Restaurant Leadership Podcast: Overcome Burnout, Embrace Freedom, and Drive Growth

74: Strategies for Success in High-Pressure Kitchens

• Christin Marvin

Share episode

Send me a Text Message. I'd love to hear from you.

🔥 The Hard Truth About Making It in a Michelin-Starred Kitchen—And Why Most Cooks Don’t Last

Renowned chef and entrepreneur Justin Khanna shares his journey from esteemed kitchens like Per Se and Noma to becoming a leader in the culinary world. Discover his strategies for running successful kitchen shifts, honing in on practical tools like line checks, reservation checks, and efficient prep lists. In an industry where efficiency is everything, innovative solutions like those from Restaurant Technologies Inc. help top kitchens streamline operations, from automated oil management to back-of-house automation. Learn more at https://go.rti-inc.com/RestaurantLeadershipPodcast.

Khanna's story is one of resilience and ambition as he navigates the challenges of transitioning from a line cook to a sous chef, illustrating the hurdles and triumphs that define a culinary career.

Chapters:
00:00:08 - Improving Restaurant Kitchen Operations

00:10:33 - Advancing Skills in Restaurant Kitchens

00:15:46 - Improving Communication for Kitchen Teams

00:26:48 - Teamwork and Communication in Kitchens

00:31:08 - Optimizing Inventory Management in Restaurants

00:40:49 - Enhancing Hospitality Organizations for Success


Listeners will gain insight into the relentless pursuit of culinary mastery that drives chefs to stay after hours, constantly learning and perfecting their craft. In high-pressure environments, such as Michelin-starred kitchens, the distinction between cooks and chefs becomes stark. This episode emphasizes the importance of continuous education, whether through formal training or real-world experience, and the passion required to overcome knowledge gaps. Khanna’s reflections explore the emotional journey of feeling inadequate yet determined to grow, providing a realistic look into the evolution of chefs in the industry.

Effective communication and teamwork form the backbone of successful kitchen operations, and this episode delves into strategies for fostering these essential skills. Learn how to tackle the challenges of open dialogue, manage inventory efficiently, and prioritize high-performing menu items. From introducing a "station score" for staff assessments to understanding the broader financial impact of inventory choices, Khanna’s insights offer practical advice for enhancing both team dynamics and business success. Join us as we advocate for sustainable business practices and invite hospitality professionals to refresh their approaches, setting the stage for thriving restaurant operations.

Resources:
Justin Khanna
Per Se
Noma
The French Laundry

More from Christin:

Grab your free copy of my audiobook, The Hospitality Leader's Roadmap: Move from Ordinary to Extraordinary at christinmarvin.com/audio

Curious about one-on-one coaching or leadership workshops? Click this link to schedule a 15 minute strategy session.

Podcast Production: https://www.lconnorvoice.com/

Christin Marvin:

if you are curious about how to run a better kitchen shift or how to close the gap between promoting a line cook to a sous chef, this is an episode for you. I'm talking to justin khanna today. Chef creator and entrepreneur, he is obsessed with high quality gear, memorable dining experiences and building practical resources that truly help the industry. He graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in 2012, spent eight plus years training at Michelin starred and critically acclaimed restaurants, and worked at places such as Per Se, the French Laundry and Noma. He's going to break down his learning and basics around total station domination, how to run a really great shift by incorporating things like line checks, reservation checks and going over your prep list, and how he made some mistakes in closing the gap between line cook and sous chef, and some of the ways that he's working with clients today on how to create sustainable business practices for kitchens moving forward. Stick around, you're not going to want to miss this episode. Welcome to the Restaurant Leadership Podcast, the show where restaurant leaders learn tools, tactics and habits from the world's greatest operators. I'm your host, Christin Marvin, with Solutions by Christin. I've spent the last two decades in the restaurant industry and now partner with restaurant owners to develop their leaders and scale their businesses through powerful one-on-one coaching, group coaching and leadership workshops. This show is complete with episodes around coaching, leadership development and interviews with powerful industry leaders. You can now engage with me on the show and share topics you'd like to hear about leadership lessons you want to learn and any feedback you have. Simply click the link at the top of the show notes and I will give you a shout out on a future episode. Thanks so much for listening and I look forward to connecting.

