Hello chefs. This is the chef's.
PS a podcast. I'm your host Andhra Doterra.
On today's episode, we're going to talk about building your
kitchen team. Stay tuned.
Before we get into today's episode, I want to give you a
quick update. I am doing a dinner on June
26th, in Dallas Texas, at Jose restaurant with Anastasia
Quinones, We're going to have chefs, Philip Speer, and Rick
Lopez both, Austin chefs. Both fantastic Cooks Phillips
from Commodore. One of the best restaurants in
Austin. And Rick is from La condesa,
James Beard, nominated restaurants.
A ton of accolades between the two of them, of course, Chef, AQ
anastacio. She's James Beard nominated as
well. She's, you know, I'd say right
now, she's probably the queen of Dallas, maybe the princess,
depending on who you ask. And then my Myself obviously the
best retired Chef in the business.
Well I don't say that. That's what everyone says about
me. Anyway, I'll be doing that
dinner on June 26th. If you're in Dallas and you want
to try some good food, it's going to be focused around,
Mexican Cuisine, you want to make sure that you're there.
I might do a little meet and greet meet the chefs talk to us.
Shoot the shit. If you all want to do that, if
you're in Dallas. And you want to do a chef's PS.
A-- meet the chef meat and greet.
Let me know. I love having these
conversations with shop, so I get a lot of DMS all day.
And by the way, if you haven't been involved in the cigar
Sunday q&as that, I do, I want to make sure that you do that.
I look forward to those. I look forward to smoking my
cigar. I look forward to getting the
questions last week. They were really good, but for
those of you that aren't aware, maybe you don't follow me on
Instagram if you do, and you want to do a Q&A with me on
Sundays. Go to the chef's, PS a page on
Instagram on Sundays. I'll do a Q&A, you can ask your
questions. I try to get to all the
questions that I can. Some of them I'm not going to
respond to because they're not questions.
They're just statement. So I'm not going to respond to a
statement, but if you have genuine questions about the
industry about me about chefs, PSA things that are troubling,
you feel free to ask. I'm there for that.
Other updates. The bad sooo good.
Chef book is out. Make sure you go get it.
I've received a lot of really good feedback from other chefs
that enjoyed it. Actually my chef, my mentor sent
me a note this morning and said how much he enjoyed it.
It reminded him of the conversations that we had one.
When I was a dummy, I'm still a dummy sometimes.
Anyway, it was nice too. It was nice to get the comment
from him. The dedication.
At the beginning of the book is dedicated to 22 of my chefs,
Kirk Bachman Chef that runs the escoffier schools and Patrick
Mitchell. He's a culinary competing world
champion across the globe, part of the world.
MasterChef Society been on Team USA.
A couple of times been to the culinary Olympics.
Anyway, those are my chefs that I admire, and I wanted to make
sure that I dedicated the book to them.
Shout out to those guys. Also a few episodes back.
I did a two-part series on opening a restaurant, so part
one was the critical path and part 2, was what to expect after
your open and strategies. I had mentioned to during that
episode that I might turn that whole episode into a critical
path that I could give away. So the critical path is done.
So I'm announcing it right now. I'll put it out, sometime next
week. It took me a minute to create
the Critical path to go back and listen to the episodes and then
add more and transcribe put links.
Make it look pretty but I'll have that up.
I'm not going to sell it for free.
For those people that are interested in opening up a
restaurant. Don't hold me accountable to it
because obviously the information is only as good as
the person using it, so I'll have opening a restaurant
critical path available next week.
For those of you that are interested in, you want to learn
how to open up a restaurant that will be available for free.
I'll put on my website. Speaking of my website, I'm
trying to update my website. I'm in the process of redoing my
website and it's taking a little bit longer than I thought you
know I'm not I'm not a website designer but I'm not going to
pay someone to do it because if I do it I'll learn how to design
websites. I designed it the first time I
figured I could do it again but better only problem is is my
skills haven't gotten better and In designing websites.
So it's taking a little bit of time, but there will be a
revised chefs PSA website coming soon.
It's going to look much cleaner. That's what I've been up to.
