Abby Elliott couldn’t believe the numbers — how they warped and morphed. She was shadowing a restaurant manager at Houston’s in Los Angeles, in preparation for her role in the television series The Bear. “It was crazy,” Elliott, 37, says. “As a creative person — and math is not a strong suit — it blew my mind.”
She watched the manager at work, spending 20 minutes — and not a moment more — checking that night’s food with the line cook. Then he would look at the bookings, compared against the outgoings and the incomings, the profits and losses changing night by night, minute by minute. It was like three-dimensional chess, it was like climbing shifting sands, it was Sisyphean.
It is also one
