Hello chefs, This is Chef's PSA Podcast.
I'm your host Andre Natara. On today's episode, we're going
to talk about kitchen rust, AKA ring rust.
Stay tuned. Before we get started, let me
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Culinary leadership fundamentals.
That's for new sous chefs, new executive chefs.
It's going to go over the basics of what it's like to run a
kitchen. Bad Sous Good Chef is the book
that I wrote. It's a it's a fictional
narrative conversation between a sous chef and an executive chef,
going back and forth on all his fears and anxieties and a lot of
the questions that we all have when we're new in leadership
positions. Kitchen Art of War This is, it's
a translation of Sun Zoo's Art of War and how it applies to the
culinary world. It's a direct translation.
So if you like that style of Eastern philosophy writing, then
I think you'd like Kitchen Art of War.
But if you don't like reading that style, it's probably not
the book for you. It is I I like to say it's
advanced reading and it's advanced thinking.
Line Cook Survival Manual for line cooks.
Every cook in your kitchen should have what it should be
like hanging on the clipboard. It should be the culinary manual
when the manual doesn't exist. And then companion to that is
how not to be the biggest city in the kitchen.
They're all short breeds. And then I have some free
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opening up a restaurant, and a free culinary dictionary.
Hey, sometimes you're new to the industry and you don't know
these words and you're too afraid to ask.
So all these books are designed to give you a shortcut to help
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That's what you could do to support today's episode Ring
rust or a KA Kitchen Rust, depending on I guess I could
have said that. Either way.
Anyway, it doesn't matter for those of you that may or may not
know if you've been paying attention, I've recently come
out of my retirement for a brief period.
I'm doing what's called a Chef in Residence through mid
November. This is 2023 when you're
listening and I'm doing it at Tilly's Restaurant at Camp Lucy
in Dripping Springs, TX. For those of you that may not
know, I am retired as a chef. I was a chef for 27 years.
I decided to step away and focus full time on mentoring,
coaching, and the chef's PS:. A creating the memes, writing
the books, doing the podcast. This is my full time job, but as
you know, if you listen to the show, I have a lot of opinions.
I talk a lot of crap. Someone messaged me the other
day and said can you still back it up?
Got in my head a little bit, I'm not going to lie because I was
thinking, can I still back it up?
I'm giving, I'm giving a lot of advice.
I have a lot of opinions on what the right thing to do is.
I'm looking at every situation and saying this is all you got
to do to turn it around. Work hard, discipline, focus,
all the things that I talked about daily on chefs, PSA.
But can I still walk the talk? It was something that I talked
about in an earlier episode where if I had to go back in the
kitchen, how difficult would it be?
I had said it wouldn't be that difficult.
I would do some research. I would look at the latest
trends, plating trends, ingredient trends.
I would update my style a little bit and I would jump right back
in and I didn't think it would be a problem.
I still know how to cook pots, pans, etcetera, still know how
to use a knife. I didn't think it would be that
difficult and here we are. So a friend of mine reached out
to me. She runs dish and Dame, so you
should go follow that Instagram account.
And she was looking for an executive chef and asked me if I
would be interested in potentially doing a chef and
residence program there through Midnovember.
So two months go in, write the menu, reconcept it, work with
the team, get to cook with them. And around the same time, I'm
also contemplating if I still got it.
So it's like the timing was impeccable in time, on time all
the time. And I thought this is a great
opportunity for me to get back in and see if I could do it.
So I had a few days to get in, work with the team, write the
recipes, write the menu, train them, and then go live with the
menu. And I could tell you that I feel
pretty good about the menu. Now granted, I'm going to write
a menu based on the team that I have, the location, the
environment, the type of restaurant.
So a lot of the food that I'm doing is going to be what I
think fits that area. It's not an Italian restaurant
or it's not an Asian restaurant. Otherwise I'd write menus
tailored to those specific types of cuisines.
It's not a tasting menu, only restaurant.
Otherwise, I would write a menu specific to that.
This is an upscale modern American restaurant in the
country, In the Hill Country. Therefore, I wrote a menu
similar to that. So when writing the menu I had
to sit down and I'll tell you what it was.
It was really fun because I haven't written a menu in quite
some time outside of consulting, but usually it's for those
things. But this is a menu of my
personality on a plate. So I often talked about the
creativity. And when it comes to writing
menus, what I did is I put on my headphones, started sipping my
green tea, started chewing my nicotine gum, listening to 40HZ
brain waves on the headphones, and just got into a creative
zone and started writing. A lot of the menu that I wrote
is the greatest hits of my career.
