Kitchens Need a Heads-Up and Eyes-Open Management Style

A chef usually works with eyes looking down at what they are doing. It is difficult for a chef who also is a manager to lead and manage a kitchen unless their eyes are up the majority of the time. Things go wrong in a kitchen in a matter of seconds—anything from seasoning to time in the oven to incoming deliveries from vendors. The manager of a kitchen is similar to an umpire at a ballgame.

A successful kitchen manager is never timid. They need to barge right in with their eyes and tastebuds. The manager of the kitchen must praise and critique at the same time. They are the captains of the company’s image and need to use discipline correctly to maintain the quality of the food. Management needs to walk around all areas of the kitchen, cooler, and loading area regularly to get close to the action.

A kitchen leader’s back must never face the same direction for any length of time. They are like a football coach on the sidelines who keeps moving as the ball goes up and down the field.

Catering From A Chef's Point Of View

NOTE: This is an article I wrote for the ACF magazine. I suggest you let all chef candidates read it before you interview them:

I believe that catering is the selling, producing and performing of outstanding foodservice usually in situations that are not ideal for anyone, under pressure circumstances, with a lot of people watching chefs as they work, and a host wishing to pay the least amount of money possible. From a culinary point of view, a simpler definition of catering might be that catering is the art of quality volume foodservice balanced by the science of making profit.

WHY IS CATERING IMPORTANT?
  One just can’t escape the truth. Catering is the fastest growing segment of the foodservice industry growing 7% to 10% per year. Since your clients want it and are buying catering somewhere, they should be buying it from you. Additionally, catering gives a foodservice business a competitive advantage and enhanced image in today’s marketplace. Plus, catering is usually a “life-saver” during recessions.

HOW SOME CHEFS VIEW CATERING?
  Some chefs love to do catering and some hate it outright! Let’s face it, catering is very hard work and it often viewed as taking kitchen time away from one’s “primary” business. Add to that the potential for last minute changes and adjustments due to host’s that change their minds, and you get a product line that the culinary department is unable to totally control. Then again, a lot of dollars are made when catering!

HOW CATERING DIFFERS FROM RESTAURANTS  
Restaurant foodservice usually has a twenty-minute window from when the client places the order to when it needs to begin arriving at their table. All catering is presold days, weeks or months ahead permitting better buying and the advantages of volume preparation. At a catered event, only the host knows what the menu is. Guests are looking for a great meal.

In restaurants, diners don’t haggle with the servers for lower prices than are printed on the menus. In catering, everyone haggles. Since hosts often don’t now all the guests eating preference and allergies they request more traditional menus with less experimental or cutting edge cuisine. Lastly, event food is usually prepped many hours before the event is served and the food is often held and/or transported raising the level of concern over the safe temperature zone. Then again, a lot of dollars are made when catering!

GUIDELINES TO CONSIDER
 Successful and profitable catering needs the total commitment of the culinary team. Here are some proven guidelines to insure outstanding catering:

1. The culinary leader needs to have veto power over any menu or presentation requests from the sales department that don’t offer proper profitability, safety, or company image.

2. During busy times of the year, a limit needs to be established on the total variety of different entrees and hors d’oeuvres offered to customers. There is no logic for having a culinary team prepping 67 different types of items for ten different events on a busy day!

3. Require salespeople to work a bit in the kitchen to learn the joys of woes of the culinary team.

4. Resist lowering the prices of your “regular” menus. Instead, create new menus that offer more value to shoppers. In other words, never sell your “A” menus at “B” prices. Create “B” menus and sell them at “B” prices. Also, keep offering your “A” menus along with the “B” menus.

5. Last minute popup orders should be limited to only a few easier to produce menus choices.

6. A culinary leader must have a sit-down meeting with the salespeople to go over each menu sold… item by item. This is the only way to discover errors and omissions.

