Make Their Day

Sometimes when someone opens a restaurant, the original idea gets lost somewhere along the way. Owners start with a vision, but over time it turns into policies, numbers, margins, and systems. The soul gets diluted. The concept becomes just another place to eat.

The Lou never lost its concept.

It was the first place I had ever worked that felt like it actually had a soul.

There was one theme. Just one.

Make their day.

That was it. No complicated mission statement. No corporate buzzwords. Just make their day. Make the customer feel appreciated. Make them feel wanted. Make them feel like the whole place existed because they walked through the door. Because in truth, it did. Without them, none of us were there.

And the way we honored that philosophy wasn’t through scripts or policies. We honored it through the people we hired.

When I was trained to interview servers, bartenders, hosts, bussers, and barbacks, I wasn’t taught to ask about experience or how many tables they had waited. A trained monkey could do the mechanics of that job. What we were looking for was personality—someone who could carry a room, someone who would sing while they walked through their section, someone who would pull up a chair and sit down with a table like they were old friends.

We wanted people who noticed things, who could sense a birthday or a breakup or a bad day and adjust their energy to meet it. People who made customers feel so seen and so comfortable that they wanted to come back and sit in that exact same section again.

It was never about the food alone.

It was about connection.

And the people we hired were built for it.

There was Rami, who quite possibly had the biggest smile I had ever seen. He looked like he should have been in a toothpaste commercial—just pure sunshine. There wasn’t a negative bone in his body. If little kids came in and wanted to see the kids’ menu, he didn’t just hand them a laminated sheet. He’d take them by the hand and walk them into the back.

“Look,” he’d say, showing them the mac and cheese. “This one’s really good. And we’ve got chicken nuggets too. You’ll probably like those.”

He’d give them a full tour like they were VIP guests. Totally unsafe. Totally against the rules. And completely in the spirit of the place.

Then there was Turner, who sang constantly. Not songs from the radio, but commercial jingles, at the top of his lungs, just walking through the restaurant like he had his own soundtrack playing in his head at all times.

And Amanda.

Amanda had that look about her—the pretty girl, the one who probably ruled high school, the cheerleader type. You could tell she had been spoiled and adored most of her life. Then one day she came to me, scared, and told me she was pregnant. She didn’t want the baby. She was too young. She had just met the guy. She didn’t want her body to change. She didn’t want the responsibility.

I had just had my baby boy, so I told her the truth. That it was terrifying. That it was hard. That nothing about it was easy. But that the moment that baby came into the world, her life would change in ways she couldn’t even imagine. That she had a whole room full of people who would help her. That pregnancy was temporary, but the love wasn’t.

She kept the baby.

We threw her a baby shower at my house. All the girls came. We filled the place with gifts and laughter and so much love. She married that man. He became a doctor. They had two sons together.

Every year when I see her post about Gavin’s birthday, I still wonder if that conversation had anything to do with the fact that he exists. I’ll never know for sure, but it felt important at the time. I watched her go from mean girl to mom, and it was a quiet privilege to witness that transformation from a distance.

Angela was a different story.

Angela was a spitfire. She drove me absolutely crazy. She talked back, broke rules, and didn’t listen. She had this bratty energy that made you want to shake her, but there was also this cute innocence underneath it that made it hard to stay mad at her for long.

One day we almost had a full-blown come-to-Jesus moment. I don’t even remember what broke the tension, but something shifted. After that, she became one of my biggest supporters, and to this day she’s still one of my favorites.

At one point, three of the girls planned a trip to Vegas and asked me to come with them as the fourth. I was thirty-eight years old. They were in their early twenties. I was their manager, their boss, and they still wanted me there.

That’s the kind of place it was.

Then there was Ashley, just pure love in human form. Outgoing, energetic, warm—one of those people who made a shift feel lighter just by walking into the room. She became part of my core crew on the slowest nights of the week.

Because when I first started bartending there, I didn’t take the good shifts. I could have. As a manager, I was allowed to take any shift I wanted. But I wasn’t about to walk in as the only female manager and steal Friday and Saturday nights from kids who had already earned them. That was the fastest way to make them hate me.

So I took the dead nights.

Sunday. Monday. Sometimes Thursday.