One more thing before we get into today's episode, I get
asked a lot of questions so I've been asked to get into AI a
little bit more and how I use it and how it could benefit a lot
of chefs. And I've also been asked
specifically if I could explain my morning routine.
Now I probably could do a whole podcast on my morning routine
but I don't think that it's completely in line with chefs
PSA because it's more unique to me and not everything that I do
has anything to do with being a chef.
And so I'm going to do to spin off episodes specifically on my
morning routine and also expanding upon how I use AI, but
I will have those as bonus episodes and I will put those on
my YouTube channel exclusively. So, by the way, I'm on YouTube.
So you might be watching this on Spotify or you may be watching
this on YouTube, but if you are watching on YouTube, make sure
you thumbs up, subscribe, whatever the fuck they tell you
to do on YouTube. So that Thing that make sure you
do that and if you're not and you're listen on Spotify, go
subscribe to my YouTube page. I don't think you can leave five
stars on YouTube. You should leave five stars on
the podcast but leave the thumbs up on YouTube.
Anyway, we digress So, building a team in the kitchen.
Probably one of the most important things that you're
going to do, as a chef is going to be building your team.
And when you're building a team, you know, depending on what type
of kitchen, you're running, you're probably going to get all
ranges of skill sets. So people that are well versed,
may be ready to take your job as the chef and people that are
entry level may be right out of culinary school or it is their
first job in the kitchen. There's nothing wrong with that,
but having a diverse kitchen is probably one of the best things
that you could do. As a chef, you want to make sure
that you're getting people from different backgrounds and
different restaurants and different.
Different cooking Styles, especially if you're running a
larger kitchen, the last job that I had where I had to hire a
ton of people I wanted to hire peoples.
That had a very high-end background.
So it's looking for people that have like a Michelin star
restaurant pedigree, or were coming from restaurants that
were on the world's 50 best and things like that.
And so, as I was finding people, I noticed that they were all
coming from different backgrounds, that they were all
superstars, in the organizations, in which they
were working. now, sometimes this could be a problem because
when you bring a lot of A lot of a player's, a lot of people want
to be Superman, they want to be Batman, they want to be the
superhero star of the show. And so, Me trying to get all
these. Highly skilled chefs to come
together and work with each other as equals, and Piers was
something that you had to have a little bit of finesse.
To manage all of them, you know, I felt like I felt like I was
Riza from the Wu-Tang Clan having all these very highly,
talented individuals, all trying to work together towards a
common goal and one of the things that I would say to them
is look, when we join this team, it's one voice, One mission, we
all have different backgrounds, we're all going to create one
culture, and it doesn't matter that you did it this way at this
restaurant, or that way at this other restaurant.
When we all come together, it has to be the way that we're
doing it here. So we all have to agree on it.
And we need to make the best decisions for the operation.
Because a lot of times when you're bringing in different
individuals from different backgrounds, they're very
strong, and very passionate. Say, this is how we did it.
This place this, how we did at the other place, this is the
best way to do things. And so what I would do is I
would hear them out and it's okay.
I like the idea of this here and I like the idea of this here but
this is how we're going to do it here and once we establish that
as the standard it would become non-negotiable.
But back to the analogy of trying to create a team of
superheroes. What I would say to them is I
don't need Batman on the team. I don't need Superman.
I need the Justice League. I need all of you to come
together. You know, Wu-Tang example form,
like Voltron And that's really what I needed is.
I needed everyone from different perspectives to be looking at
the same problem and coming up with unique solutions to solve
it and they were able to because they all had different
backgrounds and when you work with people that have different
backgrounds from different restaurants in different
cultures, And if you're open to the idea of hearing them out and
say, that's a good idea, but maybe it doesn't work here, but
maybe a part of it does. Now, I have a chef's PSA.
That sometimes sometimes I get a lot of shit for a lot of people
understand it, but when you don't understand it, there's
some nuance and what I'm trying to say and that is no one cares,
how you did it at your last job, that's mostly true, but it's not
always true. And let me explain what I mean
by that. When it's your first day on the
job, there's a there's this insecure feeling that you have
that you gotta you gotta prove your worth.
And as I say often in the kitchen, the only currency that
really matters is your ability to cook.
