Category Archives: food

December 12, 2014 · 11:13 am

Finely Chopped Onions And Business

Foodie Friday, and this week it’s about chopping onions.  No, it’s not a screed on how cutting up onions relates to being in business without crying although that’s not a bad idea for some Friday down the road.  This week, it’s about a legendary chef – Marco Pierre White – and his technique for chopping onions more finely than you’ve ever chopped them before.  There are practical reasons for doing so as he explains. The video I’ve embedded demonstrates his technique, but it’s actually something he says in the video that’s our subject today.

First, the chopping lesson:

Did you hear what Chef White had to say as part of his demonstration?

‘Perfection is lots of little things done well.’

He picked that up from Ma Gastronomie by Fernand Point. He is the father of modern French cuisine. It’s a great business reminder too.  We talk a lot in this space about many “big” things but the reality is that we can’t ignore the most basic skills if we’re to continue to improve as businesspeople.  We might be focused on the big idea, but if our basic writing skills are inferior, the brilliance of our idea won’t be expressed.

Chopping onions is probably the most basic of cooking skills.  I’ve seen friends spend a full two minutes chopping an onion when had they learned the proper technique and practiced they would be able to do so in under 30 seconds.  It’s a little thing, but improving all of the little things is sometimes the only way to improve the whole.  As an aside, it’s a heck of a lot more fun when the tedious things go quickly and efficiently both in the kitchen and in the office.

Striving for continuous improvement is a noble goal.  Our focus should be on big steps forward.  The way to get our businesses to take those steps just might be through improving all the little things, especially when we’ve done a good job on the big ones already.  After all, a team that keeps hitting singles and not making many outs eventually scores a lot of ones, even without any home runs.

You agree?

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December 5, 2014 · 2:07 pm

Sneaky Is Stupid

Foodie Friday, if you’re not too stuffed from all of the past week’s consumption.  I came across an article in The Guardian which pulled back the covers on how some restaurants improve their margins by cutting corners in sneaky ways.  What prompted them to write the piece was the travails of The Olive Garden we featured here on the screed a few Fridays ago.  Not surprisingly, the myopic practices going on there is just the tip of a much larger set of things restaurants do. 

A few examples: restaurants will often serve glasses with a half-inch to an inch of foam on top because leaving that much foam can save them around 20 beers per keg.  They will use heavier, high-grade silverware for steaks to give the perception of a higher grade of meat.  They will cut back portion sizes and buy smaller plates.  If they cut an ounce out of a burger they’ll buy smaller buns (something I think they learned from the package goods folks).  Naturally, prices don’t change.

The list goes on but it raises the obvious business point.  As I wrote in September, many companies lose their core identity in the chase for revenues which is bad.  Hurting the products that got you to this point is worse.  Smarter companies do one of several things.  If you’re Apple, you maintain higher prices and don’t mistake cost for value.  If you’re Honda or Toyota or Nissan, you create separate brands (Acura, Lexus, Infiniti) that allow you to charge for a better product while permitting you to change the “standard” brand however you’d like.  No smart brand is sneaky.

What dumb companies do is to cut corners. Successful companies are always looking for creative ways to protect the bottom line without giving the impression that quality is going down with it.  Imagine what happens when your current customer base picks up on the smaller burgers or questionable shrimp.  Legitimate changes – repositioning menu items to increase sales or example – don’t affect quality.  Anything that does may increase your per table margin but you’ll be seating far fewer tables over time – even if you’re not in the restaurant business.

Make sense?

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November 26, 2014 · 11:43 am

Timing Is Everything

Today is prep day for tomorrow’s feast.  Since I’m busy doing many other things (including praying the pending snow storm misses us), I’m reposting my Thanksgiving screed from 2008.  Not much has changed in the intervening 6 years about my approach to the task at hand.  It’s also a decent observation on the value of planning and attention to detail.  Happy Thanksgiving!

I had an assistant once who developed the concept of “the Ritter factor” when estimating time.  The basic concept was that if I said something would take a certain amount of time, that amount needed to be multiplied by 4.5 to determine the actual time required.  While not admitting to the accuracy or even existence of this factor, I can state that Thanksgiving‘s biggest challenge is time. “Time?” you’re thinking, “that’s the biggest challenge?  HA!  This idiot has really lost it!”  I’m sure you could put together a list of this week’s challenges which would contain items such as where to stash all the coats, how to fit 25 people around a table made for 12, and how to step over Uncle Elmer to get to the bathroom without waking him up.  However, as the conductor of the Thanksgiving orchestra around old Rancho Deluxe here, let me assure you that the primary challenge of the day is delivering all 39 items on the menu to the table at the same time, appropriately hot or cold as required.

The key to the entire day is a timed checklist.  Seriously.  I take enormous amount of crap from everyone who sees mine each year until they realize that the meal is being served at exactly the time requested by the Mrs. which happens to coincide nicely with halftime of the football game.  This list is created by using back timing – something TV and radio producers do all the time.  Beginning at the desired end time and factoring in the availability of necessary facilities (ovens, stove burners, etc.), you work backwards and piece together the time required for each dish until you have a road map.  Anything I can knock off ahead of time (baking, prepping all the dressings, parboiling vegetables) is done up to 24 hours in advance.  It even gets down to resting time for the turkeys before carving and the time it takes for the oil to heat up in the fryer.  In fact, we’ve started frying a turkey in part because it frees up an oven late in the process.  This sounds like a silly bit of overkill to get the meal ready, but it prevents you from leaving the soup in the refrigerator or forgetting you were serving carrots and finding a 20lb bag the next morning.

I’d be happy to share my list with you but it really would only help you a bit.  The cooking facilities here are pretty damn good although we spent the money on them instead of indoor toilets (kidding).  You have to tie your back-timed list to the menu, the facilities you have available to you, and your cooking skills.  Even though my former assistant (who comes most years for the Thanksgiving meal) thinks I’m chronologically challenged, I’ve got 25 full bellies Thursday evening that think otherwise.

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