The Joy Audit

Fall in Love With Food Again

I can tell you the exact moment I knew I wanted to spend my life in kitchens. I was nineteen, working nights as an undergrad, and the chef—a stern Japanese guy who'd trained under someone who'd trained under someone important—made the staff meal after we had closed up shop. It was nothing fancy, just a simple fish soup with rice and grilled mackerel, but watching him work, the way he tasted and adjusted, the way he got quietly satisfied when it came together right, the way everyone stopped complaining about their shifts for twenty minutes to just eat and be human together—that's when I understood. This wasn't just a job. This was a way of being in the world.

Fast forward twenty years, thirty years, and somewhere along the way most of us lose that thread. The thing that was supposed to be about pleasure and creativity and feeding people becomes about food costs and labor percentages and why the delivery is late again. You stop tasting your food—really tasting it—because you've made the same bowl three thousand times and it's just become a series of movements your hands execute while your brain worries about six other things.

This is how people burn out. Not from working hard—people in this industry expect that—but from working hard at something that's stopped meaning anything.

The First Question

When's the last time you cooked something just because you wanted to eat it? Not because it fits your menu or because it'll sell or because it's on-trend, but because it sounded good to you, personally, as someone who presumably still enjoys food?

If you can't remember, that's your problem right there. You've turned yourself into a production machine, and machines don't last in this business. They break down, rust out, or just stop showing up one day because they've finally internalized that they hate what they're doing.

Here's what I want you to do, and I'm serious about this: take an hour this week—a real hour, not some fractured twenty-minute window between crises—and make something for yourself. Not for a customer, not to test for the menu, not for content. For you. Something you'd genuinely like to eat. It doesn't have to be complicated. It can be a perfect egg sandwich. It can be pasta with butter and parmesan. It can be that dish your grandmother made that you haven't thought about in years.

The point isn't the food itself. The point is reconnecting with the sensation that food can be a source of joy, not just stress. That cooking can be meditative, satisfying, even fun—concepts that probably seem laughable when you're grinding through your fifteenth hour on your feet.

The Menu Item You Actually Care About

Every menu has a greatest hits section—the items that sell, that people expect, that you'd be foolish to remove. And then there's usually one or two things that you put on there because you wanted to, because you thought they were interesting, because they meant something to you. What happened to those items?

I'm going to guess they either got value-engineered into oblivion or quietly removed because they didn't sell as well as the safe choices. And every time that happens, you lose a little piece of why you started doing this in the first place.

You need at least one menu item that's yours. Something you genuinely care about making, that represents your actual taste and not just calculated crowd-pleasing. Yeah, it might not be your best seller. That's fine. Its job isn't to drive volume—its job is to keep you interested in your own menu.

This can be a weekly special if you don't want to commit permanent menu real estate. Every week, you do something different. Maybe it's seasonal. Maybe it's something you ate somewhere that you can't stop thinking about. Maybe it's a childhood memory recreated. The rules are: it has to be something you'd order yourself, and you have to actually be excited about executing it.

I've watched operators transform their energy by doing this. Suddenly there's something on the menu they want to talk about, something they're proud of when it goes out the window, something that reminds them they're a cook and not just a manager of an assembly line.

The Ingredient That Excites You

When's the last time you sourced an ingredient because it was beautiful, not because it was on sale? When did you last go to a farmers market or a specialty purveyor just to see what's out there, to let yourself get inspired instead of just checking boxes on your order guide?

This is how creativity dies—through the slow calcification of routine. You order the same proteins from the same supplier at the same specs because it's easy and consistent and you've got enough problems without adding variables. I understand this. I've done this. But it's also how you end up making food that bores you, which means it probably bores your customers too, even if they can't articulate why.

Make it a practice—monthly, if not weekly—to bring in one ingredient you wouldn't normally use. Something seasonal, something weird, something expensive that you can't quite justify but that makes you curious. Figure out what to do with it. Experiment. Let yourself play in the kitchen the way you did before this became a business.

Maybe it becomes a special. Maybe it doesn't work at all. Maybe it inspires something else entirely. The outcome matters less than the practice of staying curious, of treating your operation as a place where interesting things can still happen.

Staff Meal as Creative Outlet

Staff meal is where most operators phone it in, and I get it—you're exhausted, you need to feed people quickly and cheaply, and it's tempting to just make a giant batch of pasta or throw together whatever's about to go bad. But staff meal can also be the lowest-stakes, highest-freedom cooking you do all day.

There's no ticket time to worry about. There's no customer expectations. You're feeding people who understand that this is thrown together, who aren't going to complain if it's weird. It's the perfect space to try things, to use techniques you don't normally use, to just cook without the weight of commerce attached to it.

