Restaurant Industry

Recommended Culinary Books

2011-04-17T18:13:00.001-04:00

Here are a few books I used along the way and in my career. These books will give you insight into the culinary life from Kitchen Confidential to the history of our cuisine and the rest will teach the techniques of professional cooking and baking.

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Restaurant Industry Economy and Down Sizing

2011-04-11T13:03:00.001-04:00

The economy is still trying to recover. Family restaurants, carry outs, and fast food are all doing well because people still have to eat. Some food service companies are downsizing and changing their operations. Contract food service operations downsize their operations to meet the clients needs in this economy by cutting service, changing menus to lower or raise prices and downsizing staff. Restaurants downsize and change their menus to get rid of high food cost items. They also change operations to to reduce labor intensive things so that they need less staff to run their operations.
   Higher end restaurants and food service operations may have to downsize to or restructure. Most people can't afford to eat fine dining in this economy but people still have special occasions to celebrate or occasionally want to treat themselves to a nice meal. This keeps the higher end food service operations in business.
The cost of everything is on the rise. The rising cost of gas costs consumers more to get to and from work. It costs more to ship a truck load of food to a restaurant thus the rising cost of food. That cost is then transferred to the consumer. Another factor is natural disaster which destroys crops thus driving up costs which is then passed along to the consumer so that these restaurants and food service companies can turn a profit.
The economy greatly impacts everything not just food service and as with everything you have to change with the times. Those restaurant and food service operations that can't make the changes will most likely go out of business or struggle to stay in business.

Deciding to Go to Culinary School

2010-01-26T08:18:00.003-05:00

Deciding to go to culinary school or not is a big decision. A lot of people decide to go to culinary school for the wrong reasons. They think it will be easy, they like to watch cooking shows, eat and cook. They really don't have any direction but know they need a degree in something to make it.
It is not all glitz and glamor as seen on TV. When deciding to go to culinary school make sure it is something you really want to do or you will end up with a culinary degree that you won't use because when you see the real culinary world you will probably work in the industry for a few years then get out when you decide its not what its all cracked up to be.
This just makes it hard for those who really love the food service industry to get the positions they want because the industry is flooded. The restaurant/ food service industry is flooded with people who have degrees who only stay in industry for a few years get tired and get out. Or those people who just work in industry because it pays the bills but really have no drive or determination.
It is hard for employers to weed out these types of people so the people who really have the drive and determination to work in the restaurant/ food service industry have trouble getting their desired position..
When selecting a culinary school be sure to look at the programs offered because some schools may be cheaper but only offer 2year associates degree programs when you may want the 4 year bachelors degree program or masters program.
Also look at the classes offered can you do duel majors like cooking/ baking or is it limited to just one or the other. Are the business classes offered because you can be the best chef but if you can't work the numbers you won't go very far.
Another thing to consider is studying in another country offered. I believe the culinary school I went to Baltimore International College is the only culinary school in the U.S that offers this but I could be wrong.
These are just a few of what I believe to be the major factors in deciding to go to culinary school.

Restaurant Food

2009-06-19T09:45:00.003-04:00

What happened to restaurant food? Everything is owned by big corporations and turned in to restaurant chains. They are killing off independent restaurants where real food is created. I almost hate eating out, I'd rather cook myself. Everywhere you go u see the same things on the menus just slightly different no creativity. Why is this you might ask. Well this is because the big corporate chefs have to design menus that are easy enough that a average cook can prepare. They basically have to dumb things down. They have to make the products come out the same in hundreds of restaurants across the country. They have to make it so a $10 an hour cook is able to successfully prepare the food on the menu. You might say well just find a good independent restaurant with a real chef and eat there. Well they are few and far between with these corporate giants and their millions of dollars. The corporations are squashing small restaurants because the independent doesn't have the resources to run ads on TV every day or pay the high rent for good locations. Also quiet often independent restaurants biggest problem is the cost per meal. By this I mean to have chefs creating the menu and selling very nice food costs a lot so you will pay more. Unless it is a independent restaurant that is selling basic food prepared in a skillful manner. But I guess it is easy for these big corporate chains to fool the vast majority when it comes to food.