Christin Marvin:

Running a restaurant is tough. Long hours, staffing, challenges, rising costs Sound familiar. What if I told you there's a smarter way to manage your kitchen, boost your staff's morale and keep your operations running smoothly? Enter Restaurant Technologies, the ultimate solution for modern kitchen management. Here's how Restaurant Technologies can transform your business.

Christin Marvin:

One solve labor challenges. They automate unpleasant tasks like manually handling used cooking oil. They keep your staff safe and happy while promoting a safer, more efficient kitchen. Two reduce operating costs. They help you save money by optimizing oil usage and eliminating third-party cleaning services. With their auto-miss technology, some restaurants save up to $300 per month per location.

Christin Marvin:

Number three they help you ensure consistent food quality. Fresh oil means better tasting food every single time. They help you monitor your oil usage remotely with ease. Number four enhance safety. Reduce fire risks and injuries by eliminating the need to handle hot oil. Number five promote sustainability Join the eco-friendly movement by recycling used oil into biofuel. And number six maintain a clean kitchen. Imagine no more spills, pests or messy cleanups. The result a safer, cleaner, more efficient kitchen that saves you money and keeps your team happy. Ready to see why? Over 45,000 restaurants, from small independents to large multi-unit concepts, trust Restaurant Technologies? Visit rti-inccom to learn more. Justin, thanks so much for being here, super excited to share the vast amount of resources that you have. My show is more front of house focused, so I am just super excited to learn a lot from you today and share all of your amazing well, not all of it, we'd be here all day for years, right but to share a lot of the knowledge that you have with the audience today. So thank you for your time.

Justin Khanna:

Just appreciate you having me Excited to talk to your audience.

Christin Marvin:

Absolutely. Will you talk a little bit about repertoire and what you do to kind of kick us off? And then I'd love to dive into some of the really big challenges that you're seeing in kitchens right now.

Justin Khanna:

Yeah, so the name of the company kind of comes back from a really really old school. I could reference it as a cookbook certainly, because I think that there's a vast swath of culinary knowledge inside of this book. It's called Le Repertoire de la Cuisine. It's a very old. I almost call it like a handbook or a guidebook for chefs back in the French hotelier days and basically what it had is these tabs along the pages and if you needed to insert mother sauce or insert a derivation of any of these sauces, you would go into this handbook. And basically it was understood that you kind of had this well-built up repertoire. So if I was going to tell you poach something or bring something to a specific temperature, incorporate some sort of thickener, it was understood that you kind of had that in your back pocket. You kind of understood some of these things and so it was more of a reference guide than anything else. And that comes back to what I certainly experienced, which was high performers, and certainly the people who are the most hungry for knowledge, are often under-resourced. They're the people who, like the basics are covered by everybody under the sun, right Starting with how to dice an onion.

Justin Khanna:

In any sort of culinary education. That's where most people start, and as I started to go up in professional kitchens and especially get to more advanced levels starting to get considered for sous chef positions or starting to go for an ambitious kitchen or deciding I wanted to cook abroad it was one of those things where there isn't resources. Here there's well-trodden paths, but the people who have done it either play the information super close to their chest or it just becomes one of those things where you have to have these backdoor conversations to figure out what's going on here, and so, as I sit, being really passionate about restaurants, I don't want to see them go away. We're coming off of something like COVID and I'm like there needs to be more resources to make sure that we can continue to have a robust talent pool in this industry and having it be this thing that is gatekept behind large culinary school institutions. I went to one.

Justin Khanna:

I'm not going to say that they're all bad, but I don't necessarily think that, in the age of the internet, it's necessarily right for everybody if we really strip this back to first principles and think about how we're going to get more folks in and excited about being in this world, and so that's why I kind of decided to start this and then it's just been fascinating to almost build this with the audience that I've kind of come up with, and so that's kind of what I specialize on.

Justin Khanna:

That's the arena that I play in and, yeah, happy to jam on again to your point. I put out a lot of stuff because I think that there are so many holes and missing pieces, and maybe it's not even like I'm not sharing anything novel or new, but I might just be connecting the dots for people in a way that they might not have thought was possible before. Or I will do the work to kind of like be the scout, to go off into another industry, take an insight, bring it back to our world and ultimately make sure that teams can perform better.