I know a truck operator who treats staff meal like culinary school homework. He tries a new technique every week—sous vide, fermentation, a cuisine he's never cooked before. His crew eats better than most restaurant customers, and more importantly, he stays engaged. He's learning, playing, keeping his skills sharp on someone else's dime. That's not waste—that's professional development that happens to produce fed employees.

And here's the thing: your crew notices when you care about feeding them. They notice when you put effort into staff meal versus when you're just getting it over with. It changes the culture. It reminds everyone that you're in the hospitality business, that feeding people—even your own people—is supposed to matter.

The Practice of Actually Tasting

You taste everything that goes out, right? Of course you do. But are you tasting it, or are you just confirming it's not actively wrong? There's a difference between quality control and actually engaging with your food as food.

Once a day—pick a moment, any moment, when you're not drowning—make yourself slow down and actually taste something you've made. Not while walking, not while talking to someone, not while thinking about the next thing. Just taste it. Notice it. Ask yourself: is this good? Not "is this consistent" or "will this sell," but is this actually good? Would you be happy if someone served this to you?

This sounds precious, I know. You don't have time for mindful eating meditation or whatever. But the alternative is that you stop having any relationship with your own food beyond the mechanical. You stop knowing whether what you're making is actually any good or if it's just familiar.

The best cooks I know, at any level, have maintained this practice of actually paying attention. They still get excited when something comes together right. They still get disappointed when it doesn't. They haven't become numb to their own cooking, which is the first step toward not caring at all.

The Permission to Close

Here's a radical thought: maybe you don't have to be open every single day. Maybe the two extra days of revenue aren't worth what they're costing you in terms of exhaustion, creativity, and will to live.

I'm not suggesting this lightly. I know what revenue pressure looks like. I know about lease obligations and loan payments and the feeling that every day you're closed is money left on the table. But I also know that burning out isn't a hypothetical risk—it's the thing that ends more food businesses than bad locations or tough competition.

Look at your slowest days. Look at what you're actually netting after labor and food cost and the wear on equipment and the drain on your energy. Is it worth it? Or are you staying open because you think you're supposed to, because you're afraid of what closing a day might signal?

Some of the most successful, sustainable operations I know are closed two days a week. They build it into their model from the start, and customers adapt. And those operators? They're still in business five years, ten years later, because they built rest and recovery into their routine instead of grinding until they broke.

The Customer Who Gets It

In the middle of a brutal shift, when you're behind and everything's going wrong and you're questioning every life decision that led to this moment, there's usually one customer who makes it worth it. The regular who genuinely appreciates what you do. The first-timer whose face lights up when they taste your food. The person who stops to tell you, specifically, that what you made was exactly what they needed today.

These moments are easy to miss when you're in survival mode. You're so focused on ticket times and keeping things moving that you don't actually see the people you're feeding or register that what you're doing matters to them.

Make yourself notice. Make yourself be present for at least one customer interaction per service where you actually connect, where you remember that this whole enterprise is about hospitality, about feeding people, about the small but real joy of making someone's day slightly better through food.

This isn't about ego or needing validation. It's about maintaining perspective. The margins are thin, the hours are brutal, the problems are relentless—if you lose sight of the human element, the actual point of doing this, you're going to drown in the logistics.

The Remembering

You got into this business for a reason. Maybe it was a meal that changed how you thought about food. Maybe it was the camaraderie of kitchen work. Maybe it was the simple, profound satisfaction of feeding people and having them be happy about it. Whatever it was, it wasn't food cost percentages and equipment maintenance schedules.

Those things matter—you can't run a business without them—but they can't be the whole story. You need to actively, deliberately carve out space for the things that make this worth doing. For creativity, for play, for connection, for the actual pleasure of cooking and eating and being around food.

This isn't self-indulgent. This is survival. The people who last in this industry aren't necessarily the most talented or the most business-savvy. They're the ones who figure out how to maintain some relationship with joy, who build practices and habits that keep them connected to why they started, who refuse to let the grind completely consume what used to be love.

So do the audit. Ask yourself honestly: when's the last time you felt genuine excitement about your food, your menu, your work? If the answer is "too long," that's not a character flaw. That's just information. And information is useful because it tells you what needs to change before you hit the wall that so many operators eventually hit—the wall where you realize you've built something you can't stand, where success and misery have become indistinguishable.

Find the joy again. Protect it. Feed it. Because without it, all you've got is a very hard job that doesn't pay enough to justify what it takes from you.

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