Category Archives: Thinking Aloud

October 26, 2012 · 10:40 am

Eating What You Don’t See

For our Foodie Friday Fun this week, let’s take just a minute to think about what goes into you receiving a simple plate of food at a restaurant.

English: White House Executive Chef, Cristeta ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve been with many folks who order and scarf down their meals without a thought as to the enormous enterprise that went into making that dish happen. I know they thought about if the food was good and if the service was up to their standards. They didn’t really consider, however, all the other elements that go into a great meal.
Consider how much work goes into that one plate of food. Someone (the chef) has to plan the menu and order the components. When those ingredients show up at the restaurant, they need to be inventoried and broken down (by prep cooks) into products with which the line cooks can work. Primal cuts are broken down into steaks and chops. Cases of potatoes and bags of carrots are peeled. All this before the real prep work begins. It’s an assembly line of sorts although we don’t think of kitchen work as a manufacturing job.

Prep cooks give way to the line cooks who actually fabricate the dish for you. In between are the servers and the rest of the front of house folks. All these people need to be hired, trained, supervised and paid. What’s the business point?
The point is that we don’t notice, nor should we. Most of us are in the same boat.  When I was teaching I knew that for every hour of classroom time there would be another hour or two of prep that the kids never saw.  A simple budget presentation of one slide can involve dozens of people and hundreds of hours of prep yet the only time that anyone asks about the process is when something is out of whack.  That’s really the business point.  Apple is famous for doing technology that “just works.”   Web pages and sites involve thousands of hours of design, coding, and creativity but we tend not to notice that until something broken.  We don’t think about how our cars were built and designed until something is wrong.  The list goes on and on.

Cooking in a professional kitchen involves something unknown to most jobs – the physical reproduction of a product, from 50-60 times a day, presented in a seamless manner.   Like the proverbial swimming duck, there’s an awful lot going on under the water.  We might just be most successful when no one knows that but us!

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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!

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October 8, 2012 · 9:51 am

Don Larsen And You

Way back on this date in 1956 the Yankees were playing the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series.

The "everlasting image" of Yogi Berr...

The “everlasting image” of Yogi Berra leaping into Larsen’s arms upon the completion of the perfect game (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Yankees’ Don Larsen did something that had never been done before (or since). He pitched a perfect game in the World Series. For those of you who don’t follow baseball (we do have quite a few international readers here!), a perfect game is one in which 27 batters come to the plate and none of them reach first base. 3 outs per inning, 9 innings per game. No walks, no hits. Perfection. It’s an extremely rare feat under any circumstances – there have only been 23 perfect games in the 100+ year history of major league baseball.  To accomplish it under the pressure of the World Series is amazing.

I don’t know what was in his mind as he took the mound that day but I’m willing to bet his focus was on getting the next batter out, not on making sure none of the 27 would reach base.  Let me give you a similar thought.  There are two Swedish golf instructors who operate Vision54.   The thinking is that if we can birdie every hole during a round of golf we’d shoot 54.   That’s perfection of another sort and it sounds impossible.  Then again, as I pointed out to someone over the weekend, he’d made birdie on every hole on our course at one point or another, just not in the same round.  Like a baseball pitcher who’s retired every batter he’ll face that day at one point or another in his career, the task is to turn what you’ve done before into a consistent reality, one pitch or one swing at a time.

That’s the business point too.  We look at daunting tasks – double our sales, find 50 new customers in a few months – as impossible.  Yet we’ve increased our sales and we’ve found new customers.  We have the ability to do the remarkable because the remarkable is just stuff we can do done each and every time.  It’s less about ability than it is about execution (and maybe a little luck thrown in from time to time).

What do you think?  What impossible thing will you do today?

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