Burn't out restaurant workers

2009-05-11T16:00:00.002-04:00

The restaurant industry is a fast paced non stop industry that is always changing. It never stops. Not even for holidays or weekends, but we all know this. It is those of us who work in the restaurant industry any where from 40 to 80 hours a week who know all to well how easy it is to get burn't out. The long hours in front of hot stoves or on the floor dealing with customers can sometimes be grueling, but we love it. It is very hard to get weekends off or holidays for that matter unless u work in contract foodservice. Sometimes the daily grind in this business can beat us down to the point where we want to just throw our hands up. Thats when you have to take that extra day off when u can to get a breather and take some of that pressure off. Exspecially for restaurant managers. Sometimes we wait to long to get that breather in trying to make it to our vaccation time when we can get refreshed. It never stops and new problems arise everyday in the restaurant industry so we have to get those extra days off when we can so we can keep doing what we love.

My other website

2009-03-07T18:55:00.003-05:00

If you like this site then please visit my other site
computer-cleaners . This site has nothing to do with the restaurant industry but it may help you if you are having computer issues dealing with adware, spyware and viruses.

Managing staff in the restaurant industry

2009-03-07T18:33:00.005-05:00

Ah the biggest head ache of all managing people. I've only been at the management level for about two years now and I've gained a good bit of hands on experience to go along with my bachlors degree in culinary management. I've learned that managers who do not utilize the bigest tool we have to control our staff are the managers who have the most problems managing their staff. The tool I'm refering to is documentation. From the very begining of my management training I was always told if they don't want to listen document them and then the word will get out among staff. Then everyone will start to fall in place. Another tool we have to control staff is to take money away from them. We do this by sending them home a few times until they correct the behavior. The idea behind this is that when they see their shrinking pay check and aren't making any money they will do what is necessary so they don't get send home.
One of the biggest problems I have found when managing staff is when upper management dosn't back you up. This is when you try to take corrective action against a employee and the upper management over turns your action. This can cause trouble if it happends a lot because then the employee will not listen to you and will always go over your head to get the decision they want or think they will get. Now don't get me wrong if you make a wrong management decision then upper management should step in and over turn it. All in all upper management should back you most of the time so the employee will see you do have authority.
To sum it all up though I beleave managing people is pretty much the same across the board wether you work in the restaurant industry or any other industry.

Contract Food Service

2009-03-01T19:59:00.002-05:00

It has been a year since my last post and I've decided to start posting again. Since then I've gotten out of the restaurant seen and moved on to contract food service which is a little different then working in a restaurant. The company I work for which I'm not going to mention has contracts for various establishments. Everything from government facilities to resorts and law firms. I am now a night chef/manager for the cafeteria I work in at a law firm.
In the restaurant world as a manager you are drilled about labor and food cost to no end but in the contract food service world depending on how the contract is set up things like food cost are not worried about to the extreme as they would be in a restaurant. It is still important but food cost will be generaly higher. For instance where I work we are subsidized and the client pays for all the food and we handle it for them so while we watch food cost it is not a priority unless the client wants to focus on it.
As for everything else we just have to answer to the client much the way a restaurant would answer to corporate. Labor is always a big focus exspecially in these times. As for the rest of the head aches in managing staff it is pretty much the same across the board. Other differences is that the customers are the same people everyday when accounts are not public like the law firm. Things that effect a restaurants business don't effect a private contract food service account. For instance schools being closed could mean a busy day in a restaurant where as at the law firm it could mean nothing or that we would do less business because people have to get their kids.
All in all contract food service is a different world compared to the restaurant world. A restaurant goes under when it dosn't do any business and in contract food service you go under when you lose contracts. Either way you go it is still a tough job and the stresses are about the same so you gotta love it. In my experience both sides of the coin are fun wether you work in a restaurant or in contract food service.

