February 10, 2022
A Day in the Life: Bruce Moffett
The acclaimed restaurateur has been in the business for decades. He’s never seen burnout like this.
Bruce Moffett at his first restaurant, Barrington’s. Photo by Peter Taylor
Bruce Moffett always wanted to be a theater major. “Running a restaurant,” he says, “was a close second.” But the two aren’t so different. Every night, a small kind of drama plays out in the longtime restaurateur’s dining rooms. The servers are akin to actors, while back-of-house staff work in the wings to make sure the performance succeeds. The audience take their seats. “The lights go down,” Moffett says. “Production begins.”
In this analogy, the acclaimed chef and owner of Barrington’s, Good Food on Montford, and Stagioni is the director. The role demands empathy, collaboration, vision — and a remarkable fortitude to face COVID-related challenges. “I don’t think there’s a basic understanding of all the different pressures that are going on simultaneously,” he says, “from staffing shortages to illness, to not being able to find liquor, not finding qualified staff, food prices going up, not being able to find product.”
The result is the highest level of staff burnout he’s seen in his career. Moffett admits that he occasionally considers leaving the business and returning to his native Rhode Island. But, he says, “it’s an idle thought, and I still love what I do.” The show must go on.
Here’s what a day in his life looks like.
7 a.m. Moffett drinks coffee as his wife, Katrina, and 13-year-old son, Daniel, get ready to leave for the day. With the house to himself, he takes an hour to do “absolutely nothing.” When pressed, he admits that he sometimes spends that time playing on his phone: ”I had some ear issues a while back and a lot of time at doctors offices, so I started playing Candy Crush to help,” he says. “I’m a little bit of an addict.”
9 a.m. Moffett’s exercise routine includes two days of core training and two days of tennis. “And I’ll do something else, like bike ride, one day a week.” After a shower, he spends a half-hour “trying to clean up and help out with the house”: making the bed, washing dishes, tidying up. Sometimes he takes the family dog, a goldendoodle named Augie, for a walk around his Barclay Downs neighborhood.
12 p.m. Moffett’s home is located between his three restaurants, making for a much easier commute than when he lived in Ballantyne. He heads to Barrington’s first and often makes stops on the way to pick up fish, for example, or handle business at the bank. When he arrives at Barrington’s, a Foxcroft staple for more than 20 years, he meets with general manager Peggy Gibouin. She was the first employee Moffett hired when he opened the restaurant, his first, in 2000. Now, she manages the books and paperwork for all three restaurants in the Moffett Restaurant Group.
Moffett observes that the pressures of the pandemic have taken a toll on communication with staff. The demands on employees have multiplied, and it takes more bandwidth just to keep the doors open. The fatigue means they’re more often playing catch up than strategizing for the future, and open communication can fall prey to the frenzy. Moffett has tried to make sure that employees have personal time and a broad perspective on daily frustrations: “We have adopted a policy of, rather than dwell on the issue at hand, just put more of your effort into ‘how are we going to handle this and move forward?’”
2 p.m. Moffett checks email in the bar area. He’s lately faced a deluge of bureaucratic hurdles: He’s tackling PPP loan forgiveness paperwork and rounding up data for one of Mecklenburg County’s random restaurant audits, intended to verify and account for annual revenue. “This is the second or third time they’ve done it to us,” Moffett says. “The last time, they wound up owing us $7.67, which we, nine months later, got in check form.”
The restaurant recently switched to Toast, a point-of-sale and management system. “We’ve been trying to figure out how to switch all the gift cards over from our old system to the new system, and then they wanted an excessive amount of money to change that out.” It’s an issue that requires him to work with his accountant, which has only gotten more complicated now that it’s tax season. That’s another ongoing task: He’s trying to make sure that all the tax documents are in order and that all W-2s are accounted for. The N.C. Red W-2s, for example, were sent to N.C. Red — which is no longer in business.
“It gets to the point,” Moffett says, “where you’re just numb inside.” The mounting headaches have inspired him to consider diversifying his revenue streams. He’s talked to a few people in real estate but hasn’t delved too deeply into the idea.
5 p.m. Thanks to staffing shortages, an issue that has plagued the restaurant group for two years, Moffett is back on the line. “I was doing pastry chef duties at Good Food for a little while, and then I help expedite at Stagioni in the evenings.” He knows how to work in the kitchens at all three restaurants, so he steps in wherever he’s needed, sometimes at the last minute.
Moffett misses the day-to-day grind of the kitchen, so he likes to dip back into it — and appreciates that he can escape that grind when he wants. “It’s been nice to reconnect with a lot of the people that have been supporting the restaurants for years and years. I see them come through the door, being able to touch their food before it goes out to them, being able to circle back and see how their experience was. I enjoy that.”
11 p.m. Moffett unwinds for an hour before heading to bed. He eats whatever’s in the fridge: “I’m a big fan of tacos.” He watches Ozark on Netflix, or sometimes ESPN’s SportsCenter, but he often gets annoyed at how uninteresting it’s become and turns it off. He’s in bed by 12:30. The next day, the curtains will go up, and another performance will begin.
More in this series
Alyssa Wilen of Chef Alyssa’s Kitchen
What the Fries’ Jamie Barnes and Greg Williams
Kindred’s Katy Kindred
Freshlist’s Jesse Leadbetter
James Yoder of Not Just Coffee
Christa Csoka of The Artisan’s Palate
The Hot Box NC’s Michael Bowling
300 East’s Ashley Boyd
Aria and Cicchetti’s Pierre Bader
Sea Level N.C., The Waterman, and Ace No. 3’s Paul Manley
This statement hit home – The demands on employees have multiplied, and it takes more bandwidth just to keep the doors open. The fatigue means they’re more often playing catch up than strategizing for the future, and open communication can fall prey to the frenzy. It’s true in many industries right now.