For our Foodie Friday Fun this week, let me ask you to put on your food critic hat.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
When you try out a new restaurant, and assuming it’s not an unusual cuisine, what dish do you look for on the menu to test the kitchen’s cooking skills? For me the answer is always a roasted chicken. That’s right – plain, roasted chicken, the simpler the better. My thinking is this: nothing simple is ever easy. If you’ve ever done roasted chicken, it’s tremendously difficult to present a perfect dish. The breast meat moist, the thigh properly cooked, the skin crisp. There are different densities and cooking times for all of them. Overcooking the bird can ruin it; undercooking it can ruin you for several days.
One of the most simple foods in terms of preparation has to be sushi. It’s just sliced fish and rice. Why, then, does it take years to train a sushi chef? Candidates will do nothing but make rice for years to start their training. Simple – not easy. Yakitori is grilled meat on a stick but perfection is elusive. Try to turn out perfect soft-boiled eggs. The yolk cooks before the white yet we want the opposite to occur to get them perfectly soft-boiled. Simple, not easy. Which is the business point as well.
It’s incredibly difficult to do some of the most simple tasks well. Deliver a succinct talk that leaves the audience feeling as if they’ve really learned something completely. Explain your business in under a minute – a great elevator pitch. Run an efficient meeting with exactly the right people in the room, no more, no less. When hiring, many great chefs ask the candidate to make them something very simple – an omelet or scrambled eggs – that is often very difficult to get just right. We should steal that notion – ask candidates to do something “simple” like having them explain their current job to you completely, and briefly.
Thoreau challenged us to simplify because we’re too caught up in detail. As we do, just as with the roasted chicken, there are no places littered with detail in which to hide (read that a fancy sauces, seasonings, stuffings, etc. for the chicken!). Simple isn’t simple. It’s often complicated, and more often than not that complexity is hard. The great cooks – and business people – just make it seem simple and great at the same time.
Consult Keith 