The Perception of Failure

By Liam Davy

Have you noticed that the bar and restaurant industry is a hot-bed of self-deprecation? You cannot move for people talking about how they “would be nothing without their team” or “I’m so shit at my job sometimes I wonder how on earth I got here?” or “in my actual life I’m such a mess, I save my best side for my work.” 

While some of this might be sincere, I have a strong feeling that most of the time people are attempting not to be overtly arrogant about their successes without having to talk about things that they are legitimately bad at. We all do it. My own version of this is telling people how chronically disorganised I am while doing a job that requires a pretty high level of organisation to even function at its most basic level. 

When I had to close my own bar I was forced to come to terms with the things I had been legitimately bad at and failed in. This was not the noble failure you read about in the trade press (swiftly followed by the story of a humbling re-scaling of the highest heights of the hospitality industry) this was the stark reality of the bailiffs at the door, making friends redundant, desperately scraping pennies together to buy some stock to sell from the cash and carry, drinking too much, developing a slightly too familiar
relationship with Valium. The reality is that if I’d known that it would have gotten to that point I almost certainly wouldn’t have got involved in it, but at least in light of legitimate failure I understood what I was truly bad at and potentially learnt some useful lessons along the way.

Opening a bar and restaurant with my friends was genuinely one of the most satisfying and exhilarating things I’ve done in my life. After a fair few years of managing huge restaurants with all of the spreadsheets and training courses that entailed, the idea of literally cooking food for friends and regulars felt like one of the most viscerally thrilling things I could think of doing with my life. Watching people get shitfaced and go wild in OUR bar, seeing chefs and journalists and whoever else say lovely things about our food, being the go-to place for out of town bartenders and bar owners, selling out Superbowl parties and thinking about second sites was all amazing and despite what was to come, doing all that with people you love is as rewarding a thing as you could possibly hope to do in our line of work.

But the stuff that actually makes a place successful, the dry, grinding realities of making a critical success a financial and operational one were, it turned out, beyond my capabilities. Despite the fact that I’d seen up close the realities of what a successful restaurant operation looked like I obviously thought we were different. I liked the bit where we used the best ingredients (If you visited us in our early days you might have been lucky enough to have an iberico pork al pastor taco for £4) I wanted to pay our staff properly and treat them well. We didn’t kick people off their tables after half an hour even if they’d finished eating and were drinking water. But on the other side I couldn’t summon the energy after a hellish week to count the stock, file the invoices and put together a weekly report to see how much money we were actually making (or in reality, losing). 

The harshest reality of being your own boss in the restaurant business is that when the gloss of the novelty has worn off after 3-6 months and you’re exhausted, desperate to take your foot off the gas and have a holiday, that’s precisely the time when you need to inject some new energy and take a fresh look at what is working and what isn’t. All of the new ideas that might give the place fresh impetus (Deliveroo! Bar Food! Brunch!) felt like incredibly hard work without guaranteed reward and therefore were allowed to lapse – suggestions brought up on a weekly basis only to be shot down with the same reasons (excuses) trotted out. The harsh reality begins to creep in that despite the fact you like to see yourself as open minded, dynamic and down to earth, you’re actually lazy, stubborn and pretentious (sometimes). 

The best way to describe the feeling when you know that you’re going to have to close (excuse the cliché) is getting ready for a breakup that you know is going to happen but you really don’t want it to. Part of that comes from the fact that you are genuinely sad that it doesn’t work out. Another bit is the knowledge that it is going to fill you with embarrassment and shame and finally, and perhaps most importantly, is that the process is going to be a huge ball ache. 

I’m actually relatively proud of the way it happened in the end. There were a few tears, some tense moments and a slightly bizarre night spent pressing 500 tortillas for an event by candlelight. I feel like maintaining dignity in that situation is a pretty tough thing to do. I wouldn’t say that we left with our heads held high and there are elements of the mess that will follow us around for years but, despite the fact the last few months were as grim as you can possibly imagine, after a year of being closed we all look back on the bones and are able to pick out some bits that we’re really proud of and even some things that make us happy to remember.
As a result of that whirlwind 18 months I feel like I have a genuine and honest grasp of the things I’m bad at (sometimes I work too hard lol). I’m still petrified of failure and the shame and embarrassment that come with it but I feel a million times more comfortable talking about it knowing now what it looks and feels like. Given how much and often people do fail at things I feel like it’s something we should be more comfortable talking about.

I’m aware that reading something like this it might sound like I’m suggesting that people just shouldn’t bother. That definitely isn’t the case, but if some of this sounds familiar, maybe it’s best just being honest with yourself. Accepting a paycheck from somebody else for doing good work definitely does not make you a less interesting person.