Restaurants Fighting to keep Managers

2008-02-16T22:55:00.003-05:00

The restaurant business is flooded with opportunity and it is hard to keep managers as well as staff. The turn over rate is probably higher than any other type of business. I have been with my current restaurant company for almost two years and I have been transfered to five different restaurants all because of managers quiting or getting fired.
I find that most low end restaurants can not compete in terms of pay scale with the higher end restaurants. So most people like myself get hired into low end restaurants just for management experience for a year or two then move on.
I just got hired for $9,000 more on the year then what I make now at my curent position so of course I will be moving on. There are tons of restaurants all over so this increases the amount of opportunity and makes it that much harder to keep managers.
This is why most of the time when you hear someone say "when they first opened they were good now they are terrible." is true because there probably were three or four sets of different managers to come through which makes it harder to be consistent.

The slowest time of the year

2008-01-11T09:12:00.001-05:00

Its after the holidays and everything is slowing down. The restaurant industry slows to a crawl. This dosn't mean we don't have to work as hard. In fact being in a management position we have to work harder.
Now we have to cut labor and run with a skeleton crew so if we get busy we get screwed in a sense. This means we have to run around and make the restaurant run with the least amount of staff as possible.
If tables don't get cleaned quick enough I have to clean tables. If the food isn't getting cooked fast enough I have to cook and if tables aren't getting waited on fast enough I have to assist the servers.
Everyone has to work a little bit harder when we get busy due to labor cuts but the busy periods only last a couple hours this time of year and we mostly remain slow.

Happy Holidays

2007-12-18T10:57:00.000-05:00

Its the holiday season and the shopping rush is on. Whats this mean for the restaurant industry? It means most every restaurant is getting hit with holiday partys and loads of customers coming in from long days of shopping. A money making season.
It means employee call offs so they can attend holiday partys. It means gift card sales and pie sales. It means working on xmas eve when most people have off. So if you go out to eat this holiday season just remember were getting the rush just like the retail stores.

Customers (food stupid) no offense

2007-10-26T19:52:00.000-04:00

The hidden secrets of most chain restaurants is pre made food. Why you may ask? Its easy, uniform and quicker to prepare. Its the belief that most employees don't have enough experience to make the product in house and it would take to much training to teach them. It is also the belief that the customer can't tell the difference and its true. Most people wouldn't know the difference between products made in house and pre fabricated unless your a foodservice professional.
Take for instance simple fried food items like poppers, mozzerella sticks, mac and cheese balls. These items have been served in tons of restaurants but could you tell the difference if they told you it was homemade?
An even bigger question is does it matter? Well it does to me because if your going to serve me pre fabricated food I should just stay home take it out of the box and make it myself. To most people it probably dosn't because they can't tell the difference anyway or they don't have the time to cook for themselves so they don't care.
I'll leave you with this thought. If your going to pay the prices in a high end restaurant to have a nice meal shouldn't it be homemade?

Management and staff turnover

2007-10-03T14:02:00.000-04:00

If your a regular customer of a particular restaurant then you've probably seen a lot of new faces on a regular basis because the staff changes all the time. You may ask why does this happen? The only answer I have is that restaurant work his hard. This is probably the main reason most people encounter bad dining experiences. People simply don't want to work these days.
Most restaurants are always hiring because people quit just as fast as they are hired. This creates a constant on going training of employees. Employees are rushed through training when restaurants are short staffed and this causes a negative effect on the customers. Then when you finally get them trained they quit and the whole process starts all over agian. In my experiences you have to go through ten or so new hires to get one that will work hard and stay for at least a year or more.
Another issue is management turnover. There is always another restaurant out there looking to hire managers and make them a better offer. This causes management teams to constantly change in restaurants. This creates a negative/positive effect on the staff and customers because with new management comes change which can be good or bad. The problem with this is that management teams can change as fast as the rest of the staff.
In my own experience the company I work for I have been with a little over a year and I have worked in four different locations because of turnover. The restaurant industry has the highest turnover rate out of all other industrys. This is just anothe reason why a resturant that gives great service one week may give really bad service the next.

