Yesterday, I wrote a post about people who ask me what I think, inspired by an evening with The Pie Guy. The Pie Guy is a guy who makes good pies and is toying with the idea of starting a little business making pies.

It was interesting to be talking to The Pie Guy about his pies just then because I had come from a meeting with a restaurateur who wants to reconcept his restaurant and is trying to figure out what the restaurant should be.

I always get worried when I sit in meetings with restaurant people who are trying to figure out what they are trying to be. Mostly because I know that people with no restaurant experience whatsoever have at least the possibility of succeeding if they are crazy insane with the need to open exactly this restaurant because they believe in it so much they will die if they don't.  But people who are just trying to figure out what the restaurant should be will likely flounder.

I know this for a fact, or at least my version of a fact, because I have seen it happen time and again. The people with the passion to make their restaurant  just so — and get kinda pissy if you don't precisely intuit the tiniest of details that make such sense to them — always seem to succeed, no matter how messy their startup phase may be. And the people who run restaurants that are cobbled together to be something the restauratuer thinks will work don't. 

And Pie Guys that go into the pie business "to make money" and not because they are insane about making pies at 4:00 a.m. will be miserable and will make no money.

So if you are thinking of starting a high-end food business or running a chef-driven type restaurant, take a gut check and make sure you are opening the kind of restaurant you believe the world needs so badly it will stop spinning if it doesn't exist. Make sure you are opening the kind of restaurant that you are so compelled to open you'd be willing to give up sex to make it happen. Make sure this isn't a way to make money first, but rather the realization of your life's dream.

It doesn't mean you'll be successful beyond your wildest dreams, but it does mean you'll have a chance.