Back to the kitchen for me

Every so often in life it is time to make a change.  In the restaurant business we find this a lot.  People in this business grow stagnant and bored of monotonous day to day jobs and lose interest.  I don’t mean the actual cooking but the prep of the same things over and over again to full fill the necessary ingredients needed to make our regular menu items.  Once this happens to a cook they begin to get lazy, cutting corners and not following the steps needed to make the food the way I want it made.  They begin giving you lackadaisical answers to question like “what do you think we should do with the fish tonight?” or “got any idea for a soup?”.  The answers begin to be whatever takes the least work and  is the least creative.  Then after all this, if you don’t notice it and catch it in time, the quest complaints begin to come.  It was a sure sign when I got a complaint that our marinara was tasteless.  This is a sauce I could make with my eyes closed and so can all my kitchen staff, so why is it off.  I began tasting everything and all signs led to laziness from an individual.  I don’t think it was even intended to be lazy but just lack of interest.  This was one of the hardest working guys I have ever met, and a master in front of the burners.  Why was his section the one lacking and all the sudden receiving terrible remarks from multiple guests?  His mind was no longer in it.  He wasn’t excited about creating any more and began to skip steps that I had laid out for him.  He wasn’t taking the time to teach other people how to do things right so when questioned he blamed everyone else but himself.  It was at that moment I knew it was time.  So, with no time to spare, my partners and I had to make a tough decision and let him go.  Like I said before the guy was a incredible person to have in the kitchen but he was putting our investment at risk by not taking the time to things right and command the kitchen.  Now, making that decision was a bit easier for my partners because all they had to do was weigh a friendship against an investment and unfortunately the investment won.  For me on the other hand it was back to the drawing board, it was up to me to jump back in the kitchen and get it running perfect again as quick as possible.  So I have taken my chef coat out of the closet and gotten back in the kitchen and I got to tell you, it feels great.  We are running as smooth as ever and I have heard only good remarks from the customers.  I don’t want to say it is all me because that would be a down right lie but I am allowing the staff to show me what they’ve got.  Sometimes if you allow someone to take pride in their work they show you things they have never shown you before.  All you have to do is take the time to explain to them why we do certain things so that they understand the importance.  For instance, cooking the onions slow for the onion soup caramelizes them instead of just burning them and reducing the soup makes a much more intense flavor.  Yes, this is common sense for most people that are doing this for a living but like my partner always says “you have to spell everything out”.  So taking a little time to explain things has sparked interest in the kitchen staff and it is now like I am teaching culinary school, every thing I do, I have eyes peering over my shoulders and my staff wants to learn.  They want to understand, not how to do it, but, why I do it.  This is very exciting to me, I have an interested staff!  This means I can teach them new things, maybe even difficult things, because they want to learn.  It must be great when a teacher gets a class like this, everyone wants to learn so they pay attention with out forcing them.  This is actually therapeutic to me, I can take time to get a little creative and make labor intensive items from scratch.  Now, if I can only get my wife used to my hands smelling like onion and garlic, I would be in good shape.

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