Long wait to be seated and Long wait for food

2007-09-13T12:06:00.000-04:00

Have you ever been to a restaurant and waited thirty minutes or more to be seated and then once you were seated it took another thirty minutes to get your food? Of course you have almost everyone who has ever dined out has. As a restaurant manager you always hear "We only ordered ............ how long dose it take to make" or "We ordered ...... it doesn't take that long to make it." What most people fail to realize when a restaurant is packed is that their order isn't the only order being made in the kitchen. It also depends on what is ordered to determine how fast it comes out. If you order a steak well done that is 1.5 inches thick your looking at a minimum of 15 to 18 minutes before it is done cooking then by the time the server delivers it your total wait time could be 20 minutes. It also depends on how many orders are in front of your order. For instance if there are 10 orders in front of your order it depends how efficient the cooks are on starting the checks as they come in. If they get behind on starting checks or have to run to get to much product this slows the whole process down. A good cook will start all the items on checks that take the longest to cook then the cook will focus on the first few checks to sell them in a timely fashion. Then once the check is sold it is up to the server to deliver the food as fast as possible. The biggest problem arises when you are short kitchen staff and the orders are coming in faster than you can start them and sell them. This is what causes the 30 to 45 minute wait for food in most instances. Another cause which is a big one is incompetent kitchen staff. One more cause of this which happens alot is running out of cooking space which is when your fryers are full, the grills are full, and you have no more cooking area to start incoming orders. So you can see there are alot more factors involved as to why your order is taking so long. This is probably why most people who work in the restaurant industry are more understanding when they go out to eat and their order is taking a long time.

Labor Day Weekend

2007-09-05T21:11:00.000-04:00

Labor day the weekend almost everybody has off. Four days off the last vacation everybody takes at the end of the summer. One of the biggest money making weekends of the year for the restaurant industry. A weekend thats hard to get off on if you work in the restaurant industry. Of course most holidays are hard to get off on unless it is Christmas or Thanksgiving . Although depending on the restaurant you might be working. After a while this is pretty easy to get use to because most of the time you get the days after off when everybody is going back to work or school.

Crazy Restaurant Industry Hours

2007-09-02T03:49:00.000-04:00

Its like 3:50 am and I'm getting ready for work. Way to early but when you work for a restaurant that serves breakfast at 6:00 am its not. The restaurant use to open at 7:00 am which makes more sense since most of the time we don't even get our first customer until 7 or 8. Even still I have to be at the retaurant an hour before we open to let the staff in and get set up. Although when I was a pastry chef for a small time restaurant called Zest I use to get to work at like 4:00 am just so I would have plenty of time to get bread making done and work in the kitchen without being in the chefs way because it was a small kitchen. The good thing about geting to work at 5:00 am is that I get off around 3:00 in the afternoon. The Bad part is that by the time you get home eat dinner and watch a hour or two of T.V. its time to go to bed. Of course there is another side to the crazy hours in the restaurant industry world. The closing hours. I've worked in restaurants that by the time you close the doors at mid night and get cleaned up you don't get home until 2 or 3 am then you sleep all day and you don't have to be back to work untill like 4 or 5 pm the next day. Then there are not just the opening and closing hours there is the mid shift when you work in between the day and night shift. Kind of like a 9 am to 7 pm shift where your whole day is tied up because you can't do anything before work or after work. So as you can see in the restaurant industry the hours are different than most other industries. If you wan't to work a simple 9 to 5 job the restaurant industry is not it. You have to be able to work long weird hours that constantly change according to the needs of the restaurant.