7. The culinary team must be involved in all sales of high volume events before they are presented or sold.

FINAL THOUGHTS  
Catering is a good thing because is challenges the culinary teams creativity and makes money for the company at the same time. Catering broadens a company’s footprint and image in their marketplace. As long as the culinary team gets accurate information from the sales department in a timely manner success is easy. The total amount of planning and work that goes into a $40,000 catered event is not as much as one might think. Catering gets easier the more you do it! Did we mention that a lot of money can be made with catering?

Three Things To Watch For In Your Kitchen

The three things below exist in many catering kitchens. Unfortunately, these actions lead to danger, problems and an overall unprofessional kitchen operation. Please check to see if they exist in your kitchen:

1. Do your chefs kick the oven door closed, or otherwise roughhouse your equipment? Kicking the door closed is a culinary sin; it causes damage to some parts of the stove, like the gas safety, that can require a costly repair. Is your equipment really clean?

2. Does your staff sample freely from foods being prepared? Do they eat while they are working?

A professional kitchen doesn’t permit eating while working. It is unsanitary and dangerous. Imagine eating a sandwich while slicing meat on the slicer. A separate area in the facility should be used for eating during breaks.

3. Does your hand sink work? Are there soap and towels at the sink? Some caterers have all staff stop what they are doing and wash their hands every hour on the hour. Hand washing comes with the job in the kitchen! 


How you answer these questions will help you decide if you need to think more about these situations. As usual, you may always contact me at mikeroman@catersource.com if you wish to chat.

Important Tip In The Kitchen!

Even the best kitchens need discipline and critique. The culinary leader needs to be able to speak openly and frankly about the results of the culinary team’s efforts. “Chef James, I know you worked very hard on that recipe, but unfortunately is still isn’t correct,” is the way this is handled. Critique the results, not the person. These words are just as important as a critique of a problem: “Chef James, your work today was flawless and much appreciated.”

More Tips On Kitchens

Over a period of a couple of weeks, call each member of your kitchen team, one at a time, into your office, or other space away from the kitchen, for a private interview. Your purpose is to seek information about the attitude and atmosphere in the kitchen. Ask questions like:

·   What is your job in the kitchen?

·   Have you received enough training for your job?

·   Are you happy with your job?

·   What do you think of our food?

·   Who do you most like to work with in the kitchen?

·   Who is the hardest worker in the kitchen—other than yourself?

·   Who isn’t carrying their load in the kitchen?

·   If you could press a magic button, what equipment would you want to have in the kitchen that would help you do a better job?

If these interviews are done properly, you will soon learn whom, if anyone, should be trained better, or removed from your kitchen staff. You will learn about what the staff feels about their work and your company. Check with your human resources department to insure that the questions you are going to ask are within legal limits in your locale.

Roman's Guide To Evaluating Your Kitchen

A catering kitchen is either out of control or working well. There seems to be no middle ground. The symptoms of being out of control in the kitchen are: lack of inventory controls, tardy staff, lack of written recipes and procedures, poor sanitation, sending too much food, orders that are mispacked, food and equipment not leaving for events on time and a chef, or kitchen leader, who is not cooperative with the entire culinary, sales and management team.

An official kitchen evaluation begins with a rather simple action: Someone sits in the kitchen and does nothing but observe. What do you watch for? Just use your common sense and measure your kitchen against the out-of-control symptoms listed.

Many owner/managers believe that it just isn’t cool to sit and watch their kitchen at work. Often the owners think, “My staff will think that I don’t trust them.” During an evaluation, trust is not the issue. What would happen if the airlines felt it wasn’t cool to evaluate pilots?

Walk around from time to time and get close to the action. Taste some of the food being prepared. Just the way your staff gets you the food samples tells you a lot about how they respect their food and their sanitation level. For example, if they simply get a kitchen utensil, load the sample onto the utensil and then give it to you, you know that they are not as concerned about style and sanitation than they would be if they put the sample onto a disposable or china plate (or other container) and gave you a normal piece of metal or disposable flatware to use. This is what evaluating is all about; you need to look at the small details and past the obvious.