That's the currency that you bring and so when you come from
another restaurant, you're bringing that currency with you
and you immediately want to show your value.
And say this is how we did it at the last job.
The reason I advise against it is because no one wants to hear
that shit on your first day. It's like why don't you learn
how we do it here before you talk about the old job?
It's like talking About your ex in front of the new boyfriend or
girlfriend, like no one wants to hear that shit.
Right? I don't want to hear that shit.
I don't think a lot of other chefs want to hear that shit.
I want you to learn the way that we do it here now.
It doesn't mean that I might not ask you, how did you do it there
and I'll start picking people's brains.
No. That's more of the insecure
egocentric, Chef coming in and flexing about how they did it
the other place and everyone needs to learn from them.
And I'm not saying it's always wrong, but I'm saying in my
experience, the majority of the time, not all the time but in
the majority of the time, those people are not doing it for the
right reasons, they're not doing it because they actually care
about improving the operation. They're doing it more as a flex.
Now, what I'm talking about when you're building your team, you
might need to pick people's brains.
You might need to say. How did you do it at that?
Other place, what did you do at that restaurant?
What was unique? What are some of those things
that you could impart here to help us level up and become
better? That's different because one way
is seen, as a negative, is that you're being disruptive and
you're being insecure, And the other way is seen as you're
being collaborative and when you're building a team, you want
people that you could collaborate with you all, don't
need a thing to same. There's an expression.
If two people on the same team think alike than one of them is
useless, I don't want a team of Yes Men.
I actually prefer people that disagree with me in a respectful
way. Now there's, there's a way that
you could disagree with someone that it's still respectful, but
when I was the chef, I used to share an office with my
executive Sous chefs. And I did that because sometimes
I just sit back in the chair and, you know, as the ideas were
rolling around, it's not. What do you think of this?
What do you think of that? And I wanted to play off them
every possible scenario because I wanted to know what I might be
missing. I want to know what I might not
be thinking about, in a certain case, maybe it had to do with
food, maybe had to do with the problem that we are facing.
And I would just throw out these things.
And if they just agreed with everything that I said that, I
would just sometimes be living in an echo chamber, and I
wouldn't be getting anywhere. So when you're building your
team, you want to make sure that you have people that you could
bounce ideas off. That you could disagree with
respectfully, that have a different perspective than you
do. Because being in an echo,
chamber can be dangerous. You want someone on your team
that will tell you, when you're going to make a mistake, as the
expression goes, don't ever let a good boss, make a bad
decision. I needed people around me that
were sometimes telling me, hey, I know you think this is a good
idea but let me tell you why, or let me tell you what the team is
saying behind your back because they don't want to tell you.
I needed those people around me. Those people are worth their
weight in gold. I know, I was never upset about
that and I think if you're a chef, you need those people
around you because they have your best interest in mind.
Now, there's a certain level of discernment that you need as an
individual to say. You know what?
They might they might not see what I'm trying to do, because I
understand that perspective because I used to think that
way, but I've evolved my thought process.
But you should hear them out and they shouldn't feel
uncomfortable coming to you. Now when you're building a team
of cooks and you're pulling from a lot of restaurants, I caution
you to pull everything from the same area because you'll just
end up replicating that restaurant that you're pulling
from. So, for example, let's say
there's a restaurant that might be your competition and they
close and then all their cooks are defecting and they're coming
to work for you. Well, if they all come work for
you, you might just end up replicating that other
restaurant that close because that is the style and not only
that be also bring the culture. You bring those habits with you,
good and bad. So keep that in mind.
I'm not against bringing on two or three people from One
Restaurant, but when you bring multiples, that's not always the
best thing. Because you're like, I said,
you're bringing on those bad habits, or bring it on that
culture, but sometimes you could be bringing on some of that
dissension. So if there is a problem and you
need to get rid of one person from that, from that click, you
might be losing all three or four if they all came together.
So that's always a little bit of a slippery slope when people
bring When people come in groups, I know I've dealt with
that situation before where I lose one.
And as soon as you lose one, two and three are also gone.
And I would prepare for that in my mind, like I would sit down
in the office and I would talk to my one of my Sous chefs.
