Rick Bayless

We see and hear bad things about restaurants, but we don't usually hear, certainly not consistently, the good things about working in a restaurant.

I know the reputation of working in restaurants is terrible and The Bear has made it even worse, and I want to say that that is not the case. Look for the people that have the reputation and long-term staff, and see if you could work with them because you might just find the perfect environment for you.

When everything teems too big and too looming, this too will pass. Just take a deep breath and come back to it, and always smile. Smiling takes away so much stuff. It feels like if you smile, you can just release that burden of life.

So we started a scholarship program for the Chicago Public School system where we could send a Latino student through culinary school, and they could come to our restaurants and do their internships, they could go on our staff trips with us and all of that. We really have the opportunity to be cultivating that. Now we have transformed that now into a full, free culinary training program called Impact Culinary Training. That's our big focus right now, growing that program where we put kids from the west side of Chicago—a very overlooked neighborhood—through a culinary boot camp and getting them into the best restaurants in Chicago.

You really have to have other things that get you out of bed besides the restaurant. Because when the restaurant's going through a hard time or you're going through a hard time with the restaurant, then you have something else to bring you joy.

That is when I made a big family meal. We all spent that night together, and we would invite other people to come and share our family meal with us at home. During the week, our meal was breakfast, because Deann and I were busy at night. So we sat down, lit candles, had a breakfast together. It didn't last more than 20 or 30 minutes, but we just sat down, and we shared a meal together every day where we could talk. To me, that is one of the things that sort of kept the family together, because we prioritized things. Even though it was weird that breakfast was our family meal, we made sure that we had family time every single day.

We want them to really represent us well when they go someplace else. I always think about that. Are they going to represent us well, did we train them really well? So when somebody comes from our restaurant, other restaurants will say, “They're gonna be great because they're well-trained, and we know they're gonna do a good job.”