Tiger Woods: Advice From the Pros On Opening a New Restaurant

Tiger Woods hangs out with Bobby Flay. Photo credit: Getty 

Dear Tiger,

We hear you’re opening a restaurant. Mazel tov! And congrats to your native Jupiter, Florida, which in early 2015 will be home to your 5,900-square-foot dining and drinking establishment called “The Woods Jupiter: Sports and Dining Club.”

Here’s something you may have heard: Running a successful restaurant is harder than it looks. But relax! We’ve compiled a reading list to help you navigate the roller-coaster ride, from how to do your homework right to those first shaky weeks of service.

To stay up on your new industry, read:

Eater. The online food, drink, and nightlife site is a real-life ticker of important restaurant openings, events, and controversies. Its recently beefed-up features department is also churning out some of the most thoughtful food pieces on the web.

The New York Times. Obsessively refresh the Times’s Dining & Wine site on Tuesday nights, when reviews are posted. You’ll gain a foothold on the current trends, learn the trendy dishes that work and those that don’t, and get to know the scene’s major players.

Yahoo Food. Um, hello? From recipes to trends to news, we’ve got your back.

To pick up pro tips from fellow restaurateurs, snag these books:

“Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business,” by Danny Meyer. ”The customer is certainly not always right. But they must always feel heard,” Meyer writes. Translation: Patiently listen to that abrasive customer—there’s always one or two or a hundred—with a straight face, even when you’d rather show him the door.

“Restaurant Man,” by Joe Bastianich. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Writes Bastianich: “The pressure, the heat, the almost impossibly fast pace at which you need work—this is the reality of working in the culinary industry. This is what professional chefs do night after night.”

“Art of the Restaurateur,” by Nicholas Lander. Lander’s impressive tome compiles the collective wisdom of restaurateurs such as Maguy Le Coze of New York City’s Le Bernardin, Russell Norman of Polpo in London, England, and Gilbert Pilgram of Zuni Café in San Francisco, California. (Meyer and Bastianich make cameos, too.) “If you’ve ever wondered what goes into running a single stalwart or growing empire, now’s your chance to learn,” raved The Wall Street Journal.

And what will it be like to work alongside cooking pros? Brace yourself:

“Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly,” by Anthony Bourdain. ”So who the hell, exactly, are these guys, the boys and girls in the trenches?” ponders Bourdain in his behind-the-scenes memoir. “You might get the impression from the specifics of my less than stellar career that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths. You wouldn’t be too far off base.”

“The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef,” by Marco Pierre White. The title says it all, doesn’t it? The British chef, in his heyday dubbed the enfant terrible of the British culinary scene, once reduced a 20-year-old Gordon Ramsay to tears. Perhaps such behavior inspired the book’s following quote: “If you are not extreme, then people will take shortcuts because they don’t fear you.” Unless you’re down with this attitude, don’t hire dudes who have it.

“Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef,” by Gabrielle Hamilton. What you do want is a chef who can do what needs to be done—even if that thing is disposing of a rat’s maggot-infested carcass. That’s exactly what Hamilton, the chef and owner of modern American eatery Prune in New York City, detailed in her 2011 memoir.

We never said this would be glamorous! Best of luck out there, Tiger.