Jeremy Leinen, CEC, Executive Chef of Park Ridge CC, encourages club chefs to document everything—recipes, cleaning procedures, station lists, etc.—so nothing is left to chance.
I have recently relocated and accepted a new opportunity at a club in the Chicagoland area. As any chef knows, walking into a new club is exciting, but it can also be a daunting challenge for different reasons. One of the biggest that I’ve now experienced a few times is simply getting up to speed on all the information centered around the menu. Clubs are infamous for having off menu items that are always available as well as recipes and other established norms that live through oral tradition, as opposed to being written down.
In my case, I’m replacing a chef who previously held the position for 20 years, so I have 20 years of tradition to get caught up on. Trying to get my head around all of this has not been an easy task. This has just reinforced in my mind the importance of documenting everything: station lists, recipes and pictures of dishes with a component list for starters. Thinking big picture, this goes a lot further than just me—having these things in place will benefit every new staff member we need to train.
There’s obviously a lot of different ways to do things, and more than a couple of them that are “good.” I’m not here to critique how other chefs do their job or manage their team, but this is one area where I feel very strongly that a little work on the front end goes a long way towards making things easier. The other side of that coin is that choosing not to put in that front end work is essentially choosing to take the harder road with no additional payoff for doing so. How can we expect to effectively onboard new employees if things aren’t written down for them? Beyond that, shouldn’t we make every effort to organize the information in the most efficient way possible for them? I’ve always said that my success depends on everyone else’s, so I make it priority number one to have all these items in place for my team. There are some crossover points here where this helps tremendously with the front of the house staff, as well.
What all do we need to write down? Each time I roll out a new menu, I have a binder for each position on the line that I build out with a copy of the menu, basic dish descriptions, recipes for each component needed on that station. Any necessary details are on the component list, with it being organized by dish—portion sizes and any other applicable need to know information is there. Basic every day staple items are also listed—oil(or clarified butter), pepper(black, white or both), chicken stock, and so on. This is an opportunity to communicate what the standards are and leave no doubt. If you don’t list black pepper and they season everything with white pepper they can pull the “oh I didn’t know” nonsense when you point it out. The details matter, and this is a chance as a leader to set the stage.
It is extremely important that this information is broken down and organized for each cook’s station. I’ve worked in my share of kitchens that had a master recipe book. Seems like a good enough idea in theory but it’s too much information put in one spot that everyone has to use. It turns into a free for all and you quickly wind up with a recipe book in tatters, missing key recipes and it’s always “not me” or “I didn’t do it” that lose the recipe that somebody needs. Having these individual station binders keeps things from getting so messy and it also adds another layer of accountability. It’s your book, take care of it.
Recipes and station lists, as well as pictures seem like a given. Is there anything else you need to put in these binders? This can be highly individualized to each operation. Depending on your operation’s staffing tendency—like how often you rotate cooks around vs. having a largely static staff—opening and closing procedures, daily timelines, etc. can also be extremely helpful. Sunday mornings at my last job were often problematic. With it being a shift we typically rotated around since nobody really volunteered to open on Sunday mornings, there were some key details specific to Sunday morning shifts that we at one point outlined in the binder. For example, employee meal was served at a different time, hours of service were different, soup needed to be ready at a certain time (and this was typically a PM staff member that was not used to opening), so it was important to have all of this listed out. If your have equipment with particular daily or weekly cleaning needs, add a page to the binder with daily cleaning procedures, etc.
Like I said, take this as an opportunity to set the tone of what you expect from your team. Most of the time, people want to do a good job, but they can’t if they’re not 100% clear on what the expectations are.
To be clear, having all this in writing isn’t the be all end all. It’s just a start, but it’s so much better of a start than me expecting everybody to know what I want, or to remember everything I tell them, or me to actually say everything that needs to be said verbally. This fills in a lot of gaps of verbal communication and has kept me from spending so much time having to chase everybody around. That said, this isn’t what I would jokingly refer to as the “Ronco set it and forget it” management system. We still have to actively participate in the day to day and actively lead but having this in place prevents a lot of the groundhog’s day feeling of starting over every day.