So go back 27 years when I was a chef and a lot of dishes that
meant something to me. So those are the dishes that I
put on. Every single dish on the menu
has a story behind it as to why it's on the menu or as to why
it's important to me that it went on the menu.
I've modified the plating a little bit.
I've updated it to 2023 standards.
There's a lot of different cooking techniques on there,
everything from using alginates, but no foams and bubbles.
But yes, there are some alginates.
I I lied. There's actually a cheese foam
on some gnocchi, so I did use some melting salts, sodium
citrate and hexametaphosphate. There's a lot of precision
cooking, so a lot of the vegetables that we're doing are
cooked under vacuum, and there's also classic techniques involved
as well, making stock sauces. A lot of the repertoire that I
had as a chef coming up was in those classic kitchen.
So you're going to see a lot of that classic technique.
But I get into the kitchen day one, menus written, recipes are
written, and then it's trained the staff.
Now keep in mind five days to launch and it's basically,
imagine relaunching a restaurant, right, opening a
restaurant in five days. New team, at least.
None of them have ever worked with me.
And they're great by the way. Fantastic cooks and chefs, and
if you're in the area and you want to come check it out and
eat, you should do so. But we get in, we discuss the
menu and we start rolling it out now.
I love the idea of rapid prototyping.
This is something that Steve Jobs kind of made famous.
That's why they constantly release Apple updates is there's
update 1, update 1.1, update 1.1, point 2, and so on and so
forth. And that's how I operate in a
kitchen. It's get better every single
day. Constantly push, evolve.
At the end of the night we meet, we discuss what went wrong, what
we could do better, and we constantly tweet.
We don't have a bad service. We have a service that we can
learn from. And it's a lot of this stuff
that I'm that I'm teaching the culinary team there while I'm
working with them. I like Sam, getting them Chefs
PSA certified, you know, cut the tape straight, fold the towels.
A lot of that they were already doing.
But all the things that I see that I talk about on Chefs PSA,
I'm trying to teach them as well.
They're very receptive to it and things are moving along really
quick. So I I don't think that from a
culinary standpoint, I'm very far off in the ring rust.
Granted, in five days I feel like I'm right back in the game,
but that's not where I was rusty.
Where I was rusty was physically, and I felt that
right away. I've made chefs PS:.
A post that the last thing to go for a chef is their palate, but
the first thing to go is their back or their knees or their
feet. And all the years of being a
chef, I could tell you that I don't have the best back knees
and feet. People that know me in real life
say I walk funny because I've. I have some back problems.
My back constantly pops, my knees pop, my ankles pop
everything. Everything's a little bit
rickety there. And so doing what I do with
chefs, PSA, a lot of it is working in front of a computer
and even though I exercise every day, I'm not standing on my feet
for 11:50 hours a day. And so that was really the first
thing that I felt when it came to rust.
Day one, I came home, took a shower, everything hurt.
My back was hurting, my feet were throbbing, my knees were
hurting. I put some sports cream on the
bottom of my feet to alleviates the pain.
Day two was more of the same, still a little bit sore, but by
day three I could tell you I knocked off the rust.
I was hustling in the kitchen, I was moving fast and it was like
I was a young chef all over again, right?
12 hours a day in the kitchen in the grind and having fun.
I I I'm not going to lie, I had a lot of fun working with this
team and creating and cooking and being with them.
Some of the cooks would joke around with me and say you still
got it, chef. Ignore the haters, but I could
tell you I definitely felt it when it came to the first couple
of days off was, you know, I slept a lot later, was a little
bit achy, but not as much. I was definitely energized.
You know, in my day-to-day I the hustle was there, a lot more
doing with the Chef's PSA stuff because now I had to do
everything that I do for Chef's PSA in a much shorter period of
time. I have to do that in my off
hours when I'm not working in the kitchen.
So for those of you that have been trying to get a hold of me,
I'm a little slow to respond because I'm working in the
kitchen right now. But as far as rust goes, I think
week one was a success. I felt like I was right back in
it, and I had touched a little bit on this on the most recent
podcast right before this one. And I talked about how when
you're enjoying what you do, the long days don't seem long and
when you enjoy being around the people that you're with, you
don't really feel as burned out. For me, the commute to and from
the restaurants, about an hour. So during that hour, I'm making
phone calls, I'm talking to people.
I have my phone out. I'm not driving and texting, but
I am making notes. I'm talking to my phone, leaving
notes, things that I could discuss when I get there.