Are my executive sous chef. I say, hey, we're going to lose
this person. And when we lose this person,
we're also going to lose this person and this person and this
person. So are we really prepared for
that? Have we really thought this
through? And so that's that's the danger
of bringing people in groups. So it's important that you
notice that and that you're aware of that potential Pitfall.
So I would caution you to bring everyone that's coming in a
group and it's not always a bad thing.
Sometimes it's a good thing, but if you could separate them, it's
probably even better for you. You don't want, you don't want
to be forming Clicks in silos in your kitchen because when you
form Clicks in silos, that that really never ends.
Well, that means that one group is excluded another group and
then there's dissension and then there's favoritism.
Mm. And when you start, when you
start seeing that, it's important that you recognize it
as the chef and you find out how to break up the group or you
pull one person out and you move them to a different area of the
kitchen different shift. If you have multiple kitchens,
you put them in another kitchen. Whatever the case may be, when
you recognize there's trouble brewing with clicks, that's when
you got to break them up. Now, the last thing I'll say is
I think it's important that you mix it up with a variety of
people men, women different ethnicities, different
backgrounds, because you're going to start to pick up on
little skills that you might. Be completely unaware of a great
place that you see that is like if you have a restaurant you
have family meal and then people cook maybe food from their
Hometown and then all of a sudden he's like wow that's a
good idea. Why do we never think of that in
my last job we had a lot of international students that were
on J-1 visas. And every now and again, they
would cook for family meal and I would see techniques and dishes
that I've never seen before. I was like, hmm, I could take
that idea. And I could use it over here and
I would get inspired. Sometimes they just show me
something. I'd like I'd never seen that
before. How did you do that?
I taste it. They explained to me.
This is the story behind at this tradition.
You'll learn a lot about food by trying other people's cuisines
in their backgrounds and their ethnicities.
So basically in a nutshell, you're designing a kitchen team.
You want to make sure that you have a variety of skill sets.
The more experienced cooks are helping the in experienced
Cooks, get to that level, right? Because the more experienced
Cooks, most likely are on the trajectory of their career path.
Going on to become Sous, chefs are executive chefs or whatever
the case may be. And then you have entry-level
cooks that you're basically developing and mentoring to
become the next future star. So the, the highly competent
cooks are bringing up the newly. The newly hatched Cooks, so that
everyone is on the same page. So you create a succession plan
So remember this, you want the Justice League?
You don't want individual superheroes, you want multiple
backgrounds. Careful pulling from all the
same restaurant have different levels of skills.
Have different backgrounds, mix it up, share meals, you'll learn
a lot about people when you share meals And make sure you
have people on your team that are confident with you to tell
you what you need to know when you're doing wrong.
And that don't always agree with everything that you say because
that's where you're going to get fresh and different
perspectives. Anyway, That's how I build my
kitchen team. Maybe that's not how you build
your kitchen team. I should also mention one more
thing, you know, I touched on this but I kind of left it
hanging out there. As I said that I went to, after
a certain level of cooks, I do think that's important, but I'm
not saying that you exclude people.
If they don't necessarily have that skill, but I'll give you an
example. If you're opening up an Italian
restaurant, you're going to go after cooks that have that sort
of background, it doesn't mean that you're only going to hire
Cooks. That have those requisite
skills, you might hire people that have similar skills that
would fit but you want some frame of reference of that type
of Cuisine. So it doesn't mean that they're
all coming from the same restaurant, you might be pulling
from multiple Italian restaurants and then you might
mix it in with someone. That's coming from a French
restaurant background because they will be able to introduce
things also that are different and unique to the team.
They just might have a different perspective on how things are
done a different Paradigm Shift, can sometimes be a good thing in
a kitchen. Anyway.
That's it for now. If you want to support the show,
make sure you leave five stars nothing less than five stars.
Anything less than 5 Stars, put that shit on someone else's
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link on Spotify where you could donate to the show.
I appreciate that. Go get the book bad, sooo good,
chef kitchen, Art of War. Culinary leadership fundamentals
and we will see you next week. Look out for those two short.
YouTube episodes also coming soon.
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