What Restaurant Operators Can Learn from Airline Safety Training

I've been in restaurants for thirty years. I've opened more than twenty concepts. I've stood behind the line, stood in the weeds, stood at the host stand at 7pm on a Saturday when a table of eight just walked in unannounced. And I can tell you with complete honesty that the moments when things go badly wrong in a restaurant are almost always moments when someone had to stop and think about something they should have already known cold.

Here's the thing about airlines that most restaurant operators don't fully appreciate. A flight attendant has probably done the safety demonstration several hundred times. They know it in their sleep. And still, every single flight, the airline requires them to do it again. Not because anyone thinks this particular attendant forgot how to point to the emergency exits. They do it because the airline understands something fundamental about human memory: repetition isn't remedial, it's structural. You don't repeat training because your people are slow. You repeat it because forgetting is what brains do.

Restaurants almost never operate this way.

What we do instead is train someone on allergens during their first week, hand them a laminated sheet, and then consider the job done. Maybe we do a pre-shift mention when a new dish comes on the menu. Maybe. But systematic, recurring reinforcement? Almost nobody does it. And then we act surprised when a server tells a guest that the pesto is nut-free because they simply don't remember the conversation from six weeks ago.

I want to be specific here because vague warnings are useless. At Fat Tommy's, we had a situation a couple of years ago where we added a walnut cream sauce to a seasonal flatbread. Beautiful dish. The chef was proud of it. We talked through it in one pre-shift. We mentioned it a second time a few days later. Two weeks in, a guest flagged a nut allergy at the table, the server confirmed the item was safe, and it wasn't. Nobody lied. Nobody was careless in any way they'd recognize. They just didn't remember. The dish was new. The allergy conversation happened fast. The retention wasn't there.

That's not a training problem in the traditional sense. That's a repetition problem.

Aviation figured this out a long time ago. The FAA requires recurrent training, not just initial certification. Pilots sim emergencies they'll likely never face in real life, over and over, because the research is clear that a skill rehearsed once is a skill that erodes. The airline industry treats memory decay as an engineering problem to be solved, not a character flaw to be scolded.

We treat it as a character flaw. Someone forgets a modifier, forgets a prep method, forgets a sauce component, and the instinct is to wonder why they weren't paying attention. But paying attention at hour six of a Saturday double isn't a reasonable ask without support systems behind it.

Now let me tell you what this actually looks like in practice when you get it right.

The operators who run the tightest floors aren't necessarily the ones with the most elaborate training manuals. They're the ones who find ways to keep information circulating. A quick three-question quiz before a Friday night shift. A manager who makes allergen review part of the weekly rhythm, not a one-time event. A culture where knowing the menu cold is genuinely expected, not just theoretically required.

The platform I built, ShiftTrained, came directly out of this frustration. I wanted a way for my teams at Fat Tommy's and Black Barrel Tavern to do short, sharp knowledge reps on their phones without me having to build the questions by hand every time the menu changed. What I found was that when you make the repetition easy and low-stakes, people actually do it. Our staff retakes quizzes voluntarily on their own phones. Not because I told them to. Because it's fast, it's on their schedule, and it turns out people like knowing that they know things.

But honestly, the tool matters less than the philosophy. The philosophy is: treat memory as infrastructure, not as assumption.

Airlines don't assume their people remember. They build systems that ensure it. They schedule recurrence. They test under simulated pressure. They normalize the idea that reviewing something you already know is just part of professional life in a field where mistakes have real consequences.

Our mistakes have real consequences too. Not the kind that make the evening news most of the time. But a guest with a genuine allergy who gets the wrong answer from a server who just forgot, that's serious. A table that asks about a dish and gets a blank stare, that's a table that doesn't come back. A new hire who tagged along for two shifts and now needs to upsell a menu they barely know, that's revenue walking out the door every single service.

The airlines learned to respect the forgetting curve. It's time restaurants did the same.

Drill it like it matters. Because it does.

Have a great day! — Terry Psaltakis
Your AI Restaurant Guy