John Foley

John Foley is an entrepreneur, writer, author, and rancher focusing on the restaurant world. He woke up one day and found himself in the restaurant business.

It was mere happenstance that while working for a local paper in St. Paul, Minn., he wrote a story about the city's 100-year-old grocery store, The Crocus Hill Market. After reading the story, the owner of the market decided Foley had more passion for his business than he did so he sold it to him. The transplanted New Yorker found himself in the grocery business without any knowledge or experience. To make matters worse, he convinced his girlfriend at the time to give up her six-figure executive job and join him in the business. It isn't often that an entrepreneur can turn a mistake into a profitable venture. But with the help of his partner (and future wife) Kranston, Foley did just that.

With over a decade of experience as a restaurant designer, owner, and operator, Foley views the business as nobody else does -- as a social addiction. For over 10 years Foley worked in his restaurants, grew the company, and experienced the highs and lows of the business.

Foley's insight to the problems, the solutions, the constant concern for perfection, and the feeling that the everyone else is running a more successful restaurant, not only brings a smile to the reader's face, but offers tips and advice on how to overcome the daily stress of the business.

In his dining decade, Foley learned the business from the bottom up, worked every position in the restaurant, (at least once), mastering the tricks, techniques, and secrets of growing a single unit company with 20 seats into a multi-unit group with a total of 590 seats, including a classic sixty-foot catering boat- in two states.

Foley's work has appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner, and numerous other publications.

Presently the author lives on a ranch in the Mayacama Mountains overlooking Northern California's Sonoma Valley. Aside from The Restaurant Blog, Foley is training his two rare Mammoth Donkey yearlings, Ditto and Scooter, tending to a small group of bee hives and is working on plans to develop a winery for the production of Dry Sparkling Honey Wine.

Foley continues to associate with many restaurateurs but has overcome the addiction to call the numbers on the numerous "Restaurant for Lease" signs he passes.