Things to watch for in your kitchen evaluation include:

·   How are the kitchen leaders sitting? Is anyone facing the back door? Is anyone sitting close to the back door to watch what comes in and out of the kitchen? Minding the entry and exit doors are important to eliminate losses from stealing and to catch errors before they happen.

·   Do your chefs kick the oven door closed, or otherwise roughhouse your equipment? Kicking the door closed is a culinary sin; it causes damage to some parts of the stove, like the gas safety, that can require a costly repair. Is your equipment really clean?

·   Does your staff sample freely from foods being prepared? Do they eat while they are working? A professional kitchen doesn’t permit eating while working. It is unsanitary and dangerous. Imagine eating a sandwich while slicing meat on the slicer. A separate area in the kitchen should be used for eating during breaks.

·   Are there signs of staff smoking in the kitchen? It’s unlawful and creates a liability.

·   Does your hand sink work? Are there soap and towels at the sink? Some caterers have all staff stop what they are doing and wash their hands every hour on the hour. Handwashing comes with the job in the kitchen! Even if rubber gloves are used, handwashing is a must; dirty hands are the culprit in many food-borne illnesses.

·   In the walk-in cooler, are like foods shelved together or are there flats of strawberries here, there and over there? Organization is crucial in any cooler storage system. Use a first-in, first-out process.

·   After a can or package has been used and put into the garbage take it out and shake it, scrape it and look inside. Is all of the food out of it? You may find peas still stuck at the bottom of package of frozen peas. There may be some baked beans at the bottom of the can. When things start moving fast in a kitchen, culinary staff sometimes overlook things and take shortcuts.

·   Take a pan of food from an order ready to go and check to see if the food is in the same amount as requested on the order or packing list. If the order calls for 42 chicken breasts, how many are really going? Too many or too few, either is a problem.

·   See if anyone fails to wash their knives every time they move from one food group to another. Do the culinary staff have thermometers in their pockets? Are they using them? Do your staff clean their workstations as they go?

·   Try to determine whether there is fear of asking questions in your kitchen.

·   Moving fast in a kitchen is a good thing, but it also can signal that the timing is not correct. A quality kitchen makes mistakes. The question is how many and when are they caught and corrected.

How Much Extra Food To Send To Events?

Off-premise caterers need to send extra food to serve more than the actual guarantee, traditionally 5 to 10 percent more. This extra food is needed for everything from staff meals to covering a host who has given a lower guarantee by simple error or by cunning preplanning. A caterer must not run out of food to serve, no matter who or what caused the situation. The caterer will be the one the guests are unhappy with, not the host.

When doing away events, caterers need to be concerned about what affects the amount of food that was sent from the kitchen, including:

·   Food that was sent to the wrong event.

·   Food that becomes burned or unsanitary before the event starts.

·   Food that gets stolen during the setup of the event.

·   Additional uninvited guests who come to the event.

·   Guests who attack the buffets and take more than they can eat.

·   Food to feed the photographer, musicians, DJ’s, valet, etc. This may not be required, but it’s often good for marketing your quality to vendors who can recommend your catering to shoppers.

·   Food for the event staff to eat, either the same menu or a different one.

Should you let the host know you’re sending extra food to the event? Some believe this encourages the host to cheat by under-guaranteeing. Others believe it makes the host aware that there is a limit to the amount of extra food being brought to the event.

Some are challenging the idea of an extra 5 to 10 percent of food. Caterers are starting to send extra food only for certain menu items, based on how much the local guests may find exciting. As caterers examine the menu, they determine which items will be the most popular and which will not.

Many caterers charge the hosts a fee for extra meals at a full or reduced price. After all, were is it written that the caterer must feed 22 musicians and valet parkers for free?

Food Amounts 101

How much food should be sent to an event? The answer is simple: It depends. You need to ask yourself a series of questions, and the answers change from event to event.

