From Walk-In Freezer to Front Door: Ring Is Rewriting Restaurant Security

It took me nine years of prep and nearly 1,500 interviews before I got a chance to sit down and talk with the legendary restaurateur Danny Meyer. You have to work everyday to reach your dreams. Here’s my story about how this one became reality: In 2017, we launched our first podcast Behind the Smoke from a small office across the street from Cali BBQ in Spring Valley, California. We had a few mics, a basic camera setup, and a whiteboard filled with the leaders I dreamed of interviewing. Right at the top of the whiteboard was written “Danny Meyer”, the founder of Union Square Hospitality Group. I had first read his book Setting the Table back in 2008 when opening my restaurant. The lessons I learned from it were ingrained in me. In 2019, as we were beginning to grow Cali BBQ Media, I pulled that book off the shelf to re-read it yet again. On page 104, right next to a passage about building an “aura of authenticity” at Gramercy Tavern, I wrote a note in pen: Behind the Smoke w/ Danny Meyer. I knew I wanted to interview him, but I also knew I wasn’t ready yet. Earning that seat was going to take time, consistency, and relentless preparation. By 2026, the dream became reality. I watched the sun rise over the San Francisco Bay as we drove into the city. Walking into Bourbon Steak in Union Square alongside my Cali BBQ Media team, who were running cameras, audio, and producing behind-the-scenes content, we prepared to film an episode of the Restaurant Influencers podcast and a separate Q&A for the print Entrepreneur Magazine. Seeing our crew set up in that room was a testament to what happens when you build a team that shares the vision and executes at the highest level. In times like this I think of the people who’ve been with us during the journey that led to this interview. Partners like Toast and PepsiCo who believe in us and the multiplying power of storytelling and hospitality. Those companies and the people within them understand deeply the importance of building a culture that matters. Danny often says culture is an aspiration, not a destination. During our conversation, I asked him how he defines it. “Culture is ‘the way we do things around here,’” he told me. “You can have a culture with no intention, but you can’t have a great culture without intention.” He calls it an aspiration because you never truly arrive. There will never be a moment where the culture is completely “fixed,” and that’s okay, as long as the intention is to keep moving forward. As founders try to scale that culture, Danny shared a crucial metaphor about knowing when to let go: changing your grip. When you learn to play tennis, you’re taught a basic grip to get started. But if you want to get better, if you want more velocity and topspin, a coach will tell you to change your grip. At first, it feels uncomfortable to make the shift. “That is the exact same thing we have to learn as leaders,” Danny explained. “The way we have always led might have been good enough to get us here, but as you scale the business, you absolutely need to change your grip. Sometimes you have to loosen your grip and let other people hold the racquet.” In his book, Danny tackles the realities of scaling and facing the fear of failure head-on. A few years after Setting the Table celebrated never closing a restaurant, he had to close his beloved Tabla in New York. Instead of hiding from that reckoning, he openly shared what he learned. Having closed Cali BBQ locations myself and chosen to document those hard choices publicly, I know how rare that honesty is among founders. Real leadership like that which flows from Danny Meyer is about having the courage to keep moving forward. “Especially in a hard economy, what we are all selling is hope,” he said. “In tough times, hospitality is the answer to what could possibly go right...” He pointed to the very last chapter of What Could Possibly Go Right?, the concept of essentiality. “Can we create businesses that genuinely make peopl

