[soupsample]

hey yo chefs!
i'm siked to find this forum.

here's my story:

i grew up in the business - through the ranks, and just opened a cafe with a childhood friend. I'm front of the house, and she is a young, risky chef who's got talent...

BUT she comes from a catering background......and our kitchen is DYING! i can't caluclate w/o food cost. i free like i'm totally in the dark here.

our operation is small - 4 employees - 1 oven - 1 self contained frier - 1 flat top - 1 freezer - 1 double door fridge - breakfast and lunch only. m-f.

i can't get her to order consistantly from our distributors. she's getting **** from costco or sam's club all the time and i'm watching money fly out the door. i've made inventories, waste trackers....i'm a manager, i think in numbers. i'm the one catching the cooks wasting, throwing out, and burning...but i can't be back there all the time. i'm FOH!

oh chef gods, how do i train a chef to run a kitchen? any advice or tips are welcomed!

[RAS1187]

Sorry to say man, but if she is not up to the job, you might have to look into either replacing her or hiring a sous that has a better handle on this (dont expect him/her to be too happy when they realize the situation). By the time you finally get through to her, she may have already run you bankrupt. Friend or not, business is business.

[foodpump]

How?

Give her a budget, give her a reasonable food cost of say, 35%, and give her 4 more weeks. If she can't catch on, it's past her bed-time.


In many kitchens I've worked in, the owner ALWAYS had final say in what was purchased, from whom, and at what price. It is your money. However this works both ways, as it was Escoffier who said something along the lines of "The patron who cheats on his ingredients, looses the right to complain about quality to his Chef".

After giving her the budget and foodcost, sit her down and tell her you need at least 3 suppliers for meat, 3 for produce, 3 for drygoods, and at least two for dairy. The idea of relying on only one supplier for any item is about the same as walking through a gay-bar without any clothes on.....

There are a lot of advantages to being a small establishment, and flexibility is one of the biggest. Fresh sheets and daily specials are a valuable tool, you need to show her how to use it to it's best advantage.

If she's smart, she'll catch on quickly. If anything it will give her "bragging rights" on her resume to say that she ran a 30% foodcost.

Hope this helps

[PeteMcCracken]

Originally Posted by soupsample

...oh chef gods, how do i train a chef to run a kitchen? any advice or tips are welcomed!

IMHO, you do not "train a chef", you train a cook to become a "chef"!

A "chef" KNOWS how to run a kitchen, and that includes inventory control, food costing, menu development, purchasing control(s), personnel management, etc.

Apparently, you've hired a "cook" to run your BOH.

Give her two weeks with the guidelines YOU set up for food costs, purchasing, etc. Either she complies or you look for a real "chef"!

[ED BUCHANAN]

Tell her that salary will be based on food cost percentage. She should be telling you how to order, not you telling her. Start searching around before it is to late.

[ChefRay]

Originally Posted by ED BUCHANAN

Tell her that salary will be based on food cost percentage. She should be telling you how to order, not you telling her. Start searching around before it is to late.

That was going to be my response exactly. I've always been paid, every time I have been in charge, a percentage of the restaurant. When someone is paid in a way that holds them personally accountable, they become much better at cost control and learn where the farmer's market is for grocery store ingredients and what the word "wholesale" means for everything else.

Good luck.

[KYHeirloomer]

All the previous responses make sense....but

In your post you said "....opened with...." That implies a partnership situation. If that's the case, and if she's not trainable, then you need to find somebody to either buy her out, or you. If not, as others have mentioned, out of line food costs will destroy you.

I also think the professional caterers here would resent your implication that they're not concerned with food costs.

[soupsample]

it's not actually a partnership. the skinny is i have worked for them for many years before going off to college and managing a restaurant in chicago.

THEY asked ME to come back and help run the new place. and yes, i feel the catering not giving a **** about cost.

let me elaborate on the set up as is: our cafe location is TINY, as i mentioned before, and we do a lot of our cooking, baking and storing at the huge catering kitchen. which means that product that the cafe orders has gotten used for catering! argh! and it's my boss who's doing the using. ALSO, our daily specials, they come out of catering - extra product etc.

when i ran a restaurant in chicago, it was a tight ship, one walk in, one chef, one food cost. now i'm trying to figure out where everything goes, and where it comes from.

this is a small family buisness....and i'm not techincally family.

[ChefBillyB]

The first thing you learn in this business is, if you have to fire your Chef you better know how to cook..So I became a Chef............You say your front of the house FOH...Sorry to have to tell you, you are the house..............learn how to cook or get the **** out of the business.................Billl

[foodpump]

Why were you asked to run the restaurant?

If I understand correctly, the resto is combined with the catering biz, and the catering is the one that makes the money, yes?

[ChefRobin]

It sounds like you are in a no win situation. Do you have the authority to fire her? It doesn't sound like it. If she is unwilling to change and you don't have the authority to make her change, I would be seriously looking for somewhere else to go, before you go down with a sinking ship and get blamed for it!

[ED BUCHANAN]

Originally Posted by ChefRobin

It sounds like you are in a no win situation. Do you have the authority to fire her? It doesn't sound like it. If she is unwilling to change and you don't have the authority to make her change, I would be seriously looking for somewhere else to go, before you go down with a sinking ship and get blamed for it!

Something wrong here. Catering is far more profitable then full service restaurant. Are you watching the back doors, or whats comeing in?? Or could there be deals with purveyors? Is everything coming into the place weighed?, and counted. Are garbage cans checked for waste? She better go before you all have to go.

[lentil]

Maybe she just hasn't been aware of the situation. If she's a creative cook, maybe the thing would be for you to watch the numbers and let her do the creating. That means that you would have control over her, and from what I gather from your posts, you're an outsider in a family operation.

If that's the case, and they are mainly caterers, maybe the cafe isn't top priority with them, but a new avenue for them when they're not busy catering. If the big boss isn't concerned about the numbers, you're blowing into the wind.

I'm the owner in a similar situation. I did mainly catering and then moved to a bigger location where I could have a cafe. It works for me because I can use up everything I buy. For instance, I just did a beautiful antipasti platter for one wedding, used the more of the meats and cheeses for an impromptu platter the next day, and finished off the cheese in today's lunch special of mac and cheese. The soup from the wedding was one of last Monday's specials, and the left over shrimp went into the freezer to be part of a seafood chowder on Friday. And yes, before I get a lecture on food safety, I kept everything cold and didn't reuse anything that had been out on the buffet. The only way this would work for you is if the catering and cafe portions of the business worked together.

It took me a long time to think like that, though. I used to do a lot of wasting. Now I'm kind of a biotch when I see waste.

[BryanJ]

lentil, i like the way you think.

soup: run. run far far away.

[lentil]

Why, thank you Bryan....