Smart restaurant ownership

A cook’s station and its condition is in a state of readiness. If you let your miss-emplace run down, get dirty and disorganised, you’ll quickly become overwhelmed.

A typical mise-en-place contains:

• Kosher or sea salt
• Crushed black peppercorns
• Gro...

Good food is most often, simple food. Some of the best cuisine in the world is a matter of three or four good, fresh ingredients.

Basic Kitchen Ingredients

• Shallots - Use for sauces, dressings, and sauté items.
• Butter - In a professional kitchen, it’s alm...

• Be fully committed.
• Learn Spanish. The backbone of your staff will be speaking this language.
• Don’t steal.
• Always be on time.
• Never make excuses or blame others.
• Lazy, sloppy and slow are bad.
• Assume the worst. Be amused by what you see and sus...

• A decent chef’s knife
• A flexible boning knife. Get one made by Global.
• Pairing knife
• Offset serrated knife
• Plastic Squeeze Bottle
• Toothpicks
• “A thin metal ring, or cut-down section of PVC pipe about an inch and a half tall and laying inches acr...

Professional level cooking is not all about the best recipe or the most innovative presentation. Instead, it is “economy of movement, nice technique and, most important, speed.”

Line cooking is the real business of preparing food. It is more about consistency, mindless unvarying repetition....

• When to Eat Out: Tuesday is a great day to eat out. The chef is well-rested after a Sunday or Monday off.
• Be polite to your waiter or waitress: “he could save your life with a raised eyebrow or sigh.”
• The brunch menu is usually made of “old nasty odds and ends”
• Bread...

1. Artists are an "annoying, high-maintenance minority." Their efforts, convinced of their own genius, are often less satisfying to the majority of dinner customers.
2. Exiles want to work a normal 9-to-5 or are refugees who prefer work to poverty.

They are “lazy, undisciplined and, worst of all, high-maintenance lot, annoyingly opinionated, possessed of egos requiring constant stroking and tune-ups, and, as members of a privileged and wealthy population, unused to the kind of ‘disrespect’ a busy chief is inclined to dish out.”

That i...