Hello chefs, This is Chef's PSA Podcast.
I'm your host, Andre Natara. On today's episode, we're going
to talk about is the culinary industry facing a crisis.
Stay tuned. Recording this episode a little
bit early. So today is Wednesday, September
27th and 23. Tomorrow is actually my
birthday, September 28th. I hope you wished me a happy
birthday, but if you didn't, shame on you.
I still expect a present. Put a chefspsa.com.
Go get yourself a book, a journal, one of the free ebooks.
Get some merch, get a happy cook hat, whatever.
Go celebrate my birthday by buying yourself something nice.
Anyway, the reason I bring up the date is because today on my
Instagram I put up a poll. I put up several polls actually,
wanting to take a pulse of what the state of the industry is.
Everything from Is the industry harder since 20/20?
What are your staffing levels looking like?
Are your menus too big for the amount of staff that you have to
pull it off? What's the skill level like of
the current team that you have in the kitchen and how many jobs
do you need to make sure you're making ends meet?
So I put that up on Wednesday and the results are very
interesting. And the reason I did that is
because I was starting to sniff out that we're having some
problems in the industry. This episode is going to be a
bit of a rant. I'm not sure if I have any
solutions as I wax poetically. We will find out if I could have
some bright insights, but more so than anything I have
concerns. If I'm being honest, I've been
pretty connected to the industry as of late in terms of talking
to a lot of my chef friends. I've been getting a lot of Dm's
and I'm starting to notice a really repetitive pattern.
A lot of chefs that I know are burnt crisp.
They're bringing up the same issues.
They don't have enough cooks. They're getting a lot of
pressure from ownership to perform.
Their menus are too big, They're working too hard, The hours are
too long. Cooks are working two jobs.
They're willing to leave for a buck here or a buck there.
Restaurants are raising their rates very quickly in order to
pull all the cooks from the market, at least all the good
ones. Chefs have always worked hard.
I don't think that's. I don't think that's new.
I think I I was a chef for a very long time, so seven days a
week then and seven days a week now.
Hard is hard, but I think the difference is a lot of the chefs
that I'm talking to are not only working the long hours, but it's
at a sprinter's pace and they're having to compromise quality
where before at least they had enough people where they didn't
have to sacrifice the quality. Someone messaged me and they
said that they had put in their notice and this is someone that
I communicate with often. We're going a little bit back
and forth, so I was asking him the question why he was leaving.
He just said all his cooks have to come in at 4:00 PM.
The restaurant opens at 5:00. So not only is he the prep cook,
but he also has to set the line for all the other cooks.
The reason the cooks have to come in late is because they all
have second jobs. Because one job doesn't pay
enough, which one thing leads to another, Which leads to bad
service, not enough product, mediocre quality, Not something
that they're happy with. The hours are still long, but
sometimes you could put up with long hours if you're enjoying
what you're doing, If you're not as frustrated, you could deal
with it, right? It's kind of like if you're
playing a video game that you enjoy, you can play it all
night. It doesn't matter that you've
been playing it for 24 hours. You know when you were a little
kid, you'd play video games 24 hours a day, if not longer.
But if you didn't enjoy the video game all of a sudden, you
might not want to play it for 24 hours straight, much less 10
hours straight. That's kind of what's happening
in the kitchen. A lot of times people would say
why do they work so many hours? A lot of chefs enjoy being in
the kitchen that long. I know right now personally, I'm
doing a chef in residence program at a restaurant in
Dripping Springs and I wake up in the morning and I get ready.
I go to work and I'm there all day.
And then I come home. I go to sleep and I do the same
thing and I'm like back in the grind for a short period of
time. But I'm fully switched on and I
can't turn it off right. I'm an all in type of chef, so
I'm driving to work. I'm making my notes to talk
about When I get there, I come home, I'm thinking about new
things. If I have any time off, I'm
looking at things that I could incorporate, whether it's the
culture or the philosophy or even on the menu.
So there are some chefs like that, just they are so into it,
they can't turn it off because it's fun.
It's like a video game. They're racking up the high
score, but what if it's not fun? If it's not fun, you're not
going to be doing that. You're not going to be trying to
move things forward. You're not going to be trying to
push. And so this guy that I was
talking to says to me that he's put in his notice and he's going
to leave. He doesn't have a plan.
