"I was absolutely caught," Rosemary says. "He wouldn't have allowed a divorce. There wouldn't have been child support, because we didn't have any money. And I didn't have any skills to earn a living to support four kids."
"She was scared all the time," remembers Kathy. "We were all scared."
Tom started Los Tios in 1970 with $25,000, working with a friend who cooked Tex-Mex. He loved the restaurateur's life: night after night he'd sit in the dining room, his 200-plus-pound bulk wedged into a booth, charming the public and bullying the staff, feeding his ego with boasts of big plans. Until they hit $300 a day in sales, enough to cover costs, he had to take a part-time job during the day to pay the bills. Rosemary would help out with the books or at the cashier stand if they were shorthanded -- just as long as the housework didn't suffer.
The rising tide of Houston's boom lifted even Tom's fragile boat. By 1973, Los Tios was in the black. That year Tom opened a second unit, and in 1975, a third. By 1976, flush for the first time in his life, he began to test the newfound credit possibilities of company ownership, buying two new cars, a swimming pool for the house, and a complete set of new home furnishings, including sterling-silver flatware service for 12.
Tom's death in 1976 left Rosemary buried in bills, both business and personal. For months, Tom's estate was tied up in a court-ordered appraisal, and what little insurance he left could not be released until the coroner ruled that his self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head was accidental. State taxes were already coming due when the Internal Revenue Service announced an audit of the Garbetts' tax returns for the previous three years. Although the restaurants were making money day to day, it wasn't much, and with the business leveraged to the hilt, a cash crisis loomed not far in the distance. A potential buyer offered to purchase the company for half its book value.
"You'll have to sell anyway," the company accountant insisted. "You have no choice," her lawyer agreed.
"I probably would have sold, too," Rosemary says, "if the offer hadn't been for 50? on the dollar. My accountant told me we should live off the interest from the sale, but I knew I couldn't put four kids through college with that. And we had done without for too long and sacrificed too much to give it away. I thought, 'If I'm going to do that, I might as well just lose it on my own."
Things got worse before they got better. The top manager and head chef deserted, followed by the four office employees. "I won't work for a housewife," one said. "You're a loser," another said. Old suppliers shifted Los Tios to COD -- "it was your husband who had the credit rating," they told her. New suppliers kept turning up, delivering uniforms and matches -- "your husband ordered them before he died," they would say. Too shy to talk with salespeople herself, Rosemary had to delegate the job to a 19-year-old management trainee. "No way you're going to be able to pay the rent," her landlord sneered. "I'll be stuck with enchiladas."
"All those insults and put-downs really hurt," Rosemary remembers. "But they made me mad, too, because I knew just how much I had done for my husband all those years."
Why couldn't she do it? She knew what her customers wanted from a family restaurant: consistent quality, with value for dollar -- the things she'd always wanted for her family. And if running the restaurants came down to managing budgets, scrimping to pay bills, juggling schedules, and still putting food on the table with a smile at 5:00 p.m. -- well, she had plenty of experience with all that.
Her ambition at the start was modest: to preserve the shaky status quo and pay the bills. Self-confidence came slowly, from small successes such as meeting the payroll, getting her tax payment in on time, or learning to make conversation at a business lunch. But the more time she spent at the restaurants, the more she saw the problems that Tom's style had created. He had disdained details and never understood controls. As a result, profits were walking out the door -- in the accounts of suppliers who overcharged and underdelivered, in the satchels of the kitchen staff who helped themselves to groceries, in the pockets of waiters who kept more than the tips.
Rosemary made simple changes at first: she locked the kitchen doors, numbered waiters' checks and had them tallied against receipts each night, paid bills weekly by check. She started keeping, and comparing, weekly books for each unit, posting the figures herself.
She managed people differently, too. Tom had been a tyrant, ruling from a distance by intimidation and threats. She knew how that felt. Now, she told employees that everyone deserved to be listened to, and everyone deserved responsibility. Under Tom, operations had been split among three unit managers who ran the front of the restaurants and a single food supervisor for all three of the kitchens. Rosemary abolished the supervisor's post and put each manager in charge of an entire restaurant -- then gave each of them a share of the profits based on increases in sales and decreases in costs.
