Category Archives: food

October 19, 2012 · 10:02 am

Are You Making Art Or Commerce?

For our Foodie Friday Fun this week, let’s talk about a dilemma faced by many chefs.

Chefs in training in Paris, France (2005).

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

That problem is the “art vs. commerce” equation.  What I mean is that unless a chef is cooking solely in competitions or to entertain guests in his/her home, they’re probably conscious of their food costs.  In fact, that’s the number one issue I think restaurants face because unlike rent and utilities it’s a highly variable cost.  In my mind it comes down to do we want to make art – some wonderful dish that has expensive ingredients and requires a lot of labor to produce – or are we making commerce – highly repeatable, high margin plates.  That’s something that affects your business too.

I’ve always found it interesting that culinary schools offer both culinary arts tracks as well as culinary management tracks.  The former is about food science –  nutrition, flavors and cooking techniques. They also spend time on presentation but mostly on creating great flavors and developing cooking skills.  The latter program is about running the business – hiring people, accounting, running the front-of-house (the non-kitchen part of the business).  Art vs. commerce.  One would think that to be successful in the food business you’d need a heavy dose of the other side.

These sorts of choices are made all the time in your business as well, I’ll bet.  Where do we put the ads on the web page?  Do we auto-start our audio or video without user initiation?   Do we provide our store staff with uniforms or let them wear whatever?  Are we PBS looking to make art or ABC looking to sell ads?  Should we have someone go get the goods from storage or just go floor to ceiling with boxes of inventory?  Obviously no one would confuse Nordstrom’s with Costco, but to a certain extent that’s the art vs. commerce equation at work.

Obviously it’s possible to pay attention to both elements.  There are high-end restaurants that charge $200 for a meal and fast food joints that charge $2.00.  The reality is that the high-end “art” places often don’t last long because they’re not paying enough attention to the commerce.  We need to run our businesses as businesses but do so with flair and as much style as our budgets will allow.

How do you deal with this dilemma?

Enhanced by Zemanta

Leave a comment

Filed under food, Helpful Hints

Tagged as , , , ,

October 12, 2012 · 9:14 am

Walking First

Foodie Friday again, thank goodness.

English: Apprentice. Man and boy making shoes.

Apprentice. Man and boy making shoes. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As we end the week, let’s talk about the professional kitchen, which may be one of the last great bastions of the apprenticeship system.  Escoffier invented the notion of the “Kitchen Brigade.” This system is still used in many restaurants and kitchens and forms the basis of the hierarchy in which people learn.  Typically, aspiring chefs take on the most menial tasks like peeling and prepping vegetables before they’re allowed to have a “real” station.  What’s going on in that world is a business point as well.

Culinary schools have changed the apprenticeship dynamic.  Now applicants come to kitchens feeling as if they’ve been through the grind of the line.  Putting aside having never been under the stress of a real dinner service for days at a time, the reality is that they are “book-smart” and the real world is a very different place.  They want to run before they really know how to walk.  This from a respected chef, Mark Vetri:

I once had a young cook who used to bring in modern Spanish cookbooks because he wanted to make things like mango caviar eggs and chocolate soil. I told him, “Hey, how about you learn how to blanch a goddamn carrot first, cook meat to a correct temperature, clarify a broth and truss a chicken? Once you can do these things then, and only then, should you try to learn these other techniques.” Trust me when I tell you that José Andrés is a master of the basics. You should strive to be one too.

This isn’t limited to the professional kitchen.  If you’ve ever managed younger people, many of them think they know the business thoroughly because they have an MBA or a couple of years in an office.  The reality is that much of what we teach as managers are basic skills that either aren’t taught at all in schools or are given a week’s worth of attention.  Listening, politicking, presentation skills, office culture, and the knowledge specific to an industry are generally not areas in which young folks come prepared.  Try to tell them that!

I was managing people (some older than me) when I was 23.  I was a department head by 25.  In retrospect, I was lucky not to have screwed up more often than I did because I was learning as I went and much of what I was learning were basic skills.  As in the kitchen, learning the building blocks of the industry and business frees you up later on to be able to do anything.  Walk first!

Enhanced by Zemanta

Leave a comment

Filed under food, Thinking Aloud

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

October 5, 2012 · 9:01 am

Eating Rocks And Bark

Our Foodie Friday Fun this week revolves around rocks, bark, and dried flowers. You probably had all three for breakfast this morning. Seriously.  Salt is the only rock we humans eat on a regular basis (or on any other basis as far as I’m concerned). The bark we regularly eat is cinnamon – you might have sprinkled some on your oatmeal or cereal. The dried flowers are pepper – maybe on your eggs?

You just know there’s a business point lurking here, and you’re right.

What’s interesting about each of the aforementioned food items is that someone had to be the first to figure out that these seemingly unappetizing things were actually quite tasty and useful in the kitchen.  None of them, however, can be used “as is”.  Peppercorns (actually a fruit of a flowering vine) need to be dried.  Cinnamon needs to be transformed from tree bark into a dried and ground form.  Salt comes in dozens of types but is either extracted from the ground or from the sea.  I’m not sure who was the first to figure that out but it’s instructive.  All have been used by humans for millennia and maybe the ancients were smarter than we are in some ways.

Sometimes our first instincts when we see something or someone who doesn’t appear to be particularly useful is to move on.  Our ancestors couldn’t do that – food was not something you ran to the supermarket to get.  In many businesses today, resource availability is in many ways as challenging as food was for the ancients.  Everything they encountered was evaluated (I expect quite a few brave souls didn’t survive the “R&D” phase of new food discovery) before it was discarded.  In the cases of these three items, someone had to figure out how to transform them into something useful.  Maybe a dead animal or fish was preserved in a bath of seawater that dried.  Maybe someone saw an animal eating tree bark and tried some.

We need to have the same mentality in many ways.  Don’t dismiss anyone or anything out of hand.  Take some time to think about how they can be useful in another form or another position (I know a lot of ex-lawyers who are great salespeople and a few accountants who do wonders in marketing).  Rocks and bark may not seem like a great diet but thinking out of the box is at the root of a great business.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Leave a comment

Filed under food, Helpful Hints

Tagged as , , , , ,