He doesn't know where he's going.
He's picking my brain. Where do you think I should go?
It's an interesting question because here's what I do know,
is that not all places are suffering the same.
A lot of the smaller independent restaurants may be suffering
more so than the big players. A lot of the chain restaurants
are suffering, especially those chain restaurants that have
massive menus. You know, the ones that have
like 50 menu items and three cooks to pull it off, right?
And when you have massive menus and a few cooks to do it, one
thing has to give, right? Usually the cooks can only do so
much, so you're probably going to take shortcuts and compromise
on the quality. So I had said to him, as taboo
as this sounds to a lot of people, it's not taboo.
And I think we have to reframe how we think about this.
I said to him, and he's working in a great restaurant, I won't
say which one, but he's working in a very top end restaurant
with a big name chef. And I said to him, sometimes you
need to take the corporate job so that you can have more free
time and you have more infrastructure.
You get the benefits, you have more resources, You have a human
resources department. You might get the free gym
membership, the health benefits, the PTO, all the things that I
think are valuable, especially for what today's cooks are
looking for. And you could find that in a
corporate environment. It's much more difficult to find
in an independent restaurant that's independently owned and
independently run. But there's a tradeoff, and that
tradeoff is usually you're trading the chef life for
quality of life. Might be giving up a little bit
of that creativity, depending on, you know, if you have, if
you're in a corporate structure where they're writing the menu
for you, something that you got to think about because quality
of life seems to be a hot topic. People are talking about burnout
all the time, being overworked and underpaid.
I'm not really sure how I feel about burnout.
I think burnout is a very real thing, and I've experienced it
before. But when I've experienced
burnout, it's never been in jobs that I like.
When I'm having fun at work, I am not burned out.
When I'm enjoying myself, I can work there all day long.
You're around people that you love.
The kitchen crew is just humming.
They're like your second family. Don't feel burned out.
You're cooking food that you enjoy.
Don't feel burned out. Change that situation up.
You're cooking with people that you really don't like, People
that you don't get along with. You don't like your boss.
You're cooking food that you're not inspired by burnout.
A lot of the burnout has to do with not just the amount of
hours that you're working, but the amount of joy that you're
getting out of those hours that you're putting it.
It's the missing part that not a lot of people talk about, but I
think it's equally as important as you really have to enjoy what
you're doing, or if not, that burnout comes on a lot quicker.
If you have a chance, you need to go back and listen to Chefs
PS:. A episode one.
And in that very first episode, I talked about the state of the
union coming right out of the pandemic.
And what we were facing and some of the things that I had brought
up was that during the pandemic, a lot of people left and they
found other careers where they can make more money, a side
hustle, whatever the case may be.
So a lot of people left, which put a lot of stress on the
restaurants that were opening. Then a lot of the people that
came back were basically playing arbitrage between employers.
Meaning I'll work here and I'll get a raise and then I'll go
there and I'll get $0.25 more and then I'll come back and I'll
get a dollar more. Where previously chefs would say
if you leave, you're not coming back.
But post COVID, they were begging people to come back,
even if they had burned the bridge, because they were all
desperate for staff. One of the other things is we
had promoted many people into positions of leadership, which
they were not ready for, but we were desperate.
We needed people to lead the teams.
So maybe someone became a sous chef or an executive chef that
was maybe two or three years removed from where from being
ready for that position prior to the pandemic.
So now here we are, 2023, basically pretty close to
wrapping up the year. And where are we?
We created a big mess. We promoted people that weren't
ready. We're seeing the fruits of that
people were overworked, was almost like we didn't learn the
lesson from the pandemic to streamline the menus and make
something that's more cost efficient.
Cooks came in with different expectations, right?
The industry feels different. I could tell you that for sure
in just three short years, the industry feels different.
I'm not saying it feels better or worse.
I'm just saying it feels different.
I can't necessarily put my finger on what is so different
about it, but I can tell you it feels different.
And if you've been cooking for a while pre 2020, you know what
I'm talking about. It's very difficult to put your
finger on exactly what it is that's different, but it is
different. I don't know if it's social
media or if it's the type of food that we're cooking or if
we've lowered the bar. I'm not sure exactly what it is,
but it's definitely not the same.