Days Off

2007-08-30T14:12:00.000-04:00

My days off are Wednesday and Thursday not to bad. Its two days that most people don't have off during the week. Restaurant and Food service works are almost on an entirely different schedule from the rest of the world. Most people have Saturday and Sunday off which most of us in the food business can only dream of having those days off. Friday through Sunday is the money making days of the week. It is the busiest and craziest time of the week for most food establishments there for we never get those days off. Unless the boss is feeling nice or you happen to request those days off in advance. Most food service professionals like myself come to the realization that we'll never get weekends off and we don't really mind either. For most of us our Friday is Sunday or in my case at the moment my Friday is Tuesday. Along with the crazy days of the week we get off comes the fact that it almost never stays the same. Our schedules and days off can change daily, weekly, monthly or what ever the business trends call for. So as you can see if your entering the restaurant business and your not flexible with your schedule or you want the weekends off you might want to try something else. My experience as a restaurant manager with hiring if you can't work weekends we most likely won't even interview you. Some times we can work around the non flexible availability of people but the ideal hire would be someone who can work anything they are scheduled to work.

The Real Deal

2007-08-27T18:32:00.000-04:00

As you can see from my pictures I'm the real deal. But you can have all the skill in the world and if you can't land a position where you can realy show your stuff what good is it? Well you can wow your relatives at family functions. If you want to make it in this industry you have to work hard if you really want to make a living working with food. Although I'm a bit discouraged with the speed in which my career is progressing I love this business and I don't want to do anything else. Right now I'm busting my but for Bob Evans restaurants gaining management experience and then I'll shoot for those kitchen management/ sous chef positions. If you can't truly say you love the restaurant business and you don't like to work hard you won't make it in the restaurant business.

Just Another Day at The Restaurant

2007-08-24T18:50:00.000-04:00

Another Day of work we are short staffed. Whats new the same thing happens at almost every restaurant at this time of year. Every one goes back to school and you end up short staffed. How dose this keep happening year after year. It dosn't change!!!!! I am working on my second year of management and I already know how to fix the problem but it is the bosses above me. We're fine we don't need to hire we'll slow down when school starts but we can't even run a simple monday or tuesday shift because the retaurant is short staffed. It takes the area director to come in to make the GM realize we need more staff. Although it dosn't take a big brain to figure out when you only have one cook on saturaday and sunday mornings at a restaurant that is famous for breakfast that we need to hire more staff. How hard is it to continuously hire towards the end of summer to ensure you are fully staffed when school starts back up? Aparently pretty hard since it seems to me no matter what restaurant I've been in it is always done at the last minute after customer complaints rise and every shift is rocky. Although after numerous shift covers and people are where they need to be the shift will sort of run ok but how can we stop the cycle?

Restaurant Manager

2007-08-23T12:22:00.000-04:00

I'm a restaurant manager for Bob Evans. I started out as dish washer in the restaurant industry at the age of 15 and I have worked in the food business ever since. I love to cook I want to become a chef. Thats a achievable goal but a tough one because our industry is flooded with people of all walks of life going after the same goal. I went from washing dishes to cooking in no time, I loved it. The fast pace, the insanity and the never ending stream of orders flowing in with questions, how long on this , where is that, fix this , I said no cheese and we keep coming back for more. Everyday is a new experience in the reataurant industry loaded with a whole new aray of problems to be solved. As I but in the long hours and cook for different restaurants I decided I need to go to culinary school. I spent four years learning all the basics of cooking and baking as well as management. Yet with the degree behind me and some experience I find it very hard to get the positions I want. So here I am working for Bob Evans as a restaurant manager. I took the position only to gain management experience and I still find it difficult to land a sous chef position or even get so much as an interview. So to those of you expecting to go to culinary school and get a degree then walk in to that fifty thousand a year job or more it probably won't happen unless your lucky. You need the degree pluse a few years of experience to get your restuarant career going if you can handle the abuse we love to continue to endure.