Bourdain, Burnouts & Bedtime

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My brain is currently operating with roughly 47 tabs open.

We’re fully into jeans season at Mugsy. Please buy some pants here. It’s time. They’re awesome. I recently sold a pair of Chippers to Parker Burr through LinkedIn.

My comedy group, Steam Room Etiquette, has an improv show on October 22nd in NYC. Please come. I’m obviously biased, but it’s the best improv you’ll find in New York.

Oh, and this week we start shooting our feature film that I’m producing (?!) - Mocktail.

Oh boy.

When life gets like this, my brain gets incredibly stupid. Like next level dumb. I forget belt loops, I lock myself out of my apartment, I burn pretty much all my food. The other day I put on shaving cream to shave, got distracted, never shaved & walked out the door.

I’ve wrote about this before, but when life gets nuts like this, the only thing I’ve found that actually gets my brain to shut the heck up for a little while is reading.

Reading is nature’s melatonin (I also eat sleep gummies, so I like to double dose).

You can’t really multitask while reading a book. Sure your brain can wander, but if it’s a decent enough buck, you can lose yourself in it. That’s always the goal while reading…Get your brain to worry about your book, not the job, the movie, the improv group.

Right now I’m reading Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain.

And holy, this guy was a madman.

The book is part memoir, part restaurant story, part instruction manual for becoming deeply suspicious (while also deeply appreciative) of the way restaurants operate. Bourdain spent years inside professional kitchens, and along the way he developed some extremely strong opinions about eating out.

So, because I now know these things, you should too.

• Don’t order fish on Monday. At least in the restaurant world Bourdain was writing about, seafood deliveries were often made toward the end of the week, which meant your Monday fish special might have been hanging around longer than you’d prefer.

• No such thing as discount sushi. If it’s discounted, that’s because its old or the bottom of the barrel.

• Be careful with mussels. Bourdain basically says he only ate them if he knew who was cooking them and trusted how they’d been stored and handled. One bad mussel can ruin you.

• Brunch is highly suspect. His view was that brunch could become a home for leftovers and ingredients that needed to get used up from the weekend. Also, the bad chefs work during brunch. The good ones get brunch off.

• Bread is not as innocent as it looks. The bread basket on your table may have already made a few stops before it got to you. If one table didn’t finish it, back it went, only to potentially reappear for the next group.

But the part of the book I’ve liked most isn’t really the food stuff. It’s about the people in the kitchen.

Bourdain is absolutely obsessed with the people who choose restaurant kitchens as their world. The line cooks. The prep cooks. The dishwashers. The chefs. The ex-cons. The career restaurant people who can somehow function inside this incredibly loud, hot, stressful environment night after night and actually love it.

He talks about them as artists, exiles and mercenaries.

Some people are there because the kitchen gives them room to be creative. Some found their way there because traditional jobs and traditional career paths never really fit them. Some are simply professionals. They’re there to work, make money, execute and go home.

And the thing Bourdain clearly respects most isn’t necessarily brilliance. It’s reliability.

The best ability is availability, as they say.

The person who shows up. The person who can handle the rush. The person whose station is ready. The person you know is going to deliver when 100 orders hit at once.

There’s something awesome (and true) about that.

There’s another restaurant concept Bourdain talks about throughout the book that I love: mise-en-place.

→ a French culinary term that literally means “putting in place.”

Basically, your station needs to be ready before service starts. Ingredients chopped. Tools where they belong. Everything organized. You don’t start figuring your shit out once 100 people sit down for dinner.

You prepare for the rush before the rush arrives.

Which is also, conveniently, a pretty good way to think about Black Friday (which somehow is coming up?!.

For ecommerce brands, especially smaller ones, Black Friday is dinner service. Orders spike. Customer service tickets spike. Someone bought the wrong size. Someone needs to exchange a gift. Someone ordered three things and wants to return one. Someone somehow entered an address that does not exist on planet Earth.

The time to figure out your returns process is not November 30th.

Which brings me to Redo, who sponsors this newsletter and who we use at Mugsy.

If you’re a smaller ecommerce brand and you’re still handling returns manually, or don’t really have a returns system in place, I’d get that cleaned up before Black Friday. Redo handles returns and exchanges, makes the customer experience much easier and removes a bunch of annoying operational work that you probably do not want your team dealing with during the busiest part of the year.

This isn’t me saying you need another random piece of ecommerce software because they sponsor Trust Fun. It’s me saying I’ve lived through enough holiday seasons to know that Black Friday is a terrible time to discover one of your processes sucks.

If you don’t have returns set up, talk to REDO now here!

Do the mise-en-place now.

Anyway, I don’t think my life is going to become less busy anytime soon.

There will still be jeans to sell, improv shows to promote, a movie to somehow produce, ads to make, emails to answer and completely unnecessary projects that I will inevitably convince myself are a good idea.

Maybe the answer isn’t eliminating all the chaos.

Maybe it’s finding the kitchen where you make sense and getting your station ready before the rush.