It's Never About The Taco!

By Michael Beck & Inckey

The restaurant business has a habit of collecting slogans. Some are brilliant. Some are true. Most begin as useful observations before years of repetition turn them into doctrine. Eventually nobody remembers who said them or bothers asking whether they’re still complete. They become the hospitality equivalent of an old family recipe: nobody knows where it came from, but suggesting a change can get you removed from Thanksgiving.

Anthony Valletta doesn’t seem particularly interested in inherited recipes.

When we sat down with the CEO of bartaco during the Prosper Forum at the Ritz-Carlton Orlando, I expected a conversation about restaurant growth, guest loyalty, labor challenges, technology, and probably a few stories involving margaritas. All of those subjects showed up, but they weren’t really the point. The conversation kept returning to something more fundamental: who exactly is a restaurant supposed to serve, and what happens when an industry becomes so comfortable with its own language that it stops questioning the assumptions underneath it?

Hospitality has one phrase in particular that has become almost untouchable: “Take care of your people and they’ll take care of your guests.” It earns immediate agreement because nobody wants to be the person arguing against taking care of people. Anthony isn’t arguing against it either. He simply thinks we’ve confused a good principle with a complete one.

He put the problem plainly: “The second you put an employee before a guest, tell me how you can take care of an employee with no guests in the building?”

It’s the kind of question that rearranges the furniture.

Anthony’s argument isn’t that employees matter less. It’s that purpose has an order. Guests create the opportunity that makes everything else possible: jobs, raises, promotions, careers, new restaurants, better benefits, expansion, and all the infrastructure a successful company can provide its people. Lose sight of the guest long enough and eventually you can build an organization that is exceptionally good at serving itself while wondering where everybody went.

His philosophy isn’t employee versus guest. It’s purpose before comfort, and there’s a meaningful difference between the two. The best leaders don’t take care of people by making the standard smaller until nobody has to stretch. They develop people who are capable of meeting a standard worth pursuing.

Anthony made another observation that deserves more attention than it usually gets. For many people, a restaurant job is a chapter in their life rather than the entire book. Some will stay in hospitality for decades and build extraordinary careers. Others will become entrepreneurs, teachers, salespeople, executives, parents, or something none of us has invented a LinkedIn title for yet. That isn’t a failure of retention. It’s life.

If that’s true, leadership has a responsibility beyond making every shift comfortable. That chapter should matter. Teach people how to serve another human being well. Teach them discipline and accountability. Teach them how to solve a problem when the dining room is full, the kitchen is buried, and somebody at table 42 has developed a constitutional grievance over ranch dressing. Teach them how to make a mistake, recover from it, and keep moving without turning the incident into a three-week investigation.

If people eventually leave, let them leave more capable than when they arrived. That is also taking care of people. It just asks more of both sides.

You can describe bartaco through the language of its menu if you want. Fresh street food. Coastal inspiration. Brazil. Uruguay. Southern California. Handcrafted cocktails. Scratch cooking. All accurate, and probably the least interesting way to explain why people come back.

Nobody becomes loyal to a restaurant because the menu typography looked promising. They come back because something happened there. That’s where they celebrated an anniversary. That’s where they always take friends visiting from out of town. That’s where a bartender remembered them six months later or a manager noticed something was going sideways before disappointment had to become a formal complaint.

Restaurants become part of our lives through memory, not inventory. Food matters enormously, of course, but the meal is often just the physical machinery through which something less tangible gets created. Memory has always been hospitality’s most valuable product. The tacos are simply how the memory begins.

Anthony never said those exact words during our conversation, but nearly every story he told pointed toward them. He rarely talked about food without eventually talking about people. Operational decisions circled back to the guest. Leadership decisions circled back to the guest. Culture decisions circled back to the guest. What emerged wasn’t a branding philosophy so much as a belief about why the business exists in the first place.

And then there’s the phone number.

If you’ve spent much time around restaurant LinkedIn, you may already know the story that introduced thousands of people to Anthony Valletta. He put his personal cell phone number on every bartaco receipt.

Not a customer-service number. Not a survey link. Not a QR code leading to a form with fourteen mandatory fields and the spiritual atmosphere of a DMV waiting room. His actual phone number.

