Tag Archives: cooking

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?

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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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September 21, 2012 · 2:46 pm

Taste

 

It’s always a challenge cooking for others. For me it’s not really the quantity of food or even timing the meal so that all the dishes are ready for the table at the same time. The hardest part is anticipating people’s’ tastes. For example, when I make jambalaya, I like a kick beyond that of some good andouille sausage. Finding a well-seasoned chunk of tasso along with a fairly liberal dose of cayenne can do it for me but there are very few people for whom I cook that like that sort of heat. A splash of hot sauce at the table isn’t the same thing – it’s a sharp “forward heat while cooking the spices into the dish is a slower, more mellow burn. Still, one has to know one’s consumer (as I always remind us here) so I tone it down in most cases.

Taste isn’t just something that applies to food.  It’s easy enough to season a dish in a way that makes you happy as a cook, but unless you’re a well-known chef who has developed a palate that others find appealing, you’re probably going to under-season and let people add salt, pepper, hot sauce, or whatever else makes them happy (I just shuddered as I recalled a niece pouring ketchup over a delectably spiced dish years ago). As businesspeople, we have to assess our tastes continually and remember that there are as many permutations of it as there are people.

Very few business leaders can impose their tastes on others.  Even a guy like Steve Jobs failed to do so from time to time (remember the antenna debacle on the iPhone, which was a design issue?  Customers got fed up with the dropped calls even if it looked pretty).  Listening to the social sphere, reading your data, getting regular customer service reports, sentiment analysis, and lust plain talking to people is a critical part of assessing taste.

How’s your palate these days?

 

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