Dinner tonight at the Great China, a 24-Zagat just downhill from the Berkeley Campus. It’s a fine place in a fine location, but I can never stay in a house like this very long without thinking of what a god-awful lot of work it must be to run a restaurant. Everybody running every which way, lots of things to trip over, to spill on yourself or (worse) the customers. I don’t see how the boss gets home before midnight, and somebody must be hitting the produce market again at 5 a.m.
My thoughts then turned, as they so often do in this situation, to Harold Tafler Shapiro, former president of Princeton University. As I recall, Shapiro’s first grownup job was working as manager of Ruby Foo’s, Montreal’s most expensive Chinese restaurant, owned by his family. It was only after Ruby Foo’s that he went back to get his Ph.D. But it occurs to me: for running a great University, I can’t think of any better preparation than running a Chinese restaurant. You’ve got a million jobs to do, you have got dozen constituencies to keep happy, you have to make the cooks (=professors?) think they are special, and you have to make it all look like fun. Anyway, high marks for the double skins and the greens with duck egg.
And yes, I’ve got wifi.
No comments:
Post a Comment