Running a restaurant will consume you if you get trapped in the daily firefight. Between broken ice machines, labor shortages, food cost spikes, guest complaints, and vendor delays, it is easy to spend 100% of your energy just trying to make it to last call. At Cali BBQ, we’ve been grinding on the restaurant side for 18 years. On the media side, we’ve been at it for almost a decade. And for the first 5 years of running Cali BBQ Media, we made zero dollars. It wasn’t until we figured out how to build real digital hospitality and monetize media that we started securing major brand partnerships with companies like Toast, Pepsi, Restaurant365, Uber, Google, and Ring. The top leaders in hospitality do not just survive the day. They play the long game. Restaurant owners cannot afford to think like traditional restaurant owners anymore; we have to operate like media companies, technology adopters, and community builders. Here are five hard-earned lessons from sitting down with the CEOs, founders, and operators shaping the future of our industry. 1. Dream Big (And Stay Grounded on the Floor) If you want to access the top minds in your industry, you have to be willing to pitch a vision that sounds ridiculous to average thinkers. When Cali BBQ switched point-of-sale systems from Aloha to Toast in 2020, I told Will Eppard, Toast’s sales director in San Diego at the time, that I was going to interview the cofounders of Toast. He laughed. Because at the time, it sounded absurd. We were a local BBQ joint running a media experiment that hadn’t generated a dime in profit. Two years later, after interviewing then-CEO Chris Comparato, I was invited to speak on a customer panel in front of 1,300 Toasters at their sales kickoff. Right after that keynote, I sat down with co-founder Aman Narang (now CEO) to record an episode of Restaurant Influencers. That moment started with a massive goal and years of small, daily actions. What stood out from Aman was the mindset behind the tech: the best technology leaders obsess over their customers’ problems. Toast was built by founders sitting inside restaurants, watching ticket bottlenecks in real time, and writing code to solve operational pain points. Dream as big as possible, but stay obsessively close to the operator. 2. Play the Long Game (Relationships Compound) The high-value interview, the strategic partnership, or the major brand deal almost never happens on the first ask. It often doesn’t happen on the second or third ask either. Sometimes it takes 25 touchpoints across multiple years. When we went heavy into ghost kitchens during the pandemic, we took major risks. Through that entire buildout, I told the team at CloudKitchens that eventually I was going to sit down with Travis Kalanick, co-founder of Uber and founder of CloudKitchens, to talk about why a barbecue brand was building a media company. Eventually, it happened. Travis didn’t just grant the sit-down, he turned the tables and interviewed me in front of his entire CloudKitchens all-hands team. That door opened because we stayed consistent when there was no instant payout. In media, tech, and restaurants, trust compounds over time. Keep showing up, keep getting better, and play the long game. 3. Real Leaders Want to Share the Struggle One of the biggest misconceptions in business is that top-level CEOs are completely unreachable. Some are guarded, but the most impactful leaders actually want to share their origin stories, their struggles, and what they’re building. That was my experience with Jordan Boesch, co-founder and CEO of 7shifts. We originally reached out because our restaurant needed to upgrade from legacy scheduling software like HotSchedules to a modern, cloud-based workflow. That initial operational reach-out turned into Jordan appearing on Digital Hospitality, Rising Tides Live, and Restaurant Influencers published by Entrepreneur Magazine. We’ve reconnected in person multiple times at the National Restaurant Association Sho

We opened three ghost kitchen locations during the pandemic. And every single one of them failed. Writing that still stings. Restaurant operators don’t want to talk about the locations that bombed, the capital that vaporized, or the decisions that looked brilliant on a whiteboard but were brutal on a P&L. But at Cali BBQ and Cali BBQ Media, our guiding principle is to build in public. If we only talk about our wins, we aren’t helping anyone else survive and scale in this industry. We bet on ghost kitchens because San Diego County has over 3 million people, and asking everyone to drive to our original Spring Valley location for craft barbecue was a broken growth model. The thesis seemed strong: make the ribs, tri-tip, and wedding beans at our master kitchen, ship it out to 200-square-foot distribution nodes across the county, and let delivery apps handle the last mile. At under $50,000 per location, it looked like a low-risk expansion play. The demand was there, but the unit economics were a total trap. We were paying premium rent for small spaces designed purely for fulfillment. There was no storefront, zero foot traffic, and no physical place to build true local culture. Worse, we didn’t own the customer, the delivery platforms did. You can put QR codes in bags and push content on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram all day, but when a platform takes 20 percent to 25 percent of your gross sales and holds your customer data hostage, the math catches up with you fast. Take December 2022 at one of our ghost kitchen locations: * Delivery Commissions: $3,391.03 * Food Cost: $4,069.23 * Labor: $3,687.11 * Rent & Utilities: $5,320.00 * Fees & Maintenance: $906.92 Gross Revenue: $13,564.10 Net Monthly Loss: -$3,810.19 Yes, we were making negative money. Orders were flying out the door, but we were burning cash. Volume without margin isn’t growth, it’s a slow death. We shut all three locations down after doing our best to make them work. It hurt, but the experiment wasn’t a waste. It’s important to look for lessons from failure. Those ghost kitchens taught us how to treat barbecue as a hub-and-spoke distribution model. The prep workflows and staging systems we perfected during that failure became the exact blueprint we used to open at Snapdragon Stadium and the 32nd Street Navy Base. Today, we feed thousands of fans at concerts, SDSU football games, and 55,000 military personnel on base—not through third-party apps, but through high-volume institutional partnerships and digital hospitality. Failure gave us a sustainable model. We wanted to be the greatest ghost kitchen operator in the country, but losing that bet made us better operators, better storytellers, and a stronger business. If you’re an operator who has taken a hit on a new technology, a bad lease, or a failed experiment, don’t hide it. Reach out to me on DM @Shawnpwalchef to tell me what what you learned. Like my Grandfather taught me: Stay curious. Get involved. Ask for help. -Shawn

