Recipe Costing / Hiring

In today's odds n' ends, I reported on the machinations of the restaurant where I've been working as manager/kitchen captain/prep cook/expediter/inventory clerk, and also sought advice from Richard about how to quell some of the issues we're having -- in particular: where to look for a point-of-sale system, as our register is seriously out of date and inefficient. I also spoke of the Bohemian Beer Garden I visited yesterday, on the first super warm day of the year -- we got there, hungry, at 3:30 but the kitchen was closed until 4. We ordered soon thereafter and it took 45 minutes to get our food; when we got it, it was cold, dry and not very good.

Chicago Liz got laid off from the Mexican restaurant where she was a line cook -- it seems her boss was trying to cut expenses and cut back everyone's hours, but then she line-listed the restaurant's policies and habits, and how it's literally wasting money left and right. Kyle took her anti-NYC boyfriend to Masa, where he had a hard time ordering, but once he got the food, he fell in love with it and couldn't stop raving.

We then saw another episode of "Opening Soon," about a couple of ex-professional hockey players opening a steak house in Ontario. Neither of them cook nor have ever opened or run a restaurant; they also believe ketchup is the best sauce for a steak. Very odd. They pay a contractor to build out their space for an opening date in 6 weeks. Not surprisingly, the contractor takes 6 months and goes way over-budget, and who the heck pays a contractor in full in advance? After designing the place, they get a chef almost as an afterthought -- they hire the first person who answers their classified ad. The show glosses over a lot of details, but according to the rules of the show, the place must go on to be successful. (It doesn't show any of the growing pains that I've been witnessing firsthand.)

The next part of the class was dedicated to cost control and the concept of recipe costing. It's not too tricky, in an ideal world. You have a recipe; you know the quantities, price, and serving size of your ingredients; and you work out the cost of each dish. Divide that by what you sell it for (cost/sales) and blammo, you have your food cost percent.

We finished class with our last talk about hiring and selecting employees. Testing: today it is popular in many industries to give psychological tests to determine whether a candidate is trustworthy or not, with questions ranging from "Is it OK to steal?" to "Have you ever taken paperclips from the office home?" Damn, that sounds really stupid. The politics of the reference -- an HR department will only volunteer a confirmation of the dates of someone's employment and his or her title. You can ask, however, if the person "available for rehire." If the answer is no, that could be an indication that things did not work out well. Privately-held companies tend to have looser lips, but all sorts of laws prevent people from saying more.

Training is key, of course. Today in the food industry, the first introduction to the kitchen is a trail, when a worker goes in and follows someone around without doing anything, just observing. The problem with this is that by law trails must be paid. Previously, a person was given a test to see if they knew how to handle heat and procedure. A cook can be asked to make a perfectly done omelet, a baker can be asked to bake a cake -- in that, the proof is in the pudding, and legally, the trailer does not have to be paid. The first step is orientation -- welcome, job-role info., where everything is. Job training: performance standards. And finally, retraining: if the job changes, if they never did the job right, if there is new equipment or a new menu item.