Your Restaurant's Brand Should Be Driving Every Hiring Decision You Make
The mistake I see operators make, over and over, is treating hiring like a staffing problem. You have an open role. You fill it. You move on.
But the hiring decision is actually a brand decision. Every single time. And if you're not thinking about it that way, you're going to keep making hires that check every box and feel wrong on the floor.
I'll tell you how I know this. My husband and I are in the middle of opening a restaurant right now. And the process of getting here, finding the location, landing on the concept, fighting for eighteen months to find a name, has reminded me exactly why brand has to come before everything else. Including the job description.
The Community Told Us What Was Missing
When we moved to Santa Clarita during COVID, we saw a property available and my husband and I both thought it might be a good location. But we didn't know the neighborhood yet. We were still getting our feet wet. So we were non-committal.
We were actually looking at two other properties at the time. One in Austin, Texas. One in Denver. And I kept coming back to the same question: how do you open a restaurant in a place where you don't live? Where you don't know the rhythms, the community, who comes in on a Tuesday versus a Saturday? I didn't think that was a great idea.
Two years into exploring those other options, we came back to this original property. Eight minutes from our house. And by then, everything had changed. The kid was in school. We were meeting parents. We were making friends. We were becoming part of the neighborhood.
And everywhere we went, we kept hearing the same thing. There are just no good restaurants up here. This is such a beautiful place to live, but no good restaurants. Everything's “tired.”
That's not a complaint. That's our opening.
We decided to take a bet, take a chance, and sign the lease. Because we knew the community. We knew what was missing. And we knew we were the ones to fill it.
The Name Took 18 Months
Once we committed, some things came together quickly. We knew from our experience owning restaurants for many years that we wanted to keep food costs low without touching the guest experience. Pizza and pasta. Flour and water. Simple, honest food done well.
We knew the neighborhood. Lots of families. Very residential. So the concept needed to work for date night, for girls' night, and for the table next to them with three kids. We knew we were doing something Italian.
What we didn't know for a year and a half was what to call it.
We had made the mistake before of having a name that was difficult to spell, or that people didn't know how to say, which meant it was hard to find online. We wanted something very easy. But we also wanted it to tie into the Italian concept and into the story of where we actually were.
Our building is connected to a movie theater, in the old downtown area of Newhall, CA. That area is the hub of every old Western movie you've ever seen on TV. Gunsmoke was shot maybe five minutes down the road. The whole area was originally known for producing Western films.
So we're connected to a movie theater. We're doing something Italian. We're in an area famous for Westerns. We had all the pieces. We just couldn't see how they fit.
My husband and I were on vacation in Palm Springs. Both of us frustrated. Still no name. We were on a walk and he was talking through it out loud, the way he does, trying to connect Southern California and Italy and the movie history. And he said, almost as a throwaway: you know, when they couldn't shoot the movies here, they would take them to Northern Italy. And there they were called Spaghetti Westerns.
Wait. What did you just say?
He said they were called spaghetti Westerns. And I said: That’s the name!
That was it. That was the moment. And he said, my God, that's the name. And I said, yes. That's the name. And we laughed hysterically, high fiving all the way home.
Once You Have the Name, Everything Else Falls Into Place
I did not expect how fast it would all come together once we had the name. But that's exactly what happened.
Those classic Western films were shot in mid-century. And Italian design of that era has a very specific look. Warm. Graphic. A little cinematic. The second we had the name, the vision appeared. We had originally planned to hire a designer. But it all just sort of landed in both of our minds at that moment. We knew exactly what it was going to look like. We didn't need anyone to tell us.
The menu. The aesthetic. The design. What we'd put on the walls. What the lighting should feel like on a Friday night. It all came from the name. And the name came from the location, the building, the history of the place, the community we had spent two years becoming part of.
It was all one thing. All of a sudden a brand is developed. And once it's there, you don't have to debate the details. They answer themselves.
In the restaurant business, it's an all-five-senses experience when a brand is working. The food, the room, the music, the way the light hits at seven o'clock. Every element is either part of the story or it isn't. There's no in between.
Your Brand Tells You Who Belongs Before You Write the Job Description
Here's what opening Spaghetti Western has reminded me of, as a recruiter.
We didn't know what our restaurant needed to feel like until we knew what our restaurant was. What the community was missing told us the concept. The location told us the name. The name told us the design. Each decision led to the next one. And none of it was possible until we had a brand to make decisions from.
Hiring works exactly the same way.
When you know your brand, really know it, you know who belongs in your building. It's not about credentials or what their resume says. You know what kind of person can carry the energy of this particular place. What sensibility they need. What they have to understand about the experience you're trying to create, without you having to explain it every night.
Spaghetti Western is mid-century Italian in a neighborhood that grew up watching Westerns, attached to a movie theater, built for families and date nights in equal measure. That tells me something specific about the people who will thrive there and the people who won't. It's a filter. And it exists before I ever look at a single resume.
That's what operators miss when they treat hiring as a staffing problem. They fill the role. They don't build the room. And the room is everything. The room is the brand, walking around, taking orders, making guests feel something.
Start with the brand. Get that right first. And the hiring decisions will follow.
About The Author:
Martha Madison is the founder of The Madison Collective, a hospitality-focused executive recruiting firm where every recruiter has worked as a senior-level restaurant operator. Martha has spent decades inside the hospitality industry, owning and operating restaurants, hiring across every level of the house, and building the kind of teams that make a room feel like somewhere worth coming back to. She now places GMs, F&B leaders, and hotel executives at growth-stage restaurant groups and luxury hotel brands, bringing the perspective of someone who has actually run a floor to every search she takes on.
Your brand deserves a team that actually gets it.
You've built something specific. A concept, a room, a feeling. We help restaurant groups and hospitality brands find the leaders who walk in and already understand what you're trying to create.
