It is one in the morning on Pier 17 at the South Street Seaport, and the Fulton Fish Market is wide awake.
Stalls in every direction. Trucks backed up to the docks, unloading. Whole tuna and swordfish laid out on ice. Flatfish in cartons. Squid by the pallet load. Forklifts cutting through the aisles with what I can only call dangerous disregard. Every man on that floor has a hook over his shoulder, the point of it digging into his back when his arms are full, and a knife in his hand. Tickets get written on small pads and slapped onto the skin of a three-hundred-pound swordfish, three or four letters and numbers in pencil, the address of the kitchen it belongs to somewhere in the city. The floor itself is a swamp. Seawater, ice melt, blood, the juice of a thousand cartons. It is moving under your boots, and you wear boots into this place because anything else gets destroyed. You wear clothing you will throw away. The smell is beyond explaining. It is the smell of the sea, but the sea concentrated, the sea hauled up by the ton and dropped on concrete, and it gets into the fabric and the leather and the hair and it does not come out.
Thousands of workers come alive at this hour. You are one small part of it.
I am twenty-something years old, carrying a bundle of cash inside my coat, and we are there to buy fish for thirty or forty restaurants that need it on the line by lunch service. Beside me is Chris. Chris is the corporate buyer for the New York parent company that owns the restaurant I work in up in Boston, the Landmark Inn at Faneuil Hall. Chris is also, by training, an out-of-work actor. He is one of the smartest people I have ever met, and he is teaching me, in real time, that buying fish at one in the morning is a performance. The tonality matters. The energy matters. Whether the man on the other side of the crate believes you are serious matters.
We had started this run at four in the morning when I first took the job. Then three. Then two. Then one. We kept moving it earlier because we kept finding more to do.
By sunrise we are walking off the pier with the orders placed, the deliveries arranged, the cash gone. We get coffee. We get something sweet. We watch the light come up over the East River.
From the pier we walk back through the Fashion District, into the mid-20s on 7th Avenue, where the streets at that hour are already alive in a way that has nothing to do with us. Long fur and mink coats on rolling carts. Garment racks moving from trucks onto sidewalks and back again. People with pads and pens shouting orders across the street to each other. We thread through it on our way to the office.
First stop is always Burke & Burke, the gourmet bakery-café around the corner on Seventh Avenue. The huge iced coffees, easily thirty-two ounces. The Italian tuna sandwiches. Enough to start the morning. The rest of the day they send more upstairs to our desks, because once we are at our desks we do not leave them, except for the restroom.
We are on the phones hundreds of times a day. Old Ma Bell desk sets, the kind with the lit-up line buttons across the bottom, and we fight over those lines all day long. Merging. Conferencing. Holding. Calling out. Calling in. They are mechanical, every one of them, and we break a few every week. There is a book of vendor numbers, hundreds of them, but within a few weeks every number is in our heads. We dial from memory. Pricing. Quotes. Substitutions. Problems. Credits. Whatever the day brings. The headsets we wear through by the dozen, and they do not come off.
By six or seven the next day’s plan is already taking shape, and the boots from the market are sitting under the desk with a coat of Lysol on them.
And the next morning, we do it again.
That was the world I learned the procurement job in.
The job I had walked into
The Landmark Inn was a four-story building in the North Market block at Faneuil Hall with three restaurant concepts under one roof, owned by a parent company headquartered in New York with restaurants across multiple states. I had worked every station in a kitchen by the time I got there. Dishwasher, porter, pizza, sandwich, fry, garde manger, prep, line, sous, expediter, bar. Even DJ and design work on the side. The chef I worked for, carrying all three concepts in that building, asked me one day if I would take over purchasing.
That is how I became a buyer. Not because I had been trained for it. Because the chef did not have time for it, and because I said yes.
What I walked into was a job nobody had written down. The parent company in New York had restaurants in multiple states and almost no formal systems. It was the early 1990s. Computer technology in the back office was Lotus 1-2-3 and a lot of manual books. We did the trending by hand. Week over week, month over month, year over year, every comparison written out in pencil and then typed in. I hated it and I loved it. It was tedious, and it was the only way the math got done, and the math was what kept the operation honest.
