Hustling the Hustle
How our current world has made restaurateurs out of all of us
I recently saw Marty Supreme on the big screen and I loved it. It followed an anxious rhythm I am accustomed to as a restauranteur and I felt at home with it, amidst its chaos. I chatted with my mom afterwards and she told me that the Director Josh Safdie is great at portraying our zeitgeist - aka the spirt of our times. Our times, they feel like a big ol’ hustle and us who’ve been on the restaurant trade, we are well accustomed.
Felipe, my partner in business and love has a great go to line - ‘As a restaurant owner, your two most important people are your plumber and your lawyer, in that order’. If it isn’t a broken pipe, it’s an inundated basement, or a something with the building, or you are being harassed by whatever department needs the money that month. The list goes on, the hustle becomes part of your modus operandi. It took me a long time to arrive at the understanding that no matter how I played it, I would go to sleep to a problem solved, only to wake up to a new thing to fix - The restaurant game is a forever Whac-A-Mole.
I remember this one moment that marked me. It was a busy service at the restaurant, my then business partner Mac Osborne who had come from a well groomed Mandarin Oriental career saw my face in despair and slipped me a napkin with the following words:
‘There is no finish line’.
There really isn’t, running restaurants is an elongated pearl necklace of disasters and I was deeply reminded of this just this past week. We decided to close Colonia Verde for the first week of January to focus on renovations, maintenance, team bonding and to deepen the teams education around wine, food and our purveyors. We came up with a whole Sunday hang with our team, one that included break out sessions focusing on service, hosting, wine sessions and expo deep dives. Our plan was to start the year ready. This year, we thought, we’ll get ahead of the year, versus letting the year get ahead of us.
I was getting ready to arrive to our Sunday grand staff session, when Vi, my wine counterpart and managing partner called me up. ‘Tamy, the entire restaurant dangerously reeks with glue’. As part of the week long maintenance, we did a gut reno of our walk in fridge downstairs.
‘How the FUCK is the smell so strong that it came all the way upstairs!?’ I said, ‘I know’, Vi answered. It was way too cold to keep the doors open, the air felt poisonous and we had food from our friends at Dosa Royale dropping at our restaurant in the next hour.
‘We will be there in ten’ I said. Felipe and I were rumbling to find an alternative place for all twenty five of us to be. We arrived to Colonia Verde a few minutes late, the entire staff already sitting down, jackets and scarves still on (all doors were open to combat the smell) looking cranky as fuck. I get it. Not the way to spend a Sunday. I had nothing, Felipe had nothing.
I decided all I had at this point was stories, of when we hustled the hustle the most and that was opening weeks of our first ever restaurant Comodo on 58 Macdougal street, downtown Manhattan. I stood in front of our cranky staff and launched into that story.
We had opened Comodo with barely any money in our pockets, as one of the investors fell through at the last minute. Felipe had built the bathroom wall using a YouTube video (true story) and we were still short on money to buy food for the opening weekend. We used the food samples that had been dropped off by purveyors who eagerly wanted to work with this exciting ‘supper club turned restaurant experiment’, having little knowledge of how royally fucked we actually were. Never the less, we hustled and we opened. There was one more catch though. The full license to serve wine had not come through yet. We needed the revenue and I needed people to not be turned off by dining with us with no booze so I came up with the biggest way to hustle the hustle. I stroke a deal with the wine store across the street. I chose a list of ten of their wines, made a menu and gave it to guests at the table. Easy. Except, major loophole - It would have to be the guests themselves who called the store to place their wine order. Imagine the scene. You sit down for dinner, choose a wine from a menu, only to find me at your table, phone in hand….
‘The wine store is on the line, they are ready for you to place your order’.
I would say to the table, always wearing a long dress and big earrings, dressed for the part, masking all the cracks. Guests would grab the phone from me in a sort of disbelief but also with the thought that well, this is NYC after all and this type of crazy shit happens all the time. A delivery guy would show up at your table and voila! Wine bottle for everyone!
Ok that worked. I got a laugh out of the staff and they had softened up a bit. ‘The thing is guys’ I said to the team to wrap up the story, ‘we are never ready and I know you get it because you all are the ultimate improvisers. We are sorry we weren’t ready today’. Felipe leaned over to me and whispered ‘Do we just do it at our place?’.
We ended up moving the workshop to our home and found a way to fit these twenty five individuals into our small apartment in Bedstuy. Workshops turned into intimate chats, where we were able to tell our stories of how each of us landed at Colonia Verde. The stories were deep and personal, as most of our staff has been with us five years plus. We also took the time to air out frustrations. An active service is incredibly stressful, no matter how long you’ve been doing it for or how long your restaurant has been opened (Colonia Verde will turn twelve this February!).
We finished our week of ‘re-set’ with a dance party at Tadpole, our friend Alex gracefully lended us her space. Our team knows how to bring the energy so much so, that six cops ended up showing up and even giving a summons to Sal, who I had DJ for us. There was a moment of tension, similar to Sunday’s big workshop day, things did not go as planned… again (surprise surprise). We let the cops do their thing and assume their power over us, and as soon as they left, we did a ‘fuck the police’ dance and went back to having a grand ol’ time.
Welcome 2026. I am no longer your fool. I know you’ll get my ass, and I am ready for it, I am alive and have a team of warriors by my side, the ultimate hustlers of the hustle, and for that, I am eternally grateful and inspired.
Wishing you, Felipe, and the rest of a team a year full of unexpected good things!
Sooo good and full of emotions! Loved it!!!