His leadership team responded the way any group of reasonable adults would respond when their CEO announces plans to distribute his cell number to thousands of strangers.

“You really want to put your actual number on there?”

“Yeah... put it on.”

There’s something wonderfully uncomplicated about the decision. While companies everywhere are building increasingly sophisticated systems to collect, categorize, score, summarize, route, visualize, and occasionally avoid customer feedback, Anthony removed the machinery between himself and the customer. He wasn’t looking for another satisfaction score. He wanted conversations.

Dashboards can tell you what happened at scale. People tell you what happened to them.

Anthony wanted to hear what guests were thinking while they were still sitting in the restaurant, before two days had passed and memory had begun doing what memory does best: reorganizing reality into a slightly cleaner screenplay.

Then his phone started lighting up.

A podcast clip about the idea spread across social media, and guests around the country began texting and calling him. Anthony expected complaints because, frankly, what CEO voluntarily publishes his cell phone number and expects humanity to exercise restraint?

Instead, nearly ninety percent of the messages were positive.

Guests wanted to tell him about bartenders who rescued difficult evenings, servers who paid attention, and managers who handled mistakes with grace instead of behaving as though admitting fault might collapse the company’s market capitalization. They weren’t looking for discounts or gift cards. Most weren’t asking for anything at all.

They wanted someone to know.

That tells you something about customers that companies routinely spend millions of dollars trying to rediscover: being heard is often more valuable than being compensated.

One story illustrates the point better than any customer-experience dashboard ever could. Anthony received a FaceTime call from a woman sitting at the bar in bartaco’s Seaport location. She opened with a sentence no restaurant CEO particularly wants delivered by video call.

“My meal was terrible tonight.”

Then she turned the camera toward one of the bartenders and continued: “But this guy made the night amazing.”

Anthony followed up with her the next day, expecting a brief conversation about what had happened. Instead, something much more interesting happened. She became part of the bartaco story. Now, whenever she visits the restaurant, she texts him. Sometimes she sends a picture. Sometimes it’s a quick update. Sometimes she simply lets him know she’s back.

Think about the mechanics of that relationship. Most loyalty programs ask guests to download an app, create a password they’ll immediately forget, surrender an email address, accept several notifications, and accumulate enough points to someday receive six dollars off an appetizer. Anthony answered the phone.

One approach created another customer record. The other created a relationship.

That distinction matters because technology keeps promising that personalization comes from knowing somebody’s birthday, favorite appetizer, visit frequency, email address, and average check. Anthony isn’t dismissive of technology. He talks about CRM systems, guest data, and personalization tools like any modern restaurant executive would. He simply recognizes the limit of what those systems can tell you.

Data can tell you what somebody does. Curiosity helps you understand who they are.

That’s why Anthony challenged every general manager in the company with an assignment that sounds almost laughably simple: “Get me three names this weekend.”

Not three loyalty members. Not three email addresses. Three guests.

Learn something real about them. If they’re regulars, discover something you’ve never bothered asking. If they’re visiting for the first time, don’t stop after learning where they live. Find the story. Understand why they’re sitting in your restaurant tonight instead of the hundred other places they could have gone.

When managers returned with those stories, Anthony made the priority unmistakable: “Ignore everything else. I don't care about labor. I don't care about cost of goods. If you do this every day with every guest, there's no problem in the world we can't fix.”

Then he smiled and delivered a sentence every restaurant operator understands immediately: “Revenue covers all sins.”

It’s an easy line to misunderstand if you read it too quickly. He isn’t suggesting that strong sales excuse bad operations. He’s making a more interesting argument. Loyal guests create the breathing room that makes great businesses possible. They return. They bring friends. They forgive the occasional mistake because their relationship with the restaurant is larger than one imperfect experience.

When people feel known, they forgive. When they feel invisible, they become forensic accountants, suddenly capable of remembering the exact temperature of a taco they ate eleven months ago.

Hospitality has always worked this way. We’ve simply built enough technology around it to occasionally forget.

Eventually our conversation returned to the statement that started the whole discussion. Anthony knows how putting the guest first can sound in an era when so much leadership language is centered on the employee experience. The immediate assumption is that if the guest comes first, employees must somehow come second.

Anthony thinks that framing misses the point.

