Ask anyone who is responsible for a professional foodservice operation what keeps them up at night, and be prepared to hear a pretty long list of concerns. In one category will be things like providing guests with enough variety, being on top of making seasonal...
There are many skillsets that any good chef has, and that any aspiring chef must master. These include knife skills, good sanitation practices, building flavors, menu and recipe development, labor and food cost control, management skills and the application of heat....
Keeping our kitchens well-staffed is one of our biggest challenges. While steady work and early evenings – relative to a typical restaurant or hotel – are practical advantages to working in a senior-living kitchen, it’s often not enough to lure the best workers to our...
Proven techniques to lower those critical numbers We live in a time when the standards and quality of meals expected from kitchens at senior-living communities are clearly on the rise. More experienced managers, better-trained staff, made-from-scratch recipes, more...
Although portion control probably doesn’t top many chefs’ lists of the most fun or creative parts of their job, it is still an important task for which they are responsible. Without it, both sides of any restaurant’s basic equation - customer satisfaction &...
I don’t think I am going out on a limb to say that most of us don’t get into the restaurant business because of a visceral attraction to the field of sanitation. More likely, we chose this path because of a love of food and wine, a proclivity to hospitality, or the...
Not Too Many, Not Too Few Along with food costs, kitchen payroll is one of the two most important, easily quantifiable things for a chef to control in his or her kitchen. Like controlling food costs, payroll is a balancing act between what is obviously sufficient, but...
One of my most vivid memories from my early days in the fine-dining kitchens I learned my craft in doesn’t have anything to do with the great food, cooks or menus I was privileged to work with. It is the recollection of how the entire kitchen staff reacted to the fire...
While maintaining food safety is not the most glamorous part of running a restaurant, without it, everything else we do is for naught. No matter how inviting the dining room, how beautiful and tasty the food, how innovative the wine list and cocktails are and how...