Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Key Takeaways
- He learned more from almost failing than from any business plan.
- He sees hospitality as something deeply tied to how people connect, celebrate and support one another.
- Now he teaches hospitality the only way he thinks it can be taught: inside a real restaurant.
Seth Gerber made a promise to himself when he joined a Boston-based restaurant group as a co-owner and restaurant director: he wouldn’t play it safe.
After some risky gambles and hard realizations, Gerber found a way to turn a struggling restaurant, Mida, into multiple locations. Now he passes that wisdom to the next generation of chefs and restaurateurs as a hospitality professor at Boston University.
It started when Gerber joined Mida founders Douglass Williams and Brian Lesser. They signed a lease and began developing a concept for the restaurant. At the time, Gerber was just a general manager and figured the role would be temporary. But he became attached to Mida and personally invested in its success. However, it wasn’t smooth sailing at the beginning.
“To be honest with you, when we first opened MIDA, it did not go well,” Gerber said. “Our first six months of operation were extremely challenging. We actually almost failed.”
The restaurant burned through cash quickly and needed additional capital just to survive. Gerber says the team was “on sort of like the last legs” of figuring out whether the concept could work at all.
But beneath the numbers and customer headcounts lay a fundamental issue Gerber needed to address. Mida served avant-garde small plates, and it just didn’t conceptually fit what Gerber imagined the brand could be. It was too chic and needed more warmth, so he switched up the approach, drawing inspiration from Italian neighborhoods to bring in a friendlier, more approachable style while still upholding Mida’s quality and values. It was a small shift, but it made a big impact.
“As soon as we were able to lock in that concept, it just exploded,” Gerber said.
What essentially happened was the restaurant found its product-market fit. The look and feel finally came together, creating an experience customers wanted to return to — a place where people would bring their friends and family, a place to celebrate.
Then came another massive gamble. Gerber and his partners had already committed to a lease on a second location before the COVID-19 shutdowns began. They opened anyway, in the middle of the pandemic.
“We basically decided to go all in,” Gerber said.
The opening was chaotic. The kitchen was staffed mostly by high school and college students with almost no cooking experience, and indoor dining restrictions were changing in real time.
“It was extremely, extremely challenging to figure out how to operate this restaurant,” Gerber said.
Still, the second location worked. For Gerber, that was the moment Mida stopped feeling like a single neighborhood restaurant and started feeling like something that could scale. And it did. One location eventually turned into multiple restaurants across Boston.
Respect restaurant hospitality
Scaling Mida changed how Gerber approached restaurants and hospitality as a whole. The realization that restaurants need to fit their community, not chase what the industry considers sophisticated, is something he wanted to pass down to students. For Gerber, one of the biggest problems in hospitality is how the industry talks about itself.
That mindset now shapes how Gerber teaches the next generation of restaurant operators at Boston University. He took over the same hospitality course he had once attended as a student and almost immediately changed its structure.
“The first thing I did was take the textbook and throw it in the trash,” Gerber said.
Instead of treating restaurants like a theoretical business, Gerber pushes students into real operational thinking. They build restaurant concepts, run mock services and spend time inside active restaurants.
“It’s almost ridiculous to try to teach restaurants in a classroom,” Gerber said.
Many students arrive interested in hospitality but nervous about the industry’s reputation. Many still view restaurant work as unstable or less legitimate than other business careers. Gerber doesn’t buy it.
“I think a lot of that is total BS,” Gerber said. “I think that ultimately you can build an amazing career in this business.”
That perspective comes directly from his own experience. Gerber openly describes himself as a “misfit kid” who received multiple chances from mentors while growing up in restaurants.
“I really believe that in this industry, you have to be creative about hiring,” Gerber said. “Anybody can do anything.”
Gerber believes restaurants can become places where people develop confidence, leadership skills and real business experience, especially for those who don’t fit traditional molds. And he thinks the industry needs to stop underselling itself.
“Why don’t you just say, ‘You know what? I’m managing a restaurant,’” Gerber said. “You’re managing a multimillion-dollar business.”
Whether someone stays in hospitality for two years or twenty, Gerber believes restaurants teach leadership, resilience and problem-solving in ways few other industries can match.
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