little restaurant and headed back to the Big Apple.
I have worked in the restaurant biz for nearly twenty years, since I was a teenager. I think people need to know that even very busy restaurants do not always turn a profit.
I currently bake at a small cafe that is very popular. In the past two years my boss has had to replace several pieces of equipment. Things break. Expensive things. Also, there is always a prep cook or baker there after the restaurant closes, which means lights are always on, and the AC or heat must always be on. The utility bill must be outrageous. And my boss is conscientious enough to help all of us full-timers with our health insurance premiums, and occasional paid time off, God bless her.
Needless to say, she's not raking it in.
I still do dream of owning my own place one day, but it sure as hell won't be easy, and it probably won't make me rich.
I think cooking can be like acting in some ways. If you start out as an actor that's one thing, but if you end up an actor, that's a whole other thing. I started my career in food because I knew I could bake a cake, I liked to eat, I get hives working in an office, and I felt I had spent way too much on my degree to pursue my career as housewife. I stayed in food, because I found it is integral to who I am and that from the inside out, it moves me, drives me, and makes me happy. Passion is key, but so is persistence, and flexibility in your ideas. A secret to success can be to stay away from the restaurant business. fayefood.com
Cooking for a living is darn hard work. While I dream of cooking for others, the bitter truth is, I would stink at it.
Most restaurants fail, but for everyone that tries and gets it wrong, a lesson is learned and better things grow out of the experience. Thank goodness people are trying new things and opening new places with a gleam in their eye and a blindness to the harsh truth. Makes for some tasty eating.
I just wish some of these people starting second careers as cake and cupcake makers (we have a few in L.A.) would learn to bake bread instead! I can make a cupcake at home, but bread takes a lot more skill. I wonder if they will survive when cupcakes inevitably become less popular?
I am a good cook. Dial time back a few decades and I was a great cook. That said, why on earth would I want to open a restaurant where I would be doomed to make the same thing over and over and over again to make customers happy? Not owning (or working in) a restaurant is cooking freedom!
I used to dream about opening a soup & bread cafe, or a B&B in the Pacific NW. Reading "Kitchen Confidential" and seeing the ass-busting hard work required in FN's "Recipe for Success" and similar shows has killed those idle dreams. At this point I don't know if I could open a hotdog cart.
I think I'll limit my restauranting to my own kitchen.
Ever heard someone say "boy, if i had to do over again, I'd become a chef...". Well, at age 38, I found myself in Australia for a few years and not doing a job i liked, so i left it and went to cooking school.
That was in 2003, and when we returned to Canada, i started www.thymemanagement.ca (www.chefmike.ca too) and almost 4 years later, all is good. I make 1/3 the money I used to make and 1/2 what I could make as a restaurant chef, but we couldn't be happier.It's not for everyone, but for us, it's very good...