After interviewing all over the city, Edgar finally landed what felt like gold. A second interview at Il Buco, one of the most quietly revered restaurants in New York City. The kind of place where lifers stay planted for decades. In restaurant years, that’s a lifetime.
We’d been talking for weeks about his job hunt. The fear. The frustration. The utter exhaustion that creeps in when you start to feel like maybe no one’s really seeing you at all. But the day he met with Steven Bloom, something shifted.
“Oh my god, I just had the best interview ever. Not on my end…I mean, I did good. But the place, the GM, the vibe — I loved everything. I just know I want to work with this guy.”
Edgar didn’t get the job.
But it didn’t matter.
Those two conversations with Steven Bloom lit up something in him I hadn’t seen in a long time. It was like being seen clearly, reminding him that he still belonged in this industry.
And I thought about how many times I’ve walked out of an interview feeling gutted. The nights I’ve said f*ck restaurants because the guy across the table showed up late, barely looked up, and told me I was overqualified. I left swearing off the industry forever. Not because I stopped loving it, but because it stopped loving me back. One bitter moment like that doesn’t just sting, it settles in, quiet and sharp, like a rotten tooth you try to ignore. Until one day, it aches in everything you do.
But it was moments like Edgar’s that brought me back. To see the passion in his face. He was standing straighter, he had the smirk I hadn't seen in months. To see him want to be a part of this club we all stupidly fight to be a part of reminded me of the excitement this industry brought me when I first fell in love with it and how important that spark is to keep alive.
I hear a lot about how hard it is to hire. What we don’t talk about enough is how bad we’ve become at interviewing. Interviews aren’t just evaluations. They’re introductions into our culture.
We spend hours curating our spaces. Obsessing over candlelight, polishing spots off of handpicked glassware, and perfectly curating playlists. And then we rush the interview. We become robotic. Impatient. Lazy. We miss the red flags. Or worse, we miss the spark.
And those missteps? They always come back to bite us.
We are responsible for the worlds we create. That includes the one we build for potential hires.
I couldn’t stop thinking about what made that brief exchange feel so human. So I went looking for the person who made it happen.
Steven Bloom has been in this business long enough to know the difference between filling a schedule and building a team. He’s spent the last few years running the floor at Il Buco, but the lessons go further back — 20 years to be exact. I asked him what he listens for when someone walks in looking for a shot.
“If I’m doing most of the talking,” he says, “I’ve already failed.”
Steven isn't doing his interviews where he can be interrupted, he's doing them in a thoughtful place — the wine cellar, where he can see the interviewee’s reaction to the bottles of wine, and their interest in the space. He knows that how we show up for people at the door shapes the culture inside.
“I try to make a joke or offer them some water or something, you know? I just want them to feel comfortable,” he tells me. “Where you interview someone is important. How you sit with them, where you sit in relation to them. That's all very important. I want it to feel more conversational, because you learn a lot more about someone that way.”
Steven’s approach is intimate, almost meditative. He’s searching for resonance. That small flicker of shared intention and watching quietly to see if it arrives.
But not every interview happens in a wine cellar. Not every restaurant has that kind of stillness. Sometimes, culture lives in motion — in the clatter of plates, the tension of a double turn, the hum of a room that runs on intuition. And when you're overseeing not just one space but many, hiring becomes less about reading a room and more about protecting one.
That’s where Haley comes in.
Haley Nutter-Sitek is the director of hospitality at Crown Restaurant Group in Cincinnati. She’s part of a leadership team responsible for building and protecting culture across several restaurants, and, full disclosure, she had me crying during our interview.
Haley’s interviews are different. They carry the weight of the room behind them. She’s not just looking at the person in front of her. She’s thinking about every team member who will have to grind alongside them.
Both styles work. But they work because they’re not accidental. They’re practiced, lived, and aligned with the culture they’ve built.
If Steven is beautifully curating a culture by observing from the corner of a wine cellar, Haley is building it table by table. I wanted to understand how someone creates that kind of connection while scaling across multiple properties.
At one point in our conversation, she told me about a team member they had lost to suicide. She didn’t share it to make a point, it was just part of how she talked about leadership. When it happened, staff from one of their other restaurants stepped in and covered every shift so that his closest coworkers could attend his memorial. It wasn’t something she orchestrated or asked for, it just happened.
That’s what culture is. That’s what it looks like when it’s real. And that’s the moment I cried.
“Hiring is the easy part,” she tells me. “Keeping the culture going after you hire — that’s the work.”
Haley isn't hiring for a day or a shift, she is hiring to benefit the overall culture of the restaurant she's created — and she understands that one wrong move can make the entire empire crumble into unrealized hopes.
“I can train for skill, but I can’t train someone to care. If someone’s energy doesn’t fit, it affects everyone, and that’s not a risk I take lightly,” she says. “One wrong person in the room changes the whole tone. I’ve learned to trust my gut early.”
Maybe the point of an interview isn’t just to fill a role. Maybe it’s a chance to give someone one small moment of meaning in a business that takes a hell of a lot more than it gives. Because even if they don’t get the job, they remember how you made them feel. And that feeling echoes.
This industry will bleed you dry if you let it. It’ll ask for your nights, your weekends, and your sanity, and then hand you a shift drink and pretend that’s gratitude. So when someone shows up with their shirt ironed and their hope barely holding, and we meet that moment with disinterest, or ego, or some half-assed list of questions, we fail.
We forget that hiring is hospitality, too. And if you can’t offer someone dignity at the door, you’ve got no business asking them to serve it table after table.
Because maybe the interview isn’t just about the role. Maybe it’s one of the last human moments left in this business. A flicker of connection before the rush kicks in. And if we do it right, even when they don’t get the job, they walk out with their head held higher, reminded that they still belong.
Edgar didn’t get the job. But he left with something harder to come by: A little bit of himself back.