Like I said, everything that I do while I'm there is 1% better
every day. I know the the idea of that is
gradual improvements every single day.
And that's kind of what I'm preaching when I get there is
like, how do we constantly tweak the menu, make the food a little
bit better, make the kitchen a little bit more seamless?
And one of the things I talk about as a leader, when people
work under me as a leader, I try not to overwhelm them with so
much early on. And by the way, this first week
was overwhelming for everybody because it was a brand new
style. But I try not to overwhelm them
more than they need to be overwhelmed because when you
overwhelm A-Team, it doesn't stick.
And so a lot of people say we have, you know, standard of the
day and that's okay. But I I like the standard until
it's right. I don't want to hit them over
the head with 20 new standards in one day.
Let's just go with one. Let's focus on making sure
everyone does this correctly. And if everyone does that
correctly, great, then we're better.
And the next day, something new. Let's make sure everyone does
that correctly. And if we miss a day and we
slide a little bit, then let's go back to that thing.
Because if it doesn't stick, it's not a standard.
So when you're implementing standards, you need to make sure
that they stick, and that's why I recommend introducing them
slowly. When it sticks, introduce the
next one, because you do have constant drift on the standard
and you constantly have to recalibrate things to make sure
that the kitchen's getting back in order.
I would say my chef brain turned on pretty quick.
Like I said, some of some the first couple of days it was a
little rusty, like 2 left feet, but within three days I felt
like I had never left. It felt good.
It helped me feel good in case I ever want to go back, but
probably probably not at least right now.
You know, I I do enjoy what I'm doing with Chef's PSA.
A lot of the great restaurants have you kind of a rallying cry
or war cry that they that they use for the team.
You know, I could think of like 11 Madison Park, make it nice,
the French laundries. It's all about finesse.
Where I used to work, we'd say awake and ready or always ahead.
So I wanted to make sure I had something for the new team.
Where I was at, we brainstormed a couple.
We ended up with something called quality overall, and that
became the measuring stick to which everything else is going
to be measured on quality overall.
And then what's the direction of the food?
Simple, Technical, beautiful, Delicious.
So everything that we put on the menu needs to meet those
guidelines. And whenever we're unsure of
something, we'll always go back to that side and say quality.
Overall, is it quality? If it's not, then it doesn't get
served, or it doesn't get put on the menu or doesn't get
discussed. Quality is the measuring stick,
which everything is going to be measured on.
But I think it's important that a kitchen has a mantra.
I made a beautiful sign and put it up on the walls.
Really nice. But it's a constant reminder.
And I I told them that if the sign gets dirty, that's a bad
sign. The sign has to stay Immaculate.
It can't come down. It has to stay up there.
Now we're going into week two and week 3.
Service is getting better. We're getting more efficient.
The new menu doesn't seem as difficult anymore.
And so now we're looking at the items that we're doing and we
can ratchet it up a little bit, make it a little bit more
difficult, introduce a little bit more finesse, refine the
recipes a little bit and get better and better every single
day. So what's the point of all this?
The point of all of this is a lot of you are going to take
over restaurants, you're going to be the new chef or maybe
you've been out of the game for a little bit and you want to get
back in. First and foremost, I could tell
you that it's like riding a bike.
You might be rusty for a few days, but when you jump back in,
all the skills come back pretty quick.
But you should have a strategic plan.
When you go in, make sure you're making a menu that everyone on
the team could execute and that you're constantly looking at the
dishes and discussing with the team how it could be improved.
It's important to get buy in from everybody.
What I find interesting is that my time as a chef and my time
here now, like I've I've changed my perspective a little bit.
I would say I'm not as intense as I used to be.
You know, when I was a younger chef, I was a little bit more
intense. I think with time and wisdom I'm
able to navigate the storm a little bit better, a little bit
more calm. Bad situations are going to get
thrown at you, and I'm able to ride the wave and flow like
water, like Bruce Lee said. And having been on both sides, I
recognize that being calm and focused and not losing your cool
in the kitchen is so much better than the opposite.
Anyway, we digress. I don't even know what I was
talking about. Build your team up.
Create the standard. Don't implement too much and get
a little bit better and better every day in every single way
possible. Stay calm, wipe your cutting
board, look up, see what's going on, and go forward anyway.
If you want to support the show, you know what to do.
As we talked about, make sure you leave five stars.
Nothing less than five stars. Go to chefspsa.com.
You can get all the books there. Merch.
It's going to be hoodie weather. Have a lot of hoodies for sale
at the Chef's PSA store. Thank you all very much.
See you next week. Hit the porno music.