What nearly four decades in food service taught me about attention, accountability and passing useful standards to the next generation.
By Christine Silva
Adapted from the author’s article originally published November 28, 2017.
In my original article, I described a sandwich shop in the middle of the afternoon: employees on their phones, some wearing food-handling gloves, while the dining room needed attention. Papers on the floor. Dirty tables. Folded napkins holding a table steady.
What bothered me was the work sitting in plain sight, waiting for someone to care enough to do it.
Nearly nine years later, I wish I could say that concern feels dated. From what I continue to observe, it feels more urgent. When personal scrolling takes priority over service, my concern extends to the customer waiting to be acknowledged, the coworker picking up the slack and the manager who needs to address it.
I have spent too much of my life in this industry to shrug at that.
My first job was in a drive-through restaurant. I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, riding bikes, playing sports and spending much of my time outside. The movement and pace of restaurant work suited me. There was something satisfying about finding your rhythm in the chaos and becoming part of a team that could handle it together.
Over the following decades, I learned to operate restaurants with millions of dollars in sales and take responsibility for multiple locations. I learned how staffing, training, food safety, service and costs connect. In my experience, a weak decision in one area rarely stays there.
I also learned that accountability applies to the person in charge.
Early in my management career, I was demoted. That belongs in this story because I am asking other people to accept a standard I have also had to answer to. A title does not make your performance good enough. You still have to do the work.
The best lessons I carried forward were practical: know your operation, develop your people, explain your expectations and follow through. Those are the lessons I want to pass on.
Attention is part of the job
A customer approaches the counter. An order needs checking. A teammate carries something hot. The dining room needs cleaning before the next rush. These are the moments I want a team to notice.
Research gives us a reason to take interruptions seriously. In a 2015 controlled attention experiment, participants receiving phone notifications showed greater increases in errors than a control group, even after researchers excluded people who handled or looked at their phones. The study author's explanation notes that the text-message finding was less conclusive because of a baseline difference between groups. Read Cary Stothart's account of the methods and findings.
My operational recommendation is straightforward: make attention an explicit part of the job and explain what appropriate device use looks like.
Using a device for an assigned task and scrolling for personal entertainment call for different expectations. Managers should define work use, breaks, emergencies and approved needs, then follow the boundaries themselves. I would not ask a team to respect a phone policy that its manager ignores.
Food safety deserves more than a reminder
In the early 1990s, I worked for the company involved in the devastating hamburger-associated E. coli outbreak. CDC's retrospective reports that the 1993 outbreak sickened more than 700 people in four states and killed four children. CDC's account describes the outbreak investigation.
That history is part of why I take food safety so seriously. There are families on the other side of our procedures. Food-handling standards have never felt abstract to me.
The sight of a food worker handling a phone with gloves on prompts an immediate question: what happens before those hands return to food?
The FDA's 2026 model Food Code calls for handwashing after activities that contaminate hands and before putting on gloves to begin a food task. Section 2-301.14 sets out the occasions for washing. Its glove provisions call for discarding single-use gloves when damaged, soiled or contaminated during interruptions. Section 3-304.15 covers task-specific glove use, including a narrowly defined, approved interior/exterior glove method.
For phone interruptions, my recommendation is to train staff to stop and follow the operation's approved handwashing and glove-change procedures before returning to food. The Food Code is a model rather than a statement of every jurisdiction's adopted law; confirm applicable requirements with the local regulatory authority. FDA explains the Food Code's role.
Explain who the procedure protects. Demonstrate it. Have the employee demonstrate it back. Make the expectation concrete enough to follow during a busy shift.
Pass on a sense of urgency
My original article spent considerable time comparing generations. Looking back, the useful lesson is in the skills we pass on. I do not want to use age as a shortcut for judging someone's work.
When I talk about a sense of urgency, I mean recognizing what needs attention and responding safely, accurately and promptly. Know the next priority. Prepare for demand. Communicate when something is getting away from you.
“Move faster” is not the instruction I would start with. Show a new employee how to organize a station, sequence a task, communicate a delay and prepare for the next customer. Let them practice. Watch. Correct. Explain.
Someone who has not been taught how to see the work around them needs more than a manager's frustration. Someone who has been taught, has the tools and repeatedly disregards the standard needs consistent accountability.
That is where experience can become useful to the next generation: in what we are willing to teach, not simply what we remember doing well.
Leadership has to show up
When I see an operation struggling, I want to understand the decisions above the front line as well as the behavior on it.
Who trained the manager? Who checks whether that training carries into the shift? Are staffing and workload realistic? Does the team have functioning equipment and time to complete essential tasks? Does anyone act when employees raise a concern?
Restaurant economics deserve a place in that discussion. The National Restaurant Association's February 2026 outlook identifies elevated operating costs, cautious consumer spending and anticipated difficulty finding experienced managers and chefs. Read the association's industry outlook.
My view is that high standards need investment behind them: adequate training, workable staffing, breaks, respectful treatment and the equipment to do the job. Employees also have a responsibility to give the work their attention. Both obligations belong in the same conversation.
What I would tell the next restaurant leader
Start by observing a real shift. Follow an order through the operation. Watch how customers are acknowledged, how food is handled and how the team communicates. Listen to the people doing the work.
Address immediate safety concerns first. Then choose specific operational problems to improve. Name the person responsible, provide the training and resources, and establish how you will check progress.
Teach managers before expecting them to teach everyone else. Have people demonstrate what they learned. Keep coaching and revisit the work when performance slips.
Make personal phone expectations explicit. Define appropriate work use and exceptions. Apply the standard consistently, including to leadership.
Recognize employees who do the job well. Dependable people should not become the permanent solution to everyone else's lack of effort. Give them support, development and a reason to stay.
Above all, explain why. Why we check. Why we clean. Why we prepare. Why a customer should not have to compete with our personal feed to get our attention.
I still believe restaurant work deserves pride. There is dignity in feeding people safely, running an organized shift and helping someone become capable of more than they thought they could do.
The message I wrote nearly nine years ago still stands: put your phone away when the work needs you, lead by example and develop your team. The standards you value are worth teaching to someone else.
The next customer is walking through the door. Look up.
About this article
This is the author's professional perspective and personal account. The attention study is laboratory evidence, not a restaurant trial. Food Code references describe the cited model provisions; local requirements and approved operating procedures must be checked before using the article as staff-training guidance.