I'm going to share some of the results from the poll that I put
up with you. The first one I put up was, is
the industry harder now than it was in 2020 or I should say
prior to twenty 2081% of the people that voted yes, the
industry is harder now. That got me curious, why is it
harder now? So I wanted to dig a little bit
deeper. I put up a lot of questions.
The next question I had put up was how staffed is your kitchen?
Are you fully staffed, down a few cooks, or are you desperate?
Only 21% said they were fully staffed.
Think about that. Only 21 percent, 21 out of 100
restaurants are fully staffed. That's crazy.
That's crazy to think back when all the culinary schools were
popping up, like around 2010 to 2015, and you had a stack of
resumes and people were doing stages and working for free and
culinary labor was just a plenty.
There was a line out the door to work at mediocre places.
Now you have some of the best restaurants in the world putting
ads on Facebook and Craigslist for cooks and sous chefs.
Places where you would have to get tapped on the shoulder to go
work are now putting ads. Interesting times.
The next question I put up is your menu too big?
Only 13% said it could be bigger, 52% said it was the
right size and 35% of the people said it was too big, which I
find interesting because I actually, I thought that number
would be higher, which tells me that some chef owners are
putting a lot of thought into the menu and are focusing on
better quality, fewer, fewer items.
But there's a trade off, right, because the customer has to
understand that too. Some of the best restaurants
that people are talking about in the last few years really are,
are sniper specialists. They do a few things very well.
They don't have big menus. I'll give you an example.
Maybe they're a Taco shop or a ramen shop, or they serve this
pizza and it's excellent. They don't have 100 items on the
menu that are OK. They have 10 that are excellent.
I mean, there's a couple of restaurants in Austin that I
could think of. You know, Franklin's BBQ is a
legendary restaurant in Austin, TX.
There's a line out the door. People are camping out, so when
they run out of brisket, sold out, sign goes up and their
brisket is world class. Best in the world arguably.
But they only just do a few things and they do it very well.
And then you get owners of other places that think they got to be
something for everybody and they have too many items on the menu
and then it puts a strain on the staff and then you start to
deliver. Mediocre, because there's no way
you could put out excellent food when menus are.
It's just not practical. Maybe you could point to a
restaurant that does that very well.
But in my opinion, if you want to be a successful restaurant,
you got to hone in on your concept and your brand, and you
have to deliver that very well. The next question I asked was
the skill level of the team around you.
Is it better, worse or the same? 23% said that the team that
they're with right now is better, 40% said it's worse.
Now think about that. And 16% said it's really bad.
So let's call that 5056% are saying that it's way worse than
it currently was, 21%, the same 23% are saying it's better,
right? So a large portion of the chefs
and cooks that answered on the polar saying that the situation
is worse. So not only is the industry
harder, but the cooks are not as skilled as they used to be
before 2020. What happened?
I don't know. I I don't know what happened.
And these are rhetorical questions.
I wish I had answers. Like I said, this podcast was
going to be a little bit of a rant because I don't know the
answers to some of these questions, but I feel like they
need to be discussed, and I'm hoping that this podcast starts
to open up the conversation. At least it's identifying what
the problem is, because if we want to move the industry
forward, we have to understand what the problem is.
The last question I had put up on the poll was how fairly
compensated are you? Are you compensated well?
You're fine. You get by with one job or you
need to have more than one job to make ends meet. 18% said they
need more than one job, and 48% said they struggle.
They struggle with what their pay rate is, but they make ends
meet. But they struggle a little bit.
And only 33% felt that they were fairly compensated, which I
thought was interesting because if you know anything about human
nature, we could all make more money, right?
You give me a $10 raise, I'd like an $11.00 raise, right?
That's just, it's just how we're wired, right?
We always want a little bit more.
At least a lot of us are. Clearly 33% are not wired that
way. So as I was looking at all of
this and I'm just trying to, I'm just trying to pinpoint what the
issue is. So it's harder now.
Like I said, some of the issues have to do with the pandemic.
A lot of people leaving, a lot of the good cooks not coming
back. A lot of it feels like we were
on pause for three years and we weren't seeing improvement.
A lot of people left fun jobs that they enjoyed for a little
bit more money, right? And then the people that were
left behind didn't enjoy them as much and they're no longer fun
jobs. Sometimes it's people can't make
ends meet financially. Menus are too big.