Christin Marvin:

Yeah, I mean you work in the independent space, right, and work with restaurants that are just very intentional and thoughtful around every single thing they do, and I think what you bring up is a really interesting point. There's so many vast resources out there around cooking techniques, but not how to run a great kitchen, and I'm curious what you're seeing as some of the biggest challenges of the clients that you're working with or people that are reaching out to you for help.

Justin Khanna:

I call this the difference between chefs with a recipe and chefs with a repertoire. So chefs with a recipe it's like that's the common thing, especially young culinarians just kind of like get hungry about. It's like, oh well, can I get the recipe for this, or can I sit down with chef and maybe pry this information out of this person's head? Or I want to spend a little bit of, I want to stay after today and spend a little bit of extra time on this person's station, so maybe they'll give me the recipe for this thing. And as you start to grow and progress in the industry, you start to realize that, like there are other skills that you ultimately lack, that are probably preventing you from getting the outcome that you want to out of whatever it is that you're trying to do and I use those words very intentionally. So skill is how I define it something that can be learned, something that can be taught.

Justin Khanna:

It's not this inherent thing where I'll often hear chefs that I work with talk about, like, just in passing, they'll say these they're very limiting sentences that they'll say I'm not a big numbers guy, or I'm not all that tech savvy, or I don't actually find myself to be that prone to speaking to people in public.

Justin Khanna:

I don't really like talking to guests.

Justin Khanna:

I'm more of the kind of like behind the scenes kitchen guy and ultimately that is. You know that you could see that as a red flag. Certainly my optimist brain kind of looks at that and says, oh, there's interest there. Kind of looks at that and says, oh, there's interest, there's something interesting there that we could actually develop if we were to basically just take a step back, acknowledge it as a skill and then have that be something that again you can add to your repertoire. It's this thing where, yes, you know how to butcher the chickens, you know how to make the sauces, you know how to pan fry something and plate maybe even. But it's this thing where, like across the whole guest experience or across the whole recruiting process of bringing a team member on and having them rise up in the brigade and want to stay with you for a long time or maybe that's a new concept that you want to ultimately launch it does become this thing where you have to be able to pull out more stops than just what's in your Moleskine recipe binder.

Christin Marvin:

Hi everybody. We're taking a quick break to offer you an exciting opportunity. If you're a restaurant owner or manager looking to enhance your leadership skills, I invite you to join my 12-day leadership challenge. In just 12 days, you'll receive a guided packet with actionable strategies to transform your leadership in less than five minutes a day. Join the challenge and the community and grab your copy at kristinmarvincom slash 12 days. Now let's get back to the show. You said something really interesting and I'm curious how you're seeing this showing up today In restaurants. You said you know if somebody stays behind and they want to jump on a station and learn something new, is this happening?

Justin Khanna:

Yes and no. So I am also a firm believer we're going to really spilling all my philosophies here that sometimes we paint the word chef as this broad brush title or standing you can have in the industry. I'm happy to talk about my kind of philosophy there on the difference between a cook and a chef, if you prefer. But it is one of these funny things where if you're going into a situation where you're prepping at a hotel and that is the role that you're going into versus if you're at a one-star Michelin place, versus if you're at a more casual bistro versus if you're at Alchemist in Copenhagen, which is kind of like on the cutting edge of everything they're talking about doing dinners in space. There are different. Like all of us would look at each of those roles and say, you know, to the casual person you stop them and you do the man on the street style interview with them, they're going to say, yeah, that's a chef. But to us, like the folks of us that are working in the industry, we know there's nuance and differences between each of those and I've certainly had roles where it didn't make sense for me to stay after because the menu stayed the same and I just knew that as long as I stayed at this place for long enough, I was going to kind of get my hands on XYZ thing. And then I worked at places where the menu changed every single day and it was the situation where if I was going to work with this specific type of shellfish, or if we had this one you know limited piece of produce that was only available for this small, limited time, or chef was doing as an experiment, if I had one chance to work with this ingredient or see it wasn't maybe even me working with the ingredient, it was maybe me seeing how my sous chef prepared it.

