A series on the oldest problem in restaurants: getting the right information to the right person. (1 of 3)
In Setting the Table, Danny Meyer explains where his book's title comes from, in a chapter on management and leadership:
"Communicating has as much to do with context as it does content. That's called setting the table. Understanding who needs to know what, when people need to know it, and why, and then presenting that information in an entirely comprehensible way is a sine qua non of great leadership."
He wrote that twenty years ago about the challenge of leading a restaurant team. Written today, it could just as easily be commentary on context engineering for large language models.
Since 2006, an entire software industry of communication and project management tools has been built to address this problem. Slack, Asana, Google Workspace. Built on the internet, mobile, and cloud, these tools were optimized for people doing office work, sitting behind a desk from nine to five, roughly 20% of the workforce.
Applied to the other 80%, most of them never stuck. Hospitality, retail, healthcare, and construction all have the same communication problems. The difference is that the work is embodied: you are on your feet, hands occupied, moving through a physical environment at pace, with a customer or coworker in front of you. The usual labels, deskless or frontline, define it by what's missing rather than what's there. The communication tools built over the last twenty years assume you have access to a computer, a moment to sit, and time to enter something into a machine.
We built Colette for restaurants, but what we're really working on is bigger than any single industry: how AI needs to work for teams doing physical, embodied work. Hospitality is just where we're starting.
A restaurant can't be run by one person. It takes a kitchen crew, a floor team, and a management layer all working from the same picture at the same time. When that shared picture breaks down, everything else breaks with it. To see why, start with the shift itself.
Communication breakdowns happen in every organization. But most are too large, too layered, and too slow to study clearly. The restaurant shift is different. It has all the same problems in a package small enough to study and consequential enough to be worth it. Five things make it the ideal place to see how communication breaks.
- A Fixed Team. Every shift is a fixed set of people in one room with defined roles. The GM, the floor manager, the kitchen manager, the servers, the line cooks, the host. Faces change night to night; the roles don't. Fewer moving parts than in a larger organization, so it's easier to see exactly where communication breaks.
- A Consistent Routine. A shift runs on routines. The pre-shift briefing, the push, the close, the handoff. Same rhythms, same roles, same goal, night after night. The conditions hold steady, so when one thing changes you can actually isolate it.
- A Verdict Every Night. A shift has a hard start and a hard end. The whole cycle runs in a single day so you find out what works and what didn't that night, not next quarter. Change something at pre-shift, watch it land by close, and adjust it again tomorrow. And every service produces hard data. Revenue per cover, table turns, comps, sales per labor hour.
- A Moldable Team. The staff are young, turnover is constant, and no one has worked long enough to defend the old way of doing things. You reshape how the team works by changing who you hire and what you ask of them next shift. Whatever you learn, you can actually put into practice.
- A Room Full of Witnesses. A shift is a race to get a finished product in front of the guest in real time. When communication breaks down, the food doesn't hit the table, and the guest sees it happen. In an industry where nearly half of operators didn't turn a profit last year, getting it wrong is what decides which half you're in.
When a restaurant is struggling, the instinct is to look at food cost, labor, turnover, reviews. Those are real problems. But they're almost always downstream of the same thing: somewhere in the operation, the right information didn't reach the right person at the right time.