The supplier world we worked in barely exists anymore. Almost every company we bought from was a family business. Fish, meat, produce, dairy, dry goods, paper, chemicals. Each category had its own culture, its own cadence, its own four-generation history. The salesman I was talking to was often the owner. Sometimes the owner’s son. Sometimes both, on the same call. I spent my twenties on the phone with people whose fathers and grandfathers had built the businesses they were now running, and whose sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters are running them today, in many cases for companies five times the size.
The Friday afternoon
The moment that made me a buyer happened on a Friday afternoon in summer.
I was on my own that day. A chef at one of our locations needed product for the weekend, and the supplier on the other end of the phone was hell-bent on not delivering it. He had reasons. He had a route already loaded. He had a closing time. He had a Monday. He had everything except a willingness to put my chef’s order on a truck.
The chef was a hundred percent dependent on me to fix it. Not getting the product was not an option. There was no second call to make.
So I made the call I had to make. I do not remember the exact words. I remember the shape of it. I remember the moment the conversation turned. I remember walking away from that phone knowing I had just done something I had not previously known I could do. Convince a person whose job was telling me no to say yes, because the alternative was a restaurant going dark on a Friday night.
The product was delivered. The weekend went out clean. And the way I spoke with suppliers, from that afternoon forward, was different. Not louder. Not more aggressive. Just clearer about what was at stake and what was non-negotiable.
What the job actually was
That world, with Chris in New York and the fish market at one in the morning, the family-business owners on every line, the headsets that never came off, the manual ledgers and the Lotus spreadsheets, taught me what multi-unit, multi-state procurement actually requires. It is three things stacked on top of each other.
Relationships, because you cannot negotiate from a directory. You negotiate from years.
Judgment, because every chef has different specs, every location has different needs, every category has its own rules, and no single playbook covers all of it. You learn judgment by listening to people who have spent thirty years inside one category and asking them what you should know.
And calculations, because the trending and the comparisons and the variances across locations and weeks and months are how you actually catch the drift. In the early ’90s we did that work by hand. Today there is more of it, not less.
One person can carry all three of those for a while. Especially a young person willing to start at one in the morning. But it is a fragile arrangement, and it is the arrangement most independent restaurants are still trying to run on.
What stayed
The relationships from those years have mostly come and gone. People moved on. Companies were sold. The Fulton Fish Market itself moved to Hunts Point in 2005. The world of family-owned wholesale, owners on every call, cash on the floor at the market, that world is largely gone. Distribution has become more sophisticated, more consolidated, more digital. In a lot of ways that is better. In some ways it is not.
No more boots. No more Lysol. No more bundles of cash. No more sunrise on the pier. No more Burke & Burke at 7 a.m.
What stayed, and what I think back on most often now, is the knowledge. The thousands of conversations with owners and their sons and their truck drivers and their warehouse pickers and their salespeople added up to a foundation that no course or book or piece of software could have given me. How fish actually moves. How meat actually gets cut. How produce actually trades. How the inside of a category looks when you stand inside it for years.
That foundation is what ChefMod was built on. Not just a platform. A body of knowledge about how each niche of this supply chain actually works, applied on behalf of operators who do not have a Chris in New York and a 1 a.m. trip to the market to learn it themselves.
The advice I would give my younger self
If I could go back to week one at the Landmark Inn and tell that twenty-something kid one thing, it would not be a tactic.
It would be: have more of those conversations. Soak up more of that knowledge. Say yes to every invitation. Every walk-through, every market trip, every offer to ride along, every chance to stand in someone else’s warehouse and listen to them explain their business. The relationships fade. The knowledge compounds.
For the operator reading this, in 2026, running multiple locations across multiple states with more vendors and more SKUs and more compliance than any of us had in 1991: the multi-unit job has always been about people and judgment and the slow accumulation of knowledge across categories. It has never been about the orders.
If the people carrying that work for you are spending their hours on calculations a system should be doing, you are paying for it twice. Once in the time they lose. Once in the knowledge they do not have time to build.
Close
I would love to hear how you are structuring that work in your own operation. Reply, comment, or DM me. That is the conversation this newsletter is for.
John
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