Q. What led you to a career in the restaurant industry?

A. I’ve always loved to entertain. People asked me what it was like running a restaurant and I would say, ‘I got to throw a dinner party every night and got paid for it.’

But when I was [working] with W.R. Grace in the mid-to-late 70’s, and opening all these restaurants, I really fell in love with taking a group of 60 to 100 people, creating a team and then creating guest satisfaction and employee satisfaction. I’m a detail-conscious person. So it was all the details that created that experience for you. That’s truly what made me continue [in this business] as a career.

Q. What’s the best career lesson or advice you’ve ever received?

A. Never be afraid to ask why you are doing something.

Q. How would you characterize the Georgia Restaurant Association?

A. We are an advocacy and education organization. We are also responsible for making sure that there is awareness of the importance of the restaurant industry.

Q. Is it fair to say you’re a lobbying organization as well?

A. Yes.

Q. What is GRA’s mission and how has that changed over the years?

A.  The mission is to serve as the voice for Georgia’s restaurants through advocacy, education and awareness. Restaurateurs want to hire everybody, regardless of their ethnic background, skin color, orientation or religion, and restaurateurs want to feed everybody. So, it’s very hard for a restaurateur to take a public position that might be opposed by some people and lauded by others.

So our organization speaks for those restaurateurs who don’t want to alienate their employees or their customers. Restaurateurs are fiscally conservative but to a great degree … I don’t like using the term socially liberal. It’s a very humanistic industry.

Anybody can hire a chef, open a great location and purchase great food, but if you don’t have the right people in the right places doing the jobs, then you’re not going to achieve customer satisfaction.

Q. Many lobbying groups have tons of money to court lawmakers; other groups rely more on grassroots efforts, getting out into the community to push their agendas. How does GRA go about its lobbying efforts?

A. In terms of what we spend money on, we throw a huge event every February for the entire legislature. It’s called The Taste of Georgia. There’s restaurants from around the state that focus on Georgia-grown food. Legislators understand that they have restaurants in their community that are an important part of their community. In my opinion, the legislators that care about their communities want information from me. They want to understand the economics of what is going on with that industry in their communities.

In fact, on the House side, the chairman of the Labor Committee at the start of the two-year session has me do a presentation on the restaurant industry.  I bring some restaurateurs and we do an orientation for the legislators because not everybody has run a business. 

Q. Georgia lawmakers are in session 40 days of the year. What’s GRA’s strategy to reach out to lawmakers when they’re not in session? 

A. We do visits around the state. We do something that we call a “kitchen cabinet.” It’s restaurateurs meeting with state representatives or local elected officials, mayors, county commissions. They do a couple-hour sessions in one of the restaurants in the afternoon and they tell them what’s going on in the industry and how things are affecting them. We also do that with our federally-elected officials also. We meet our congressmen in their districts.

Q. How did the pandemic change the landscape for restaurants and lobbyists in your industry?

A. What changed was the adoption of technology and electronic communication. We had restaurateurs that didn’t even have websites before the pandemic. There were restaurants that still operated with fax machines. We had a fax machine in our office.

A lot of restaurateurs tend to be very independent. However, during COVID, the industry really came together as a community to help each other, to share best practices of how they were making it work for themselves. Everybody had to get smarter.

Q. How many restaurants in Georgia went under due to the pandemic?

A. In 2020, we lost about 4,000 restaurants. So we ended up with about 19,000 restaurants statewide. However, since 2020, we have gradually been increasing restaurants and now there’s roughly 21,000 statewide.

Q. What was GRA’s role in getting the third-party delivery service bill passed into law?

A. I had started meeting with Senator Parent. We put together data and information to explain the way the system worked. We created a white paper for her. A bipartisan study committee was formed and the legislation we worked on came through. The bill was dropped in the early days of the 2023 [legislative] session.

We were getting all sorts of concerns and complaints from restaurants around the state. We started putting the case together that there needed to be some guardrails put in place.

Q. Any other parts of that law that people can expect to come due in January?

A. We’re going to be back in January trying to get some public health and safety rules passed. Hot food should be kept hot. Cold food should be kept cold. There shouldn’t be pets [in delivery vehicles]. … And it’s incumbent upon my organization that represents restaurants to make sure that the industry is protected.