Guide

Amy Hom on Hiring, Feedback and Picking Sites From the Bar

By Wilson K Lee, updated October 2026 · How I get these numbers

Early in our conversation I asked Amy Hom for the unglamorous side of the restaurant business. She would not give me one. “I wouldn’t say that any part of it is unglamorous,” she said, and then told me about the night before. A call out had left one of her kitchens short, so the COO of a 24 restaurant group walked to the back and helped clear the dishes.

That is most of what you need to know about her. Amy is COO of Barcelona Wine Bar: 24 restaurants, 11 states plus Washington DC, now in its 30th year. She has about three decades in this industry, including operations jobs at Red Robin, sweetgreen and Bluestone Lane. And she still judges a restaurant first by how it feels the moment she walks in.

We talked in Atlanta at Workstream’s On the Clock 2026. This page is the written record: the moments I would send a friend, then my notes for anyone running one to five locations.

Why a dessert shop founder wanted a wine bar COO’s answers

I took 720 Sweets from a single shop to seven locations, then sold it. The owners I write for run one to five places, and for most of them the hard part is people.

Amy has run operations at brands as different as Red Robin and sweetgreen. When I asked how she brings the right energy into a restaurant, her answer went straight to people: who you hire, and the three skills she says our industry does not really train.

That gap hurts a small owner more than a big one. At 24 restaurants you can build a training team. At two, the person teaching your new manager to interview is you.

What Amy told me about people, sites and standards

She expects a party. Amy says that in this business “you go to a party every day,” and she holds her restaurants to it. If she walks into one of her restaurants and the energy is missing, she reads it as a leadership problem in that building.

Warmth first, technique later. “We hire for hospitality,” she said. In her view the technical part of the job can be taught anywhere. The people side is where restaurants come up short.

Three skills nobody teaches. Amy named three skill sets that she says restaurants rarely train for: interviewing, developing other people, and giving and taking feedback. Get those right, she said, and your brand and your business will scale.

Easy on people, tough on standards. That is her motto. She wants to hear about your family and your friends, and she will also be clear about what the business is paying you to do. Most people, she thinks, make it too difficult.

Data is only part of the site decision. Before Barcelona commits to a neighbourhood, the team will sit there for a couple of days, order a cocktail and ask the bartenders nearby what they earn and what they want from the area. To Amy, data is only “one piece of a very big picture,” while the real question underneath is “Can I hire here?”

No two rooms alike. Barcelona likes old buildings and leaves the walls alone. It has its own art studio, where a VP of creative makes the art, so every piece in every room is one of a kind. She wants each restaurant to feel like “there’s no other Barcelona.”

Five things I would take from Barcelona into a two-shop business

These are my translations of what Amy said, so blame me if they miss.

1. Spend half the interview on how they treat people. If the technical side can be trained, an interview should test the part you cannot train. Ask about a time they looked after a guest, a teammate, a stranger, and listen for detail. A vague answer tells you something. Try it on your next three candidates and compare notes with your manager after each one.

2. Teach the three skills yourself. Amy can build programs around interviewing, developing people and feedback across 24 restaurants. At two locations, you are the program. Three one hour sessions with your manager cover it: sit in on a real interview together, pick one crew member they will develop over the next 90 days, and rehearse one feedback talk out loud before they have to give it.

3. Put feedback on a timeline. Her structure has four parts: where you are now, what needs to improve, by when, and the goal you will check against. Fifteen minutes, once a month, with each lead. Write the date of the next check on the same page, so the talk has an end point both of you can see.

4. Sit in the neighbourhood before you sign. I learned this one the expensive way. When I first started my ice cream chain, the foot traffic data told us a location would work. On paper it should have. It never performed for our concept, and it was a big mistake we made early on. Before your next lease, spend two evenings and one lunch at the closest bar or counter and ask the staff what they earn. If you would struggle to hire there, the rent number does not matter yet.

5. Open for a reason you can say in one sentence. Barcelona opened in 1996 and has 24 restaurants in its 30th year. That is fewer than one opening a year. “Don’t just scale to scale,” Amy said, and her test for a new market is a question: “What energy would we bring the community?” Before location number two or three, write your answer down. If the only answer is getting bigger, wait.

One more thing from the room. I told Amy that the recurring theme across the successful leaders I had been interviewing was passing the baton to the next generation, and that is the work she does on the side, through LEAD and her podcast for emerging leaders. In her words, “the managers in restaurants are the ones that do all the legwork.” Train them like it.

If you want my longer take on building a team people want to join, I wrote a guide on how to create a restaurant culture that attracts top talent.

The two Amy Hom articles on Workstream’s blog

Workstream published two articles from this interview, and I wrote both. Each has its own action list, so they go deeper on specific moves than this page does.

• Why Amy Hom Hires for Hospitality and Never for Technical Skill: the people half of the talk. The energy in the room, the three untrained skills, her motto, and why she picks the leader she works for over the brand.
• 5 Things Amy Hom Does Differently at a 24 Location Restaurant Group: the growth half. Choosing sites from the bar, growing slowly, making every location feel like the only one, and keeping technology out of the guest’s view.

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