When it comes to planning the amount of food for an event, it doesn’t matter how much food a guest can eat; it only matters how much food a guest takes. Some caterers actually try to determine how much a guest of a particular menu item a guest is likely to eat, when they really should determine is how much will be taken by guests, whether they eat it or not.

Questions to ask when trying to decide how much food to send to an event include:

·   What is the purpose of the event?

·   Who is the customer?

·   Where is the event location?

·   What time of day is the event?

·   Who’s coming to the event?

·   What is the actual menu for the event?

·   How will guests be dressed?

·   What is the temperature inside the event going to be?

·   How many children are coming?

·   What is the educational level of the guests?

·   What are the ages of the guests?

·   What are the host’s views on food and hospitality?

How do you figure out how much food is enough? Every group eats and takes different amounts of food during a catered event. Who eats more, a group of 50 men or a group of 50 women? Are you sure of your answer? There are only men or women in each group—and that makes a difference. Many caterers have learned that the answer to the question is “both.”

Many husbands and wives eat differently and with greater abandon than when their spouses are with them. Men and women at a singles dance eat with more concern for how others view them than if they were at a ballgame. Eating is a social activity. While some people really don’t care how others view them as they eat, others are very concerned about their eating image.

A person who has just paid $1,000 for a political fundraiser is going to attack the shrimp! They feel they have something coming for their donation. A company’s employees will probably eat differently at an event their customers are attending than at their annual holiday party, where they may want to get even with the company by eating and drinking all they can. In a group of all men, if you place attractive female servers behind the buffet, they will take less food. The same is true in reverse with the women guests and handsome male servers. It’s just biology!

Some nationalities have folk songs about food and food is a huge part of their culture; others don’t have the same passion about the foods they eat. Some guests eat to live; others live to eat. Some guests come to a buffet and closely examine every food item, looking forward to tasting them. Others simply fill their plates and move on.

So, there really isn't any "sure-fire" way to always know how much food to send, so it is best to send more than you think you may need - it is very damaging for a caterer's reputation if they run out of food no matter who's fault it really is.

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A Unique 911 Story From Tasty Catering

The email below was sent from Rich Henquinet, the Human Resources Manager of Tasty Catering in Chicago, to Larry Walters, one of the principles of Tasty Catering. I asked for permission to publish this since it is such a learning experience in many obvious ways and some deep thinking ways.

Rich Henquinet

Rich delivered the catering order mentioned in his email on September 11 to a group of Marines - here is the email sent by Rich:


While delivering the US Marines order of hot food for 140 yesterday, I opened the first of three pans of mashed potatoes. I was struck by what I saw - the US Flag! I stopped...and swallowed hard....as goose bumps engulfed my body. I opened the two other pans and they were decorated as well. I could not believe my eyes...and immediately started to try to guess who did this. What an awesome act of Patriotism on Patriot Day*. Two Marines wandered in and asked what was for lunch and I told them "chicken" as I removed the mashed potatoes lid to show them the flag. They both paused and acknowledged the thoughtfulness of the decoration. They mentioned it to a few Marines standing about 40 feet away who then walked over and asked to see it. They too acknowledged the decoration...and very much appreciated it. After the presentation was set up the Sergeant in charge came in to sign the delivery ticket. I showed it to him. He paused as he admired it....and looked me straight in the eyes and thanked me for the decoration. I told him I'd pass his "Thank you" on to the chef who decorated it. This act of kindness WOW'ed the Marines on this truly special day. I felt 10 feet tall as I left the building.  The photo, taken with my cell phone, is not the best of quality. Larry, please pass on my most sincere regards to the chef responsible for this. He or she made us look incredibly good. This is another example of why Tasty Catering is the leader in corporate catering.


Here is the photo Rich took with his cell phone of the mashed potatoes:

Not a great photo, but you can see the FLAG!

Here is the Tasty Catering Chef Ricardo Gervacio, Hot Food Prep Line manager, who took it upon himself to do the American Flag for the Marines.

Chef Richie Gervacio
Great Work Richie!