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.

Eliminate Product Lines - You Have To Consider This Concept

Some caterers book too many orders or events that don’t really impact their bottom lines in a positive manner but that require them to have a lot of staff working to handle the business. By identifying product lines you are selling that offer little, if any, contribution to profit, or those that require numerous staffing hours to complete, you can eliminate them and reduce your need for staff. If eliminating a particular product line, like drop-off catering, is out of the question, at least consider making your minimum guarantees and prices higher.

Hire Outside Consulting Chefs

This concept is important for both new and very established catering businesses.

Use culinary professionals from outside your own staff to train and motivate your staff. Consulting chefs can help your culinary team redesign your old menus or create new trendy and profitable menus. It is always good to have a fresh set of eyes evaluating your personnel, sanitation systems, inventory procedures and overall culinary skills. You don’t need to hire a Food Network star for this. The only requirement is to secure a well-trained and seasoned professional who has a passion for food and the kitchen and who will introduce new ideas and challenge the old ones.

Obviously, I stand ready to recommend professional consulting chefs - just call me at (773) 549-7210.


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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?

Russian or Butler Service

Russian or butler service is usually associated with upscale catering at a higher price point. Higher, or highly, skilled servers are required. While guests are seated, a server approaches the table carrying a large silver tray on one arm, laden with the evening’s protein, starch and vegetable. Guests are approached from the left side. In Russian service, the server serves the guest by placing the food directly onto the empty plate. In butler service, the server leans in and holds the tray while the guests take the food they wish using the utensils on the tray.

The names of these styles of service are different in different parts of the world. One or the other may be referred to as French service. It depends on where you learned about them and other cultural differences. When a client requests this type of service, be sure to clarify which one they are requesting.

Tip: While butler, French or Russian style of service is associated with a more sophisticated event, the food is often more difficult to serve, slower and losses temperature quickly.

Food Allergies, Religious Requirements and Dietary Restrictions

It is your responsibility to ask clients about guests’ special food requirements. The problem is that hosts may not know all the guests who are coming to the event, let alone their food preferences or allergies. Still, you must actively make the client aware that some menu items don’t work for some guests.

Dangerous reactions from certain food ingredients, lack of vegetarian food choices, or a menu that is not respectful to the religious beliefs of guests are just a few of the concerns you must be prepared to deal with for events. You must continually educate yourself on these different concerns. Most of the answers and solutions can be found through Google searches.

Nuts of any kind can be deadly to some guests. It is safer to simply keep nuts out of recipes. In some cases, you can place nuts on the buffet table next to a particular item that would be enhanced by them. This makes it each guest’s decision as to whether to add nuts or not. The same technique could be used for spicy menu items. Instead of deciding how hot an item should be, place various sauces next to the item so the guests can take the spiciness to the level of their choice.

Keeping Food and Guests Safe

Bacteria needs time, food and moisture to grow; but they won’t grow when the temperature of the food is colder than 41º F or hotter than 140º F. This temperature range differs slightly in different jurisdictions. The area between these temperatures is the Danger Zone. The goal is to keep food out of the danger zone until just prior to serving. Caterers, especially off-premise caterers, usually prepare food ahead of serving time, store it, travel with it, reheat it and then let it stand ready for guests.

Check with your health department to make sure that your staff has taken all the education and received all the certificates obtainable from your city or state. Hire sanitation experts to visit your location and check your facility and watch your staff at work to discover any incorrect procedures. The health department will do this for free.

Obtain and study your health department’s codes. They generally are multiple pages and may be filled with hard-to-understand information. A few samples from one state’s health code:

Critical violations creating an imminent danger to public health means those critical violations in which at least one of the following conditions exists:

(a) Food and drink is spoiled, unwholesome, or contaminated with pathogenic or fecal organisms, toxic chemicals, insect or rodent parts or excreta, or other harmful substances or articles;

(b) Potentially hazardous foods have been kept at temperatures above 45 degrees F. and below 140 degrees F. for four (4) hours or more; (this range also varies by jurisdiction)

(c) Food employee has a reportable disease or medical condition.

Critical violations creating a significantly increased risk for foodborne illness include:

(a) Potentially hazardous foods at improper temperatures.

(b) Cross contamination of raw to ready to eat foods.

(c) Poor personal hygiene and handwashing.

Lessening The Amount of Buffet Food Taken - PART TWO

On a dessert buffet, what will be eaten more, chocolate or lemon mousse? Most think the answer is chocolate. This assumes we are talking about a choice between choosing chocolate or lemon, which also assumes that they are sitting next to each other on the buffet. How does the equation change when they are not sitting side-by-side on a dessert buffet? Suppose the chocolate mousse is two feet down an 8-foot buffet table and the lemon mousse is six feet down the same buffet? Now they are two separate desserts. Imagine what would happen in a group of 200 guests if the lemon mousse were sitting next to a flourless chocolate cake? How many of the guests would understand the excitement of placing a dollop of the lemon mousse on top to the chocolate cake? You can see how easy it is to disrupt the logic of determining correct food amounts.

Items that are deemed special to guests, like shrimp, pork ribs and any cut of beef, are most often taken by guests, whether they really want them or not. Even if a woman doesn’t eat beef, she will take it for her husband if it is located on the main buffet. Try moving these special items off the main buffet to a separate station where only those who really wish to eat them will take the time to get them.

Most guests at events have been taught, by parents or experience, that the most expensive menu items are placed at the end of the buffet. If a caterer places a carved beef at the front of the buffet, they are thrown for a loop. If the first item is beef, then what the heck is at the end of the buffet? Americans who come to the end of a buffet to find a carver serving sliced beef will have the carver stack as much as they can get away with on top of the plate already filled with other menu items. Reverse this by putting the carver first on the buffet. If the first thing guests do is fill a portion of their empty plate with sliced beef at the beginning of their buffet trip, they will resist placing anything on top of the beef as they travel down the buffet. Happy guests and less waste are accomplished by preplanning of where foods are placed on the buffet and how they are served.

Lessening the Amount of Buffet Food Taken - PART ONE

Guests eat with their eyes. As they move through a buffet, they feel special and excited. As guests—especially if they’ve brought a wedding or bar mitzvah gift—they feel entitled to as much as they want from the buffet. Few guests are thinking about conservation or wasting food as they travel down the buffet.

Lines are the enemy of reducing waste at buffets. Even if a guest is in the line approaching the buffet for only several minutes, it feels like a lifetime. Guests sometimes are required to stand in the buffet line for as long as 20 minutes. The longer a person stands in the slow moving buffet line, the more they are convinced that they are not going to get back into this slow line later for second helpings—so they take their second helpings during their first and only trip through the buffet. Waste is out of control in slow lines.

You can reduce the angst of people standing in long lines and lessen their need to take away more than they can eat:

·   Serve the seconds. When lines are long, have a server move past the guests in the line saying to them in a gracious and professional manner, “The host wishes me to inform you that after you go through the buffet, our servers will bring seconds to your table for you to enjoy.”

·   Pass appetizers. To calm the guests in line and to reduce their hunger pangs, have a server move by the line offering small finger foods.

·   Pass plates. When lines are exceptionally long, like at a corporate picnic, have a server wearing rubber or linen gloves pass out the plates guests will be using when they finally reach the buffets. Many guests in long lines, worry about running out of plates before they get their turn. Their plate is a guarantee that they will get food!