TLDR: Owner went off the deep end in regards to menu size, trying to navigate getting it reduced. Backstory: So about 2 years ago I hit a burnout point managing a high-volume (think 30k per day at a $15 average entree price) from-scratch kitchen. Quit that place (good riddance, it was a shitshow) and needed some recovery time, so I picked up a part-time gig helping out on a food truck. Food was crazy good, hit it off with the owner, and come to find out that he's eyeballing starting a brick-and-mortar. Was on the fence until he showed me the spot. Now, at this point he was saying he wanted to run the food truck menu with a single additional item that required a piece of equipment the truck didn't have. The spot would have been perfect for what we were discussing at the time- tiny, cheap, in a high traffic area that was dead-center of the part of town he'd built his food truck reputation in... And his truck reputation was stellar. To top it off, he's doing a very specific niche subset of a popular food nationality. This particular niche has a massive local following, and literally no one else is catering to them. We have people who drive for hours to order from us because the next closest place that makes our food is a state away. So, all that combined (simple menu, huge following) was enough to change my mind and make me willing to sign on as his KM. Things started going downhill shortly after we locked down the location. I know y'all have experienced this... "Oh, we should totally have this on the menu." "Oh, what if we also sold that? It's really simple, and people love it". "We definitely need to have this other thing on the menu. I know it's a pain in the ass to execute on the line, but it's an iconic part of \*x cuisine\* and people will expect us to have it." By the time we had our grand opening, the menu had more than doubled in size. Now mind you, this space doesn't have a walk-in. We are executing everything out of a single 3 door reach-in refrigerator and a 1-door freezer. Everything we do is from scratch. So I have to juggle batch cooking and cooling multiple large-volume products alongside everything else. There's no room for backups of anything. Everything has to be fired on the fly when the previous batch runs out. We are now 7 months in. The bloated menu is impossible to train people on. Our average BoH employee retention has been around 2 months. The owner has explicitly promised to reduce the menu on 3 different occasions, but has walked it back all 3 times. Why am I still here? I consider the owner a friend, and outside of this one issue he's been an absolute unicorn of a boss. On top of that, I still genuinely believe he is sitting on a goldmine. If he could just stick to his roots, he'd make a killing off this place with relatively low overhead. I'm still here because I still believe in what this place \*could\* be. But I'm hitting the end of my rope. Owner brought in a guy in a consulting-type role to help us work through our current issues. It's someone we have both worked with in the past and trust, so I don't take any issue with it and in fact think it's a good thing. I'm in the process right now of arranging a meeting with the owner, having the consultant there to mediate, while I lock him down on reducing the menu. This is new territory for me. We are well past the point where I would normally just walk. I've never been at this level of impasse with my boss without also getting to the point where I just don't care any more... but I really want us to make this work. On one hand, I know that as it stands, if I were to walk, he'd virtually be forced to close. We don't have remotely close to the staff needed to keep the place functioning without me, and the nature of our menu means that it would be impossible for him to get someone up to speed in time. On the other hand, I don't think I would enjoy working in a place that only functioned after I metaphorically had to hold a gun to the owner's head with a "do it my way or I will shut you down". So yeah... I don't know any more. Anyone successfully navigated something similar? Is this something I can work through, or am I wasting my time? Because it genuinely feels like, as far as "what is physically possible to execute out of our space" goes, the owner has completely lost touch with reality. What do I do here?