3 Lessons I Learned the Day the Window Crashed
Claire Crowell
President of A. Marshall Hospitality | CEO of Hattie Jane's Creamery | Writing about restaurant leadership at outoftheweedscollective.com
A restaurant disaster story from the trenches
I was on expo during a busy weekday lunch when I heard a loud BOOM.
It was not the kind of noise you expect when something goes wrong in a restaurant like dishes crashing. It wasn’t even like a car backfiring… or worse a gun going off. No, it was like a sonic boom, and then all of the pressure got sucked out of the room.
I ran into the dining room and my jaw dropped. An enormous fifteen-foot window had come crashing down into tiny bits of glass during the middle of service. The entire room of over 150 people was stunned silent. I was twenty-five years old. I was the General Manager. I was in charge of this disaster.
My mind went momentarily blank. It felt like a scene in a movie where all the noise and movement mutes and moves in slow motion. In the next moment, all the sounds came crashing back in, and my brain started grinding into gear. We quickly assessed the dining room for injuries, announced that we were comping all meals, and evacuated the dining room. Fortunately and unbelievably, no one was seriously injured. One guy sitting near the window did get cut by glass and was evaluated by emergency responders but ultimately was fine (though this did come back to haunt me 364 days later).