In Boston, almost every restaurant offers "staff meal" or "family meal" between 4:00 and 4:30. Because we are feeding everyone with a "normal life", we cannot eat dinner at the conventional dinner time - early dinner is better than no dinner. However, some restaurants do not even offer family meal. I noticed this to be the trend in most restaurants in Denver and St. Louis in my travels. I have also heard of a couple restaurants that take money out of employee paychecks for staff meal (which I think is ridiculous).
In the French Laundry Cookbook, Thomas Keller writes a couple pages on the subject of staff meal. Keller reminisces about his responsibility to cook staff meal early in his cooking career at a restaurant in Rhode Island. He explains, "The staff meal cook was a low man in the kitchen heirararchy." At this restaurant, called the Dunes Club, his chef/mentor taught many fundamentals, including how to make use of scraps and by-products to create something not just nourishing, but tasty and pleasing for the staff. He writes, "If you can make great food for these people...then someday you'll be a great chef."
Staff meal is an opportunity to drastically decrease the amount of waste at a restaurant. At the end of the night, the mashed potatoes should be saved for the staff the next day if they're not suitable for customers, not thrown away! "Staffing" certain ingredients when they are past their prime but before they spoil is a great way to move product. In a restaurant that does not provide a family meal, what might be "staffed" because it isn't as fresh as it could be but has not yet spoiled will either end up on the customer's plate or in the trash. Either the food quality at the restaurant suffers, or waste and thus food cost is high. That alone is reason enough to provide staff meal free of charge to everyone who wants it.
In most restaurants that do provide staff meal, the servers and other diningroom staff get to sit down and eat, talk about the food, wine, and service points while the managers and chef "breif" them about the upcoming service period. In every kitchen I've worked in or witnessed, the cooks do not get the luxury of being able to sit down while they eat their food. Cooks are seldom allotted any break time to sit and eat due to the usual large amount of prep that needs to be done before service. I have had many days working in kitchens where I didn't even have time to eat staff meal, even though I had made it myself! A lot of this has to do with the general "I won't be ready for service" paranoia. And kitchen culture leans towards the idioms that "no one takes breaks" and "nobody sits down". As a result of these unwritten rules, cooks and chefs frequently spend at least 8 hours straight on their feet, without sitting down once. That takes its toll physically, and many cooks suffer from short-term aches and serious long-term back and knee problems.
When I become a chef, I will be instituting a mandatory 15 minute break for every cook to sit down and eat staff meal. Every chef should be concerned about their cooks' health. Plus, that 15 minute break will give them a bit more energy and ability to concentrate later in the night. During the sit down family meal break, we can talk uninterrupted as a group about how certain things can be improved in the kitchen. We can discuss our goals, both personally and for the restaurant as a whole.
I believe any chef who thinks this is a bad idea is blinded by the industry trend of what constitutes family meal. If it doesn't work financially, I am sure most cooks would be happy to work 15 minutes for free every day for the opportunity for a break to enjoy staff meal. I am aware of a couple restaurants that do allow and encourage cooks to sit and take a short break to eat their early dinner - L'Espalier in Boston and Charlie Trotter's - good for them, and I'm sure they aren't the only ones. However, more chefs need to take this issue seriously and make the move for a happier, healthier kitchen.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Friday, March 13, 2009
Done at Zinnia, had a great time
I was so busy over the past couple months that I forgot to blog about my experiences at Zinnia!
Chef Sean is a great guy, and he was very accommodating in letting me take the reigns and make some stuff for the restaurant that I have never made before. When I started, the restaurant was buying their bacon, smoked salmon, and pancetta and paying a pretty penny for what I consider mediocre ingredients. I started a little charcuterie program at Zinnia after my first couple of weeks there and now all of those products are made in house.
No restaurant should buy bacon - it's incredibly easy to make, it's much cheaper to buy fresh pork belly and do it yourself, and it tastes much much better. The only things you need that you don't typically find in a restaurant kitchen are pink salt and a log of wood, and both are easily attainable. I would estimate that with the method I've developed, it only takes about 15 minutes of actual work to cure and then smoke (without the need of a smoker) a pork belly and turn it into delicious bacon. The bacon that Sean was buying was around $7-8/lb and the fresh pork belly they get in is only $2.05/lb!
The smoked salmon was the typical store bought stuff you find at most restaurants, and it was also very expensive. A few weeks ago, there was a salmon entree on the menu, so I occasionally would take some two day old peices or one whole side of that product, cure it with citrus and fennel, and then cold smoke it over fig wood. This, like the bacon, also tastes miles better, is much cheaper, and has an appealing vibrant reddish pink color that the store bought stuff lacks.
Conclusions about working at Zinnia:
1) Upscale fine dining is not the type of food I want to cook for the rest of my life. The food at Zinnia is great, but food at this level and price point aims to "wow". I want to chef at a restaurant that I would want to eat at frequently, and that means simpler, moderately priced food in a friendly, relaxed atmosphere.
2) The people at Zinnia were a bit too focused on the media's impact on their restaurant, i.e. newspaper reviews and magazine blurbs. In my opinion, attention should be focused on pleasing each and every customer that walks in the door, not on reviewers, Zagat, and the like. If you please everyone who walks into your restaurant, and a reviewer happens to walk in, then you are going to get a good review.
3) Organization and communication are of utmost importance in the kitchen (and in the front of the house too). If a problem exists, it can usually be fixed by better organization and communication, and everyone should work as a team to find the solution.
