The cooks didn’t show up.

Not one of them – not the prep cook, not the dishwasher, not the line cook who was supposed to be loading in the food delivery by 8 a.m. It was 1989. The restaurant was barely two years old. We had a full lunch on the books at 11 and nobody to cook it.

Except me.

By 10:30, one other cook had shown up. We looked at each other over a stainless steel table that should’ve had four bodies around it. He shrugged. I shrugged back. Then we started cooking.

That morning humbled me, and I needed it. Up until then, the restaurant and I had been getting a lot of positive press. People were starting to talk. Reviews were good. The focus was on me. And like a lot of young guys who get early attention, it all went to my head. I’d started believing the whole thing depended on me.

If you’d asked me then who made that place run, I’d have pointed at myself without blinking. I thought the line was lucky to have me in the building. I barely knew them. That empty kitchen settled the argument before lunch.

My late friend Bill Latham used to say the most important person in a restaurant is the dishwasher. The first time he said it, I half-laughed. He looked at me the way he looked at anybody who half-laughed at him and said, “Try to run a Friday night without one. Let me know how it goes.”

He was right. What he was really saying is that a restaurant is a team, or it isn’t anything at all.

Thirty-seven years later, the lesson has only gotten clearer. New South Restaurant Group employs 450 people across eight concepts, and not one of those concepts exists because of me. Jarred Patterson runs the company day to day better than I ever have. Chef Nevil Barr can run circles around me in the kitchen. Chad Carmichael and Maria Keyes keep the numbers honest and the budgets tight. And 447 more people whose names won’t fit in this column show up before the sun does and stay long after the dining rooms go dark.

While I’m sitting here typing this column, six kitchens are prepping lunch without me. Somebody is stocking a walk-in. A manager is sorting out a vendor who showed up with the wrong invoice. None of it depends on me being in the building. All of it depends on the people who are.

The public doesn’t see any of that. They see a plate of food, a server smiling, a clean table. They don’t see the line cook who got there at 9, the prep cook who’s been there since 6 or the dish team closing the building at midnight after everybody else has gone home. The whole operation runs on people who show up before anyone notices and stay long after anybody thanks them.

Some of them have been with me 20 years. A few have been with me 30. One has been there since 1987. They were here before my daughter was born and before my son took his first steps. They were here through the years I don’t talk about much, back when I was still learning I couldn’t carry it all by myself, no matter how badly I wanted to believe I could. They stayed anyway.

My face is the one out front. The real work happens behind me.

A paycheck doesn’t settle that kind of debt. Every column I get to write on a Tuesday morning is one somebody else made possible by opening a building for me. The speeches, the TV, the books and the trips overseas don’t happen without the people back home holding the restaurants together while I’m off chasing the next thing.

My wife Jill remembers that empty kitchen in 1989. She was there through the lean years that followed, and she’s beside me on most every trip we host because the people who travel with us aren’t customers to her. They’re company. Our daughter Holleman designs the rooms our guests sit in now, and our son Harrison comes home to the kitchen in January. Neither of them is joining something I built alone. They know better. They grew up watching who really built it.

The cooks didn’t show up that morning. They’ve shown up every morning since. So has everybody else.

Onward.

CORN PUDDING

Ingredients:
3 cups Silverqueen corn (four to five ears)
2 cups heavy cream
1 cup half-and-half
1 1/2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons salt
3 eggs plus 3 yolks
1 1/2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon hot sauce
2 teaspoons minced onion

Directions:
■ Preheat oven to 300 F.
■ Combine all ingredients and mix well. Place in a 2-quart baking dish. Place dish into a larger baking dish and place in oven. Pour hot water into the larger dish so water comes halfway up the sides of the corn pudding dish. Bake 40 minutes. Remove from oven and let cool 10-15 minutes before serving. Yield: 10-12 servings.

Robert St. John is a restaurateur, author, enthusiastic traveler, and world-class eater from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He has spent four decades in the restaurant industry, written 13 books, and written a syndicated newspaper column for more than 24 years. Read more about Robert at robertstjohn.com.