What happens in the kitchen when the chef is gone?

[ChefTalk.com]

How does this exactly play out in the professional kitchen? What do the other chefs do or not do when the head chef is MIA? At the most benign level, short cuts may be taken that don't directly affect the quality of the food but rather it's presentation. Every head chef in the world has a plethora of practices that he insists must be done in a particular manner. Some of these have more to do with aesthetics than food quality.


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[phatch]

It shouldn't be that way.

I ran into some concepts today that really rung true to me. Way too much too summarize but this is a good starting point.

W. Edwards Deming - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Oh, and every clam that comes to me in a restaurant had better be dead. But I know what the author means...

[Salliem]

Good article....and one that for the last 3 days applied to my situation, my boss was gone...and the responsibility of running and keeping the kitchen on his level was in my lap. Sometimes I think that I actually go one step beyond what he does,not only because I don't want and or need to hear that something wasn't done right but because in the years of working with him, I too expect things done right. Last night I got my kuddos from the GM when she made a comment about our signature dish which is our "crunchy grouper"...I took the time to, as I was cutting the fish yesterday, to butterfly the fish.. something he doesn't do, they looked great and our GM said it was the best that she had ever seen it.

Had a very busy night, one of the "cooks" walked out the previous night, so we were short on top of it and yet I maintained the quality of his kitchen.

[Headless Chicken]

I had to take care of the kitchen on more then 5 occasions when the chef was on vacation, had to work another kitchen for a few days, off sick, etc. Now, assuming theres a sous like second in commander working or if you have a second chef that works a different shift, then you're covered.

Everyone at my kitchen knows their jobs and they can do it without a stiff looking over their shoulders every 5mins. I didn't really need to babysit anyone, showing them how to do their jobs and stuff because I know what they do, how they do it, and what they need and because so, I don't have problems when running the joint. But the funny thing is, everyone bugs me for things just as much as if the chef was or wasn't there. Since training in our new chef for the past week, I've been pulling a lot of extra weight while trying to prepare this guy to totally take over while I ditch for a 2 week vacation. And with the date drawing that much closer, everyone (the new chef, the kitchen staff, the manager) are starting to feel the sweat..."WTF are we gonna do without you?"

...well, considering how many brushfires I've put out over the past several years, I really don't care...as long as I don't need to deal with it when I come back that is

[KYHeirloomer]

In the best of all possible worlds this should never happen. In the culinary arts, as in any other endeaver, the way a good manager works is to hire good people and let 'em rip.

If (I should say "when," cuz we all know that it does) it does happen it's because the head chef hasn't done his job of choosing and training the staff.

[Suzanne]

There is a big difference between not having the exec in the house and not having ANY supervision, which is what Mark's opening sounds like. And if there has not been proper training of all staff, no amount of supervision by anyone at any level will ensure a consistent level of quality. Finally, if the staff don't care, nothing else will make up for it.

It's interesting to note that some of the nominees for Beard Awards (scroll down to page 8) are not the chef-owner or the exec, but the chef de cuisine: the person in charge of the day-to-day operation of the kitchen. In some restaurants, that function is fulfilled by the sous chef, or even just a head line cook. But someone is there, someone is in charge. It doesn't have to be the big name. Do you really believe that Jean-Georges is in all his zillion kitchens all the time, simultaneously, keeping up standards everywhere? Or Thomas Keller on both coasts? Or even Eric Ripert, in just his one? Of course not. But they have people under them who are their alter egos, and who watch when they cannot.

I worked -- briefly -- at a fine-dining restaurant where the chef was present every day for both lunch and dinner service. But was there training? It was an extreme case, but: my first day, the cook I was replacing didn't even show up to train me, and the chef arrived maybe one hour before service started. Since I was supposed to be working as the lone lunch cook, you can imagine the trouble this caused. Later on, another cook showed me how he did things, but when the chef saw what I was then doing, he yelled at me that I was doing it all wrong, AND indicated that I should have known better. Excuse me? There were no written recipes, there was pretty much no training other than one cook showing another. Yet when I spoke to another cook (a couple of levels down from me) about a procedure she was using that seemed downright unsafe to me, she was adamant about "This is how I do it" -- and even cried at being corrected! You know the game Telephone (aka Chinese Whispers) -- one person says something to the next, who tells the next, and so on until it has gone all around the circle. What comes out at the end is rarely anything close to what started. If staff are not trained, and the training is not refreshed from time to time, that's what happens in the kitchen. Just having the chef on site doesn't matter, if the chef is not constantly training and correcting in a reasonable manner.

Finally: As Headless Chicken says, everyone in the place (BOH and FOH) should know their jobs, and be able to do them right without someone peering over their shoulder all the time. That was certainly the case in a restaurant where I worked, where the exec was often away and the sous (several of them, in fact) had problems that tended to make them go AWOL more frequently than the rest of the cooks would have liked. But we kept an eye on each other: we knew how we were supposed to do our prep, and did it that way.* We knew what the prep cooks were supposed to do, and if there was slippage, we let them know it. We watched out for each other. Why? Because we all took pride in our work and wanted to put out the best food we could, all the time. If that pride, that wanting to do the best possible job, is not there, it doesn't matter who's there watching.