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Running restaurants is not rocket science. But creating a vibe and getting it right depends on the ability to manage a few key factors that, when they come together, set the tone for any diner’s experience. You learn a lot about how to make a restaurant successful through your own experiences eating in them. Hopefully you’ve been fortunate enough to travel, and your experiences have been from across the globe and at all levels of dining, from simple cafés and bistros to Michelin-starred restaurants at the haute-cuisine end of the spectrum. But even if you haven’t, it just requires you to think about what makes you happy when you visit a restaurant and try and replicate or improve upon that experience.

Niccolo Lorimer, my freshman roommate at Franklin and Marshall College, came from the small village of Scandicci in the hills overlooking Florence, Italy. When we first met while moving into the dorms, we couldn’t have been more different. We were chalk and cheese, with me the stuttering, squash playing, pre-med science nerd to his free-spirited, incense-burning, psychedelic-clothed hippie persona, majoring in religious studies. Yet, we hit it off and bonded right away. Maybe it was because we were both so different...

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