Lowering expectations isn’t necessarily kindness. Sometimes it’s simply a more polite form of giving up on somebody.

Earlier in his career, Anthony worked for a Michelin-starred chef. Nobody would describe that environment as soft. Expectations were relentless. Precision mattered. Every plate, every movement, and every interaction carried weight because excellence wasn’t something people summoned for special occasions. It was the baseline.

Yet people lined up for the opportunity to work there.

Why?

Because difficult work and bad work are not the same thing.

Sometimes the demanding place is exactly where you become better.

Anthony referenced a lesson often associated with Nick Saban: great performers want to work alongside other great performers. Excellence attracts people who want excellence because high performers don’t enjoy spending their lives compensating for teammates who have developed a passionate commitment to “good enough.”

That idea creates useful friction with some of the current leadership conversation. We have become much better at talking about psychological safety, flexibility, employee experience, and well-being. Those things matter, and Anthony isn’t arguing otherwise. The problem comes when expectations themselves begin to be treated as somehow incompatible with caring.

They aren’t.

Think about the people who actually changed the trajectory of your career. The best coach probably expected more from you than you thought you could deliver. The best boss corrected you when ignoring the problem would have been easier. The best mentor didn’t protect you from every uncomfortable truth because the entire point of mentorship was helping you see something you couldn’t yet see for yourself.

The people who made us better rarely accomplished it by making everything easier.

They made us more capable.

That is a more demanding form of care because it requires leaders to teach, coach, correct, recognize potential, and occasionally have conversations everyone would rather avoid. It also requires employees to accept that being valued and being challenged can happen at the same time.

If a restaurant is only one chapter in someone’s life, why shouldn’t that chapter teach discipline, judgment, accountability, pride, composure, and excellence? Why assume the greatest gift we can give someone is fewer expectations when greater capability will follow them for the rest of their career?

That’s a different definition of employee development, and it asks considerably more than putting inspirational language on a break-room wall.

Somewhere in the middle of Anthony’s answer, I found myself thinking about one of the finest episodes of television ever made about hospitality.

If you’ve watched The Bear, you know the episode. Richie spends hours polishing forks while staging at one of the world’s finest restaurants. Garrett inspects every fork and calmly hands back the ones that aren’t right.

Again and again.

Eventually Richie loses patience and says what almost anybody would say.

“They’re just forks.”

Of course they are.

That’s why the lesson works.

The fork doesn’t matter because it’s a fork. It matters because the guest is going to pick it up. The object is ordinary. The standard isn’t.

That is hospitality in miniature. A greeting, a clean glass, eye contact, the placement of a plate, a manager noticing frustration twenty seconds before frustration turns into a Yelp review composed with the righteous fury of a betrayed monarch. None of these things is especially dramatic by itself. Together they communicate whether somebody was paying attention.

The fork is simply where respect shows up that day.

Anthony never mentioned The Bear during our conversation, but his philosophy lives inside the same idea. Hospitality isn’t primarily built through grand gestures. It’s built through hundreds of ordinary decisions made by people who understand why those decisions matter.

That’s also why the line often shared alongside that episode—“Success is built on the details most people ignore”—resonates so strongly. It wasn’t dialogue from the show, but it captures the lesson.

Excellence is rarely dramatic when you’re watching it happen. Most of the time, it looks suspiciously like repetition.

The magic is in why someone keeps doing it properly when nobody would blame them for cutting the corner.

Anthony shared another story that explains how bartaco thinks about guest recovery better than any operations manual could.

A family arrived at one of the company’s Miami restaurants and waited far longer than they should have for a table. Eventually they gave up, walked out, and headed to another restaurant.

Most companies have a familiar playbook for what happens next. Apologize. Offer a gift card. Maybe add loyalty points. Send an email containing the phrase “We strive to exceed expectations,” which is usually how you know expectations have just been mugged in the parking lot.

The bartaco manager did something else.

He followed the family to the other restaurant and paid for their dinner.

He wasn’t trying to persuade them to come back that evening. He wasn’t chasing them down to explain why the wait wasn’t technically the restaurant’s fault. He simply recognized that bartaco had failed to deliver the experience the family expected and decided to take responsibility for the evening anyway.

When the story reached Anthony, his team expected the CEO question.

How much did that cost?

