It was in 1955, midway through the Eisenhower Years, when the notion took hold of Skippy Sack. By that time he’d spent several years at a Howard Johnson family restaurant, busing dishes, scraping gum off the undersides of tables, catching his share of cuts, scrapes and burns. He’d worked a second shift without pay for six weeks just to land the kitchen job and its $1.25-an-hour paycheck, a heady step up from the 67 cents an hour he’d earned as a dishwasher.
Now, with his weekly take-home still in double digits, and his age barely so, the native New Englander heard the thunder-clap: This was the trade for him.
“At the ripe old age of 17,” he recalls, “I decided my goal in life was to become the manager of a Howard Johnson.”
But Howard Johnson’s had bigger plans for Sack—now Burton “Skip” Sack, as he would be identified in news stories chronicling his rise through the top ranks of what was then one of the nation’s largest restaurant chains. After that operation faltered with age, Sack bought a franchise in an upstart casual chain called Applebee’s and later moved into the corporate offices as executive vice president.
And at age 70, Sack is still at it, though clearly he doesn’t have to be. When Applebee’s International Inc. was bought by IHOP Corp. last year, he was due about $58 million from the sale of his stock, according to securities filings.
Yet Sack recently opened an upscale steakhouse with moderate prices—“something I’ve always wanted to try,” he says—while advising a company that intends to buy a restaurant chain and tending his investment in a concern that supplies food-service with trans-fat-free oil. That’s while running several Irish-style pubs in collaboration with his son-in-law.
“This is all I’ve ever done, it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, and I love it,” he says. “I never thought about leaving, not once.”
The popular perception persists that a job in the restaurant industry is sort of a career lifeboat—a place to get by until you’re rescued by a real job. Yet that notion hardly fits with a reality evident to all but the greenest of restaurant executives. Researchers haven’t tabulated how many individuals have survived the long hours, the hard work and the unique demands to make the industry their lifelong career by choice. But the anecdotal evidence leaves little doubt that the lifer is still as integral to the restaurant business as forks and knives.
“I’m no different from a thousand guys out there,” says Sack. “Almost every person who runs a major restaurant company today started out as a dishwasher or a busboy or a server.”
He ticks off the list: Craig Miller, now chairman, chief executive and president of Ruth’s Chris Steak House Inc.; Wally Doolin, chairman of Buca Corp. and the one who sold Sack his Applebee’s franchise; Phil Hickey, the former chief executive of Rare Hospitality Inc., who collected more than $30 million when the company was acquired by Darden Restaurants Inc.; Dick Rivera, current chairman of the National Restaurant Association and chief executive of multiconcept operator Rubicon Enterprises; Ted Fowler, chief executive of Golden Corral Corp. There’s also Julia Stewart, who started as a waitress at an IHOP and is now chairman and chief executive of the pancake chain and the architect of the $2.1 billion Applebee’s deal.
Those industry graybeards may not be familiar to Shaina Nestor, age 36. But she professes to share their DNA.
When she was 22, “I started waiting tables to make some extra cash,” she recalls. “Before you knew it, I found I was good at it, so my boss kept giving me more and more responsibility.”
The work was hard and the hours were grinding, but “I enjoyed it,” she says. “There never was a time I thought about getting out.”
Four months ago, after working at some of the most famous restaurants in New York City, she was hired as general manager of The Palm I and The Palm II, as The Palm steakhouse group refers to its twin prototypes there. Ten years from now, she declares, “I’ll still be working for The Palm.”
As to how many young people might follow a similar course is another matter. Pundits say the notion of a lifelong career in any field is loathsome to the so-called Millennial Generation, the group of people who were born from about 1977 to roughly 1995. The experts agree that people from that age bracket are more likely to bounce around than pursue a linear work path.
Yet if they’d only give it a try, confirmed lifers say, they’d find a business that can satisfy the worst wanderlust because a foodservice career is typically more of leap from job to job than a steady plod up the ladder.
“I talk to kids about it, and they’ve never envisioned all the different jobs they could do in the restaurant business,” says Shirlene Lopez, who navigated her way from an hourly position in a Del Taco at age 14 to become chief executive of the quick-service chain. “The job has never been boring for me because I’ve done so many different things.”
At age 43, she already has run restaurants, regions and the home office of a 460-unit chain, while specializing during those 28 years in everything from rehabs to market development.
“You do more earlier,” notes Steve Lynn, a former chief executive of Sonic Corp. and Shoney’s Inc. who just moved back into restaurant-chain management after roughly a nine-year hiatus by leading the buyout of Back Yard Burgers Inc. Even managing a single unit “involves manufacturing, marketing, forecasting, production, management—every aspect of running a business. You get educated very quickly in the things that make leaders.”
The compensation can also top what people of comparable age or education are pulling down in other fields, but that was less of a hold than the tenor of the work, according to every lifer interviewed for this story.
“Financially, it’s been terrific,” says Blaine Sweatt, the longtime concept creator for Darden Restaurants who retired last year after 31 years in the business. “But beyond that, there’s a psychological income that comes from being around creative people.”
Sweatt notes that he came to the field after earning an engineering degree and working at NASA around the time of the last moon shots—his work literally was rocket science.
“I remember that they had two guys whose job was nothing more than to watch us as we worked,” he says. “They had two so that if one went to the bathroom, the other guy could watch us. The restaurant industry is just the opposite of that. It’s never a question of, ‘Will it be allowed?’”
Financial discipline is a reality, he observes, but “the fun part was taking the efficiencies that are required in a restaurant and giving them some warmth and personality.”
How, he asks, do you leave a business like that? But he confesses that he considered it.
“Sure, the phone calls came in from time to time, and I thought about it,” says Sweatt, now 60. “And who knows?”
Longtime restaurant worker Joan Johnson also considered a change at one point in her career.
“I had a customer once who said, ‘You know, Joan, you should be a real estate agent, you’d be good at it.’ And I thought about it,” recalls Johnson, a waitress at Terrible’s Lakeside Casino in Osceola, Iowa, and a 37-year industry veteran. “But restaurant work is what I like, so I said, ‘no.’” A long pause follows. “I think I’m going to stick with it.”
At age 75, she was recently named the 2007 Employee of the Year by the Iowa Restaurant Association.
Despite their professed relish for the business, lifers do seem to face a few occupational hazards peculiar to their breed. Retirement, for instance, appears to be a difficult life stage to enter, as Wolfgang Zwiener discovered when he decided to leave Peter Luger, the landmark steak-house in Brooklyn, N.Y., after 40 years as a waiter.
“My son Peter said to me, ‘Look you’re young and you’re healthy. Why do you want to retire?” Zwiener says.
Instead, the younger Zwiener, a banker, convinced his father and another retired Luger lifer to launch a steakhouse of their own, called Wolfgang’s. It now has two branches in New York City, with additional outlets set to open in Beverly Hills, Calif., and Waikiki, Hawaii, and other sites being lined up in Chicago, Florida and elsewhere.
“People like me in this business, we don’t develop many hobbies,” Zwiener says.
Sack understands that reluctance to pull back.
“I’ve lately become aware of my mortality,” he deadpans. “I realize I have only 30 good years left. The 20 years after that may not be food, but I’ll make the best of them.”