4) The valuable employees are not the ones who just do their job, but the ones that are constantly thinking, "How can I/we do this better", figure out solutions, and communicate their findings to the chef, manager, and everyone else.
5) It is important to provide an environment for free exchange of ideas - where the people in charge will at least listen and will not react negatively to an idea that sounds strange. Chef Sean at Zinnia provided this environment better than any other restaurant I have worked at.
Chef Sean is a great guy, and he was very accommodating in letting me take the reigns and make some stuff for the restaurant that I have never made before. When I started, the restaurant was buying their bacon, smoked salmon, and pancetta and paying a pretty penny for what I consider mediocre ingredients. I started a little charcuterie program at Zinnia after my first couple of weeks there and now all of those products are made in house.
No restaurant should buy bacon - it's incredibly easy to make, it's much cheaper to buy fresh pork belly and do it yourself, and it tastes much much better. The only things you need that you don't typically find in a restaurant kitchen are pink salt and a log of wood, and both are easily attainable. I would estimate that with the method I've developed, it only takes about 15 minutes of actual work to cure and then smoke (without the need of a smoker) a pork belly and turn it into delicious bacon. The bacon that Sean was buying was around $7-8/lb and the fresh pork belly they get in is only $2.05/lb!
The smoked salmon was the typical store bought stuff you find at most restaurants, and it was also very expensive. A few weeks ago, there was a salmon entree on the menu, so I occasionally would take some two day old peices or one whole side of that product, cure it with citrus and fennel, and then cold smoke it over fig wood. This, like the bacon, also tastes miles better, is much cheaper, and has an appealing vibrant reddish pink color that the store bought stuff lacks.
Conclusions about working at Zinnia:
1) Upscale fine dining is not the type of food I want to cook for the rest of my life. The food at Zinnia is great, but food at this level and price point aims to "wow". I want to chef at a restaurant that I would want to eat at frequently, and that means simpler, moderately priced food in a friendly, relaxed atmosphere.
2) The people at Zinnia were a bit too focused on the media's impact on their restaurant, i.e. newspaper reviews and magazine blurbs. In my opinion, attention should be focused on pleasing each and every customer that walks in the door, not on reviewers, Zagat, and the like. If you please everyone who walks into your restaurant, and a reviewer happens to walk in, then you are going to get a good review.
3) Organization and communication are of utmost importance in the kitchen (and in the front of the house too). If a problem exists, it can usually be fixed by better organization and communication, and everyone should work as a team to find the solution.
4) The valuable employees are not the ones who just do their job, but the ones that are constantly thinking, "How can I/we do this better", figure out solutions, and communicate their findings to the chef, manager, and everyone else.
5) It is important to provide an environment for free exchange of ideas - where the people in charge will at least listen and will not react negatively to an idea that sounds strange. Chef Sean at Zinnia provided this environment better than any other restaurant I have worked at.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Landed at Zinnia in San Francisco
The past couple weeks have been busy for me, as I have been job-hunting relentlessly in the bay area. After a handful of interviews and a few stages, I decided to take job at a new restaurant in downtown San Francisco called Zinnia. They just opened a few months ago, and business is slowly picking up. The food is fantastic, the chef is a really nice guy, and all of the cooks are a lot of fun to work with. Here's the website where you'll find the menu if you're interested in checking it out:
http://www.zinniasf.com/
I took a position there as a morning prep cook. Recently I've become interested in being a prep cook for at least a short period of time so I can concentrate on learning the finer aspects of braising, stocks, receiving, and eventually charcuterie. The only catch is that I have to be at work very early for me, by 8:30 when deliveries start coming in. And the commute to Zinnia from Martinez is pretty long, so I have to get up at 6:30! Suprisingly I've been fine for my first few days, and I'm getting used to it.
Today, with the agreement of Chef Sean, I started a food literature library for the staff at Zinnia. It's an idea I have been toying around with for quite some time. Basically, anyone can borrow from the library at will, as long as he/she contributes at least one food-related book to the collection. When I become a chef some day, I definitely want to promote reading industry-related books to my staff, and I think this is a great way to do it. Good food writing can be hard to find, and it's not cheap. Also, I currently have a 1.5 hour commute to work on the bus and BART, so I will probably benefit the most from the library if the idea catches on and the collection grows like I expect it to.
-Ben
http://www.zinniasf.com/
I took a position there as a morning prep cook. Recently I've become interested in being a prep cook for at least a short period of time so I can concentrate on learning the finer aspects of braising, stocks, receiving, and eventually charcuterie. The only catch is that I have to be at work very early for me, by 8:30 when deliveries start coming in. And the commute to Zinnia from Martinez is pretty long, so I have to get up at 6:30! Suprisingly I've been fine for my first few days, and I'm getting used to it.
Today, with the agreement of Chef Sean, I started a food literature library for the staff at Zinnia. It's an idea I have been toying around with for quite some time. Basically, anyone can borrow from the library at will, as long as he/she contributes at least one food-related book to the collection. When I become a chef some day, I definitely want to promote reading industry-related books to my staff, and I think this is a great way to do it. Good food writing can be hard to find, and it's not cheap. Also, I currently have a 1.5 hour commute to work on the bus and BART, so I will probably benefit the most from the library if the idea catches on and the collection grows like I expect it to.
-Ben
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)