We haven't fully corrected that issue across the board.
And the industry's harder. I'll share a little story with
you. I had quit a job years ago and
one of my best friends and I, we were sitting down and he wanted
to quit. And I would talk to him out of
quitting and then I would want to quit and he would talk me out
of quitting. And we were there for each
other. Like I said, we were like
brothers. Like I pulled him off to the
side and I told him I had quit while he was off for a few days.
The thing was is when we're having a conversation, he's the
the place was screwed up. He understood.
He understood why I had quit, but he told me, he says, I know
this place was screwed up, but at least it was screwed up and
we were here together. Like we had each other's back.
I remember that that hit me pretty hard because he was
right. I felt like I was abandoning
him, abandoning him as a cook and chef.
And you have to think about that like they're they're the
industry is more than just you sometimes.
And sometimes things do not get better when everyone starts to
jump ship for a dollar here or $0.50 there.
Sometimes if you're enjoying where you're at and you're
enjoying the people that are around you and you care about
them, sometimes the bigger decision is to help rebuild the
team. It's not everyone's job.
Rebuilding the team isn't everyone's job, but it's some
people's jobs. It's when the leaders step up,
it goes back to that saying win together, fail together, if you
can lift up your team. Because understand that when one
person leaves, it creates A domino effect.
When you leave, you're putting your work on the person that's
left behind and it makes it more stressful for them.
And then they leave, and so the other person that's left behind,
it's triple the work for them and so on and so forth.
It compounds pretty quick. Sometimes when things are bad,
the best thing to do is to not leave.
If you're attached to the place and you care about the people,
where you're at is to weather the storm and get through the
tough times. I don't know what we're going to
do about this wage situation because it's a real problem.
And if you go back and listen to my podcast on food cost
management, you should have a better understanding of money.
But I could tell you this, it's not as simple as waving a magic
wand. I know I see a lot of comments
and I read a lot of things where people say, oh, owners are
making so much money. It's not necessarily true.
A lot of times owners make no money and they keep putting
money into the restaurant to keep it open, to supply salaries
for the staff that is there. I know that's.
I know that for a fact. A lot of times owners don't take
home any money and it's a money pit.
They lose millions of dollars when the restaurant closes.
It's a big investment and I think a lot of people think that
some rich person is putting all their money into a restaurant
and the restaurants making them rich.
It's not necessarily the case. I think more people go broke
opening restaurants than get rich opening restaurants.
There's unicorns. Of course, There's always
exceptions to the rule, but the majority of the people aren't
getting rich off off restaurants.
They do it because it's a passion project and if they make
money, great. But I can tell you the majority
don't. So we need to look at raising
menu prices. But then people don't want to go
out and eat. Do they want to pay for what
we're serving? I've seen restaurants starting
to add a couple of dollars to the menu price to provide
affordable healthcare for their employees.
There's restaurants that are doing tipping for the front of
the house, service teams and culinary teams.
There has to be some creative options out there.
And I'm and I'm not sitting here and say I have.
I have all the answers, but I want to begin the discussion
because I truly do love this industry and I do love the
people in it. I love the cooks, I love the
chefs, and that's what chefs PS:.
A is all about. I'm trying to help everyone win.
Well, let me rephrase that. I'm trying to help everyone win
That listens to Chef's PS:. A.
If they don't listen to chef's PS:.
A. Fuck them.
Anyway, let's keep the discussion going and let's make
the industry better. Obviously it's not a one person
job. We're all in it together.
A better industry for all of us. We all win.
We all get better. We all make more money, We all
cook better food, We're all successful.
Anyway, If you want to support the show, you know what to do.
Make sure you leave five stars. If you're watching on YouTube,
hit the like button and subscribe.
Go to chefspsa.com. You get all the books merge.
I just started a Facebook page. I guess I forgot to say that.
Look for Chefs PSA on Facebook. I'm on there.
I'm posting on there. Don't message me on there.
I I really don't like using the Facebook app.
I have enough apps as it is, right?
Twitter. Facebook threads, like all these
social media apps are a little overwhelming.
Instagram is the best way to get ahold of me or Twitter.
I'm on all the other social apps.
Let me know what you think of the show.
You could comment in the poll if you're watching on Spotify.
Thank you very much. See you next week.
Hit the porno music.