Amy Hom is Chief Operating Officer of Barcelona Wine Bar. The Spanish tapas and wine group opened in South Norwalk, Connecticut in 1996, and it now runs 24 restaurants across 11 states and Washington DC. She has been in the industry for about three decades. Before Barcelona she was VP of Operations at Red Robin and at sweetgreen, and Chief Operating Officer and Chief People Officer at Bluestone Lane. She is also a co-founder of LEAD, a nonprofit that mentors emerging restaurant leaders.
I built 720 Sweets from one shop to seven locations, then sold it. At Workstream's On the Clock 2026 in Atlanta, I hosted the speaker interviews. Amy's was the one I keep coming back to, because she answers a question most operators never ask out loud. If you can teach a new hire to work the line, then what you are really hiring for is everything you cannot teach.
Ask most operators about the unglamorous part of the job and you get a list. Amy would not give me one.
She does not think any part of it is unglamorous, and the way she describes the job explains why.
"We work in an industry where you go to a party every day."
Amy Hom
That is not a slogan she keeps for stages. The night before we spoke, one of her restaurants had a call out. She went back into the kitchen and helped clear dishes, and while she was there she checked the nozzle on the dish machine and whether the machine was holding temperature. She does that because it keeps her level with the team, and because the state of the back of house tells her how well the restaurant is being run.
She is blunt about what she looks for when she walks in the front door. If the energy is not there, she does not blame the shift or the weather.
If the vibes are not there and she is not feeling it, she says, she has the wrong leadership in that building. Then she starts adjusting, quickly.
It is a harder standard than it sounds. It makes the mood of the room the first thing she judges, and it puts the manager on the hook for it. Most of us grew up checking labor percentage and waste and speed of service. Amy checks the feeling in the room first, and treats the numbers as the thing that follows.
This is where a lot of operators stop agreeing with her.
When I asked how she gets that energy into the restaurants she runs, she did not start with training. She started with who gets through the door in the first place.
"We hire for hospitality. We're not hiring for technical."
Amy Hom
Her argument is that the technical side can be taught in any business. Pouring, plating, the point of sale, the opening checklist. None of it is the hard part. Warmth is the hard part, and nobody has worked out how to teach it to an adult who does not already have it.
So the resume gets read differently. A candidate with five years of wine service and no interest in people is a worse hire than one with two years of almost any job and real hospitality. That trade looks expensive on the day you make it. It stops looking expensive about six weeks later.
The thing worth noticing is that this is a rule she screens by, not a preference. A technical gap is a training cost she can work out in advance. A hospitality gap is a culture problem with no fix.
This was the part of the conversation I wrote down and underlined.
"There's three skill sets that people don't really train in our industry."
Amy Hom
Here they are, in her order.
One. How to interview really well. Her flat view is that people do not know how to interview. Not that they are bad at it, that they were never taught it. Most restaurant managers only ever learned it from being interviewed themselves.
Two. How to develop others really well. This is the one that gives you someone ready for the next job up. If nobody in your building is being trained for more, then every time a manager leaves you start again with a job posting.
Three. How to give and how to take feedback really well. Note both halves. Taking it is a skill too, and it is the half that holds most people back.
Her claim about the payoff is specific. If you can get those three right, she says, your brand and your business will scale, because you are interviewing for the right people, developing them, and building your bench.
Her version of the feedback conversation is short and plain. An honest talk about where the person is right now. What you want to see improved. A timeline. Some goals. Then you go from there.
That is a fifteen minute conversation, and almost nobody has it on a schedule. Workstream's guide to interview skills for the interviewer covers the first of the three, and its piece on why employee feedback matters covers the third.
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Amy has a motto, and she says she has heard it back a million times.
"It's easy on people, tough on standards."
Amy Hom
Most leaders who repeat a line like that only mean the first half. The second half, the standards, is the harder one to hold.
Being easy on people, for her, is not softness. She wants to know what is going on with you, with your family, with your friends. She will love the team all day long. That is where she starts, and nobody has to earn it.
Then comes the other half, and she says it in the same breath. This is what we expect you to do in the business. This is what we are paying you for. She adds that it should be delivered in a fun way, which is the part people drop.
The order matters. Care comes first, so the standard does not sound like a threat. The standard comes second, so nobody mistakes the care for letting things slide.
Her read on why so few leaders do it is short. "I think right now people make it too difficult and it doesn't need to be."
Two sentences, said in the same conversation with the same person. That is the whole system. Building the culture behind restaurant hiring is mostly this, repeated until people believe it.
I asked why she moved from big corporate scale to a group of 24 restaurants. She answered a different question than the one I asked.
"I choose who I work for. I am not always about a brand."
Amy Hom
Look at her resume by time period, she says, and you will find a very strong leader at the top in each one. She went to Red Robin in part to learn from Steve Carley, its chief executive at the time. She still talks to him. She went to his son's wedding. Her rule is to take everything she can from the person she works for and carry it into the next job.
At sweetgreen it was the founder. She joined before Covid, sat with co-founder Jonathan Neman while he interviewed her, and found his vision hard to walk away from. Making communities healthier, at a time the world still needed it.
She calls herself a learner, and she has the test result to go with it. She has taken StrengthsFinder, and learner is her number two after strategy.
The leaders she picks have one trait in common, and she named it in three words. She thinks they are fearless. Then she told me what that actually means, which is less flattering and more useful.
An executive coach once asked her to write down, for five days, every time she second-guessed herself. She called him back ten minutes later and said it was not working. His point was that she could not reach the next level until she learned to manage those thoughts.
Her conclusion is that a leader will make bad decisions and will never do it perfectly. The job is managing and controlling your inner critic so the team does not have to carry it.
The leaders she picks do not show their inner critic to anyone. Whatever is happening behind the scenes, in her words, "they show up for the team and they show up strong."
That, she says, is what earns your respect. Not the absence of a bad week. The decision not to put that week on the team.
Amy has 24 restaurants and an HR team to match. Nothing in this piece needs either.
None of that costs money. It costs half an hour of awkward conversation, which is the thing most operators avoid.
Hire for attitude and teach the experience, because the technical side of a restaurant job can be taught in any business. Amy Hom, Chief Operating Officer of Barcelona Wine Bar, screens for hospitality and treats technical skill as a training cost with a known price. Her view is that warmth cannot be taught to an adult later, so it has to be the thing she screens for first.
Three: how to interview well, how to develop other people well, and how to give and take feedback well. Amy Hom argues those three are the difference between a brand that scales and one that stalls. Most restaurant managers only ever learned interviewing from being interviewed themselves, and were never taught the other two at all.
Yes, and Amy Hom's motto is built on doing both at once: easy on people, tough on standards. The care comes first, so the standard does not land as a threat. The expectation comes second, in the same conversation, so nobody mistakes the care for letting standards slide.
Read the energy in the room, because it tells you about the leadership before any number does. Amy Hom says that if the vibes are not there when she walks in, she has the wrong leadership in that building, and she starts adjusting quickly. She judges the feeling in the room first, and she holds the manager responsible for it.
Choose the leader, because the brand cannot teach you anything and a person can. Amy Hom picks who she works for rather than which logo she joins, and her career lines up with a strong leader in each period. She takes what she can from each one and carries it into the next role.
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About the author. Wilson K Lee built 720 Sweets from one shop to seven locations and sold it. He now runs wilsonklee.com, where he publishes real numbers and playbooks for food and beverage owners, and he hosted the speaker interviews at Workstream's On the Clock 2026.