What makes a neighbourhood restaurant great? Perfection – but in a slightly wonky way | Rachel Cooke

A memoir of one couple's years in hospitality captures the strange alchemy of running a restaurant

My intense interest in restaurants may be traced all the way back to childhood, when I coolly set up my own little place in the Victorian outside loo at my dad's (somewhat of a hipster location, I think now). A short-lived but highly memorable establishment - at my funeral, there will doubtless be ye olde sibling jokes about how I misspelled lettuce - everything on the menu had been drawn by me in felt tip, and then cut out by hand. Service was brisk, orange squash was complimentary, and the atmosphere in the kitchen was straight out of The Bear. Woe betide the customer who dared to laugh on receiving a serving of peas that comprised just three tiny discs of lime green paper. What did they expect? I had no sous-chef and no decent scissors.

Something stuck in my small brain in that freezing cold washhouse, and it has never left me. What works, and what doesn't? Why will one restaurant succeed and another fail? (Paper veg isn't the half of it.) On city walks, wherever I happen to be, it strikes me again and again how much passion it takes to survive in hospitality - and yet, how often such passion seems either to have gone awol, or to have sent owners in the wrong direction entirely. So many paradoxes, so many confusions. From the outside, quick fixes are obvious, even to the amateur eye. Shorten your menu! Paint over that maroon wall immediately. But it's also indubitably the case that some very bad restaurants are packed, and some very good ones heartbreakingly empty.