Anthony didn’t care.

He celebrated the decision because the manager had understood the principle without needing a policy to explain it. The objective wasn’t recovering a transaction. It was recovering a relationship.

That story eventually became part of what bartaco calls its Menu of Moments. Instead of relying solely on a rigid recovery manual filled with scripts, approval levels, and increasingly elaborate instructions for human behavior, the company collects stories of exceptional hospitality and shares them across the organization.

That approach recognizes something important about culture. Policies are good at teaching compliance. Stories are better at teaching judgment.

A rule tells somebody what they have permission to do in a situation you anticipated. A story helps them understand who they’re supposed to become when they encounter the situation nobody anticipated.

That’s where culture actually lives. Not in the handbook. Not in the values statement. Not in the framed poster next to the employee entrance. Culture reveals itself at 8:17 on a Saturday night when the restaurant is full, something has gone wrong, the manager has twelve other problems, and nobody has time to call corporate.

What happens next tells you what the company believes.

Why People Come Back

Toward the end of our conversation, Anthony said something every operator should probably write somewhere visible: “I’d rather run short with the right people than staffed with the wrong ones.”

If that means closing part of the restaurant for a night, so be it. He would rather protect the guest experience than pretend everything is fine because every position on the schedule has a name beside it.

That philosophy takes nerve because the short-term cost is painfully visible. An empty table is easy to count. Turning away revenue hurts immediately. A damaged reputation is harder to see because it usually arrives slowly, disguised as a series of compromises that individually seem reasonable.

Standards rarely collapse in one spectacular event. They erode through exceptions. One person who probably shouldn’t have been hired. One shift where everybody agrees good enough is good enough. One problem nobody addresses because the restaurant is busy. Then another exception becomes easier because there was already a first one.

Eventually the compromise stops feeling like a compromise.

It becomes the operating model.

Every decision casts a vote for your reputation. That may be the real thread connecting everything Anthony talked about: the phone number on the receipt, the assignment to learn three guest names, the manager who followed a family to another restaurant, the insistence on running short rather than staffing with the wrong people, and the refusal to separate caring about employees from expecting excellence.

They are all expressions of the same belief. The guest isn’t one stakeholder among many in a restaurant. The guest is the reason the restaurant has stakeholders.

And strangely enough, taking that idea seriously doesn’t require treating employees as disposable. It can produce exactly the opposite result. People generally want to know their work matters. They want to understand what good looks like. They want teammates who care. They want leaders who notice when they’re capable of more. They want to leave a job with skills, stories, relationships, and standards they didn’t have when they arrived.

Meaningful work isn’t always comfortable work. We’ve spent enough time confusing those two things.

Listening to Anthony, I realized the conversation had very little to do with tacos. It wasn’t really about margaritas, labor models, CRM systems, or restaurant technology either. Those were simply the machinery surrounding a much older idea.

Every organization serves something, and trouble begins when it forgets what that something is.

What Anthony is trying to build at bartaco is not merely a taco chain. It’s a place where employees learn what excellent hospitality feels like from the inside and guests collect the kind of memories that make them want to return.

The tacos happen to be outstanding, which certainly doesn’t hurt.

But they were never the whole point.

We’d like to extend our sincere thanks to The Prosper Company , The Prosper Forum, and The Prosper Brief Podcast for inviting Inc Tank to be part of this community and giving us the opportunity to have conversations like this one.

The hospitality industry has no shortage of conferences, panels, presentations, and people wearing lanyards while attempting to drink coffee, check email, and remember the name of the person walking toward them. What Prosper has built feels different because the useful conversations don’t stop when the keynote ends.

They continue over coffee, in hallways between sessions, around dinner tables, and on flights home. That’s often where an idea gets tested properly, when somebody says something that bothers you just enough to make you reconsider what you thought you knew.

We’re grateful for the opportunity to meet leaders like Anthony Valletta, grateful for the trust Prosper has placed in Inc Tank, and grateful to help tell stories that deserve a wider audience.

The thought that stayed with me after the microphones were turned off wasn’t about tacos, technology, labor, or whatever leadership trend happens to be occupying conference stages this year. It was much simpler.

People remember how you make them feel, and they notice when you cared enough to get the details right.

Everything else is just the menu.