Sublime

In order to become a team, we needed to stop, take a deep breath, and communicate with one another. If that meant using a more basic napkin fold or simplifying the butter presentation so everyone had time to meet, then that was a trade-off I was willing to accept. How connected we were as a team was more important to me than anything.

In Savannah, she recommended that members of the writing workshop eat at the Grey Market, where she worked part-time. It is a New York bodega-inspired offshoot of the Grey, Mashama Bailey’s fine-dining Savannah restaurant. Bailey, a Black woman who moved between Georgia and New York throughout her childhood, learned to cook first from the women in

One day the two of them ran into a friend of a friend, late of the restaurant business, now in shoes, who flatly stuck his finger in PL’s chest and said, “We were always filled to the rafters but no profit. I was skimmed to death, skimmed! Waiters in collusion with the cashier! [This is before computers, remember.] They saved up all the cash regist

We look for friction fighters when we’re interviewing new team members by staging trash on the concourse. If the candidate stops to pick it up as we’re walking through the ballpark, then we’ve learned something very important about their character.

Maybe people don’t notice every single individual detail, but in aggregate, they’re powerful.

training, motivation, and consistency of service—