Most restaurant owners think they do not have a story to tell on social media. They are too busy to post. They’re worried that food costs are up. Labor is tight. The ice machine is broken. Someone called out. A vendor is late. There’s always an excuse to not post. So when people like me say, “You should tell more stories online,” it feels like one more thing on the really big to do list. But storytelling does not have to start with a camera crew, a viral idea, or a polished brand campaign. It can start with an orange tree. At Cali BBQ, there is an orange tree outside the restaurant. On the surface, it is just a tree. It is not the barbecue smoker. It is not the menu. It is not the tri-tip or any of the things that look obvious from the outside the business. It’s a tree that holds our history. It connects back to family. My Bulgarian grandfather bought the property in the late 1970s. He and my uncle planted fruit trees, flowers, and built a fountain. Years later, Cali BBQ opened in that same spot. The business became a sports bar destination, survived hard years, made mistakes, opened ghost kitchens, closed ghost kitchens, and kept going. And the orange tree continued to survive. Later, during the pandemic, Cali BBQ started to transform into what we started calling “the Amazon of BBQ.” We added new smokers, changed the back patio, and needed more space for trucks and operations. The practical business decision was obvious: remove the orange tree. But my wife Rosi said no. She fought for the tree because it meant something. It was tied to family, to Bulgaria, to gardens, to memory, to the life around the restaurant that existed before the current version of the business. The business needed to grow. She was right, the tree needed to stay. It’s a part of our story. Most owners miss this. They think their story has to be just about the product. Now here’s a thought exercise for you to try: What object inside your restaurant carries more meaning than a stranger would ever know? Whatever you thought of just now is a story that should be told. It might be a photo on the wall. A recipe from a grandparent. A table that has been there since day one. The point is not the object. The point is the meaning attached to it. That is my Orange Tree Theory.

Most people go to Greece for the water. It has this beautiful postcard blue that doesn’t look real until you’re standing in it. The water is memorable, for sure but something I’ll remember much more is a restaurant owner I didn’t expect to meet, who couldn’t get a word out as his eyes filled with tears. But before we get into that story and lesson, I want to tell you how we ended up here. Greece was our vacation after a whirlwind work trip with Toast in London and then Dublin. We planned a lot of those trips in advance but when we got to our vacation spot we left our fate in the hands of humans and code. Every AI tool I poked at, from Claude to Gemini to ChatGPT, to ask where the best seafood on the coast was, kept spitting back the same name: Aristos. Our rental host also told us to go there, too. The tour boat company even said we had to try it. Artificial intelligence and human intelligence, pointing at the exact same door. Here’s what I think: When the algorithms and the locals agree, you go. We came into Ormos Panagias by boat. No reservation, no plan, just salt and diesel in the air and somebody grilling close by. A kid caught our line and tied us off a few steps from Aristos Restaurant like he’d done it ten thousand times, because he had. A table opened the second we walked up. The kind of timing you stop questioning. Our chairs sat right in the sand. The Aegean Sea kept rolling in beside us like it was part of the service. While we waited on the food, there was a paper placemat on the table. An old black and white photo of a harbor, a few boats, a village built into the rock. A few lines of text under it. I read it the way you read anything in front of you when you’re hungry and happy. Then they walked us into the fish cooler and told us to pick, and I forgot all about it. Local fish. Grilled shrimp. Sushi. Calamari. It was as good as anything I’ve ever tasted. But the food is never the story. The food is the bait. I’ll be honest. This was a family vacation. Barefoot, board shorts, zero plans to work. We did not come to Greece to shoot restaurant interviews. But when a story is sitting right in front of you, you do not let it walk out the door. You investigate. You pull out the phone in your pocket and you tell the thing that needs telling. So somewhere in the meal I told our server the truth. That I’m a podcaster from California who shows up in restaurants and pulls the stories out of the people running them. I asked if the owner was around. A few minutes later, Aristos walked over. Not from an office. There was no office. He was on the floor, running tables, working the room with his wife, one eye on a son expediting plates out of the kitchen. Two generations on the floor. One lunch service. Nobody hiding behind a desk. He gave me a few minutes. Walked me across the little street to the building where it actually started, the original room from 1971. He stopped me in front of a framed black and white photo on the wall and said, this is where it all started. And I froze. Because I knew that photo. It was the same one from the placemat on my table. The harbor. The boats. The village in the rock. I’d been holding his family’s origin story in my hands an hour earlier and didn’t know it. Grandpa, barba Mitsos, who started the whole thing in 1971 by teaching his village how to fish. Hard work, simplicity, and love. That was the recipe, printed right there. The same photo on the wall of the first building. And in front of every single guest, every single meal. With this much attention to detail everywhere I looked, that was no accident. So I had to ask him why. He told me about 2003. The promise he made his mother that he’d protect what they built. The hospitality. The standards. All of it. That photo wasn’t decoration. It was the contract. To his late mother. To his grandfather. Signed and re-signed every time a guest sits down and finds it waiting at the table. So I told him what I actually believed. That his grandfa