Our average sales on those nights were about eight hundred dollars for the entire day. Not the shift—the day. It was bare bones. Me behind the bar, two servers on the floor, one cook, one dishwasher. That was it.

But we had a rule: six percent of daily sales could be spent to make someone’s day. Buy a round of drinks, cover a meal, do something kind.

So every Sunday and Monday, I’d order a few appetizers at the start of my shift and walk them down to the hotel in our complex. I’d feed the front desk staff and ask them to send us any business travelers checking in for the week.

And they did.

We started building regulars who didn’t even live in town—guys who traveled for the same companies every week. They’d walk in and we’d know their drink before they even sat down. We’d send the girls out as a street team with free appetizer cards to the theater, to local events, to the mall, just inviting people in.

People bring people. That’s how it works.

Over the five years I was there, those eight-hundred-dollar nights turned into fifteen-thousand-dollar nights. We went on waits on Sundays. We needed full crews, even a barback. And the ones who built those nights with me—the ones who stuck it out when it was slow—those became my people.

Ashley.

Angela.

Jessica.

Austin in the kitchen.

It was us against the empty room at first. And then one day, the room wasn’t empty anymore.

That kind of growth didn’t go unnoticed.

Within six months of starting there, I was offered the General Manager position. A full salaried job, my own store, my own team—the kind of step that usually led to Director of Operations, corporate roles, real career paths. That company promoted from within, and the ladder was right there in front of me.

On paper, it was a big deal, a feather in my cap, proof that I was doing something right.

But the truth was, the GM job would have taken me off the floor. It was mostly days—office work, schedules, meetings, paperwork. I wouldn’t be behind the bar anymore. I wouldn’t be in the middle of the rush with the kids. I wouldn’t be part of the rhythm of the room.

And financially, it was actually a pay cut. What I made behind the bar was more than the salary they were offering.

So after a long back-and-forth in my head—and a lot of pressure at home to just take the money and not the responsibility—I stayed where I was.

At the time, it didn’t feel like a big decision. It just felt practical. Logical. Easy to justify. I didn’t realize yet how many of those “practical” decisions were quietly shaping the rest of my life.

What I did know was this: I loved being on the floor with them, in the noise, in the rush, right next to my people.

At the end of every shift, the servers had to check out with me. They’d come into the office one by one, hand me their money, and we’d go over their numbers. It should have taken five minutes. It usually took fifteen, because we talked.

How was your shift?

What happened with that table?

How’s life?

You okay?

Sometimes they cried. Sometimes they laughed. Sometimes they just vented. If I knew they were struggling at home or making bad choices or hanging with the wrong crowd, those were my moments to let them know they weren’t alone.

I also made a point to notice their good moments.

“I saw you busing her table when your hands were full.”

“You handled that difficult guest really well.”

“I never saw you walk into the kitchen empty-handed tonight.”

“That bathroom was a mess and you cleaned it without being asked. I noticed that.”

It’s easy to point out what people do wrong. It’s more powerful to show them what they’re doing right.

And the truth was, they all reminded me of myself. Each one carried a younger piece of me—the bold parts, the insecure parts, the people-pleasing parts, the reckless parts, the parts that just wanted to be seen and liked.

They were just college kids trying to figure out who they were going to be.

And the truth was, I hadn’t figured that out yet either.

I was older than them. I was their manager. I was supposed to have the answers. But most nights, I was just along for the ride too.

It was easy to fall in love with them.

And the truth is, the five or six people who stand out in my memory weren’t the only ones who mattered. There were seventy of them, all with big personalities, big hearts, big messes, and big dreams. Some were stronger than others, some were quieter, some were chaos, some were steady—but together, they created a collective energy I had never experienced before.

Imagine seventy people with that kind of personality, that kind of warmth, that kind of loyalty to each other, all moving inside one room. It’s no wonder we were successful. The concept the owners had dreamed up didn’t just stay on paper. We brought it to life, together, night after night, in a way I had never actually seen happen anywhere else.

And somewhere between the rushes, the street teams, the office checkouts, and the quiet conversations at the end of the night, they were giving pieces of me back to myself without even knowing it.

They thought I was the one taking care of them.

But in a lot of ways, they were taking care of me too.

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