Times Blog: Buschel on 'The Hardest Part of Running a Restaurant'

Bruce Buschel, the New York Times blogger behind the infamous "100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do" and Bridgehampton restaurant Southfork Kitchen, is finding that hiring and keeping excellent servers is a bigger struggle than he had anticipated.

In fact, he says it's "the hardest part of running a restaurant."

"I kid you not: getting the food from the chef to the guest in a timely and polite fashion by a timely and polite staff is the great white whale," Buschel wrote on The Times' "You the Boss" blog Tuesday. "Those last 50 feet may as well be an ocean."

He runs down a list of once-promising servers that turned out to be no-shows or who left abruptly for reasons that ranged from second jobs to drug and alcohol abuse.

Find the whole post at blog.nytimes.com.