The summer job that became the whole restaurant.
The menu
First
At seventeen, in the summer of 2015, I took a job at a luxury resort on Egypt's North Coast, carrying plates to tables. I had never worked in service.
Then
I didn't learn the job. I learned the room. Within a couple of weeks I knew the menu better than waiters and captains who had been there for years, and they moved me up to taking orders.
Main
By the last months of that first season I was leading shifts. Temporary staff usually get the heavy lifting. Before long they handed me the whole restaurant operation anyway, as a temporary employee.
On the side
Guests who had eaten in the best places in the world kept offering me jobs at their own businesses.
Still
I came back every summer until I was twenty-three, alongside university and my first engineering jobs.
The sequence of service.
It starts before the guest is through the door: eye contact while they're still far away, the smile, the welcome. I was doing the host's job before the restaurant had a host. From there it's a sequence, all the way to the moment they leave, and knowing it cold is what frees you to notice everything else.
- Eye contact from afar
- The smile and the welcome
- Seated
- Menu and questions
- Order, allergies asked
- Courses, timed to the table
- Check
- Farewell
Describing a dish before it arrives.
I studied every ingredient, how each dish was cooked, and how it was plated, and the drinks the same way. So when a guest asked about something, I could describe exactly how it would look on the table. Nobody ordered something they couldn't picture. And I asked about allergies before anyone had to mention them. I never skipped a single step of the order-taking standard, which is why so many guests said it was the best they'd had.
asked before they mentioned it
The manual.
What I learned didn't stay in my head. I wrote a printed manual for the team: the sequence of service, the workflow, a checklist for whoever opened in the morning and another for whoever closed at night, and the lessons we'd learned from past mistakes. It had a full section on the menu, with real photos of every dish, arrows naming each ingredient, and how each one was cooked. Someone who had never worked in a restaurant could study it and become an excellent waiter. And whenever a teammate had a question, I answered it and showed them how to do it themselves.
Thinking like a manager.
I kept asking the questions a manager asks. Why do the glasses keep breaking, and what's the root cause? How should the silverware, glassware, and kitchenware be stored so the floor moves faster? How do you refill the salt, pepper, and sugar so the humidity doesn't ruin them? When the cashier system got in our way, I sat with the IT team and explained how it needed to work from the floor's side. I didn't invent the craft. I kept making the operation around me smoother.
Why do glasses break?
Find the cause, not the culprit.
Where does everything live?
Storage that matches the service.
Why does the salt clump?
Refill with the weather in mind.
Why does the register slow us down?
Tell the builders how the floor works.
The kitchen.
On the busiest nights, the kitchen jammed in a strange way. Each chef had a fixed station, so one would be buried in orders while another stood waiting for his. I recommended a different way to run it, with work that could move between stations in parallel instead of waiting in one line. It clearly reduced the bottleneck.
Before
Each chef owns one station. Every order waits in line for its own.
After
Work that can move, moves. The stations run in parallel.
Selling what would otherwise expire.
At the start of a day I'd look at what in the stores was close to its date, find the dishes and drinks that used it, and get the team behind those. If a dish that used it wasn't selling, we'd ask why. Was it how it looked? How it tasted? Then we'd fix that, and feature it for the weeks that mattered, so nothing went to waste.
- Check the dates every morning.
- Find the dishes and drinks that use them.
- If one isn't selling, find out why and fix it.
The guests' dish.
One idea I'm still fond of: twice a week, the restaurant served a dish proposed by the guests themselves. They filled in a form. On those days we served five dishes from five different guests, and the best-loved ones went onto the menu under the names of the guests who created them. People came back to a restaurant where their own dish was on the menu. That's a different kind of loyalty.
Proposed by guests, twice a week
From our guests
- by a guest(made the menu)
- by a guest
- by a guest(made the menu)
Summers, alongside everything.
It was never the whole year. Every summer on the coast sat next to university, and later next to engineering. I even gave a talk once about balancing the two.
- On the coast from June to September.
- On the coast from June to September.
- On the coast from June to September.
- On the coast from June to September.
- On the coast from June to September.
- On the coast from June to September.
- On the coast from June to September.
What the guests said.
“I could never enjoy such a perfect communicator in the food industry in the Middle East. He knows exactly what to communicate and how to.”
“Best order taking experience ever. Farahat was extremely educated on the ingredients. I knew exactly what I ordered and could anticipate the full order as it came.”
“Farahat is a wonderful guy. We really never cared about any detail. One of the smartest guys I have ever met.”
“Farahat by far is the best hospitality guy I have ever met, flawless, he knew exactly each small detail in the sequence of service, from the beginning of entering the restaurant to the moment of leaving the place, no single mistake.”
“Rarely being asked about being allergic to something without me mentioning it! I would go to that restaurant again for that experience in particular, flawless.”
It wasn't where I learned to think this way. It was the first place with standards high enough to prove it.