Justin Khanna:

I remember one of my mentors was he had just gotten onto the foie gras projects at the restaurant, so he was making the torchons at this restaurant and I basically got to see the sous chef above him teach him how to do the foie gras torchons at the same time that I was kind of like on this lower rung of the totem pole, so to speak, and so I looked at that and said, hey, like well, everybody else went home. Is there a world where I could just stay after for 45 minutes? Politely ask and then ultimately have that be something that I could, you know, like add to this thing that I can say that I've, I've seen, or at least I've, you know, like, gotten at least a baseline knowledge, the one-on-one class of whatever it is that that thing happens to be. And I think again to come bring it back to you know, culinary school education. You can take a six month program, you can take a 12 month program, you can take a four year program.

Justin Khanna:

Culinary Institute of America is now talking about a master's program that they're going to bring to people in culinary arts and the reality is, I think, like all of us learn through just consistent stages throughout our career and the learning doesn't stop, at least for most of us. I think there are certainly people where they do this. I call it learn and coast, so they learn something that's their thing and then they can just coast on that. For you know 20 years and I think that you know, like, if you want to build your business that way, that's great. But I think that there are a certain number of people who kind of look at that path and they say you know, and you're going to take a look, you're going to look up in five, seven, 12 years and you're going to be really surprised where you've ended up.

Christin Marvin:

What is it about you Like? What specific characteristics attributed to you? Wanting to stay after and learn more?

Justin Khanna:

I'll be vulnerable for a second and just be honest, like there was an inadequacy, like there was truly a sense of just like. I'm not good enough to hang with these savages that were in. That was a three Michelin star kitchen that I was referencing to that story, and these were killers. These were truly the people who were at the peak of finesse. This was the restaurant that Sam Sifton, in 2011, called the best restaurant in New York at the time, in New York city, like like. And this is back in 2011, right when Copenhagen was just starting to become an interesting city to go to and eat where Noma was the only place you would basically go. Obviously, there's other places, but for all intents and purposes, it was like New York, you know, was still, unless you're going to go to Paris. It was like when we're talking about, you know, the North America, it was like the pinnacle of things, and so that was one of those funny things where I was like I had just come off of a culinary education.

Justin Khanna:

I had a couple of kitchens under my belt, but it was not a situation where I felt like I was, I was worthy of being in the presence of some of these folks, and so I looked at that in two ways. One, there was the knowledge gap. I didn't know how to look at a thing like foie gras, how to clean chicken legs, how to kind of take any of these sauces or purees or even some of the vegetable juicing projects we do. They had specific settings that they would want on the juicer so that the temperature didn't exceed a specific place, so that it wouldn't damage, you know, any of the like. If we're juicing something green, we don't want to have the temperature go too high where it's going to damage the chlorophyll in any of these things. And then the other one was just the raw experience, right, so like being able to be put in situations where you inch outside of your comfort zone over and over and over again. And that's again talking about the space that I play in, which is in this education space, especially on the back of house side.

Justin Khanna:

I think people conflate the two. They spend so much time buying the giant, you know, like swath of cookbooks and they say, look at all this knowledge that I have, and it's that funny. The analogy that I like to share with folks that I think resonates with people, is like how many books about read, about pushups. Do I have to read before I get a big chest? And it's like that's not you know what I mean, like that's not how you're going to get there. You have to kind of learn at least the baseline, and then you have to go out and do the thing.

Justin Khanna:

And again, even in this world of content creators making immense, you know amounts of value and income and reach and impact, publishing their thoughts online, I think that can kind of like skew the perception of folks a little bit, saying, oh well, all I'm going to do is watch a couple of these content creators, I'm going to create things at home. Yes, the recipes might be from some of these high caliber kitchens and you're still going to get at least the baseline level of knowledge, but that's still knowledge, which, in my opinion, is not always a substitute for experience.

Christin Marvin:

Yeah, I love that. I want to. I'm going to go back again, uh, because I think that you and thank you for being vulnerable and sharing that I think that your vulnerability and that imposter syndrome shows up a lot in kitchens these days and I wonder how, like what advice would you give to restaurant owners and chefs on how to cultivate an environment where people feel comfortable speaking up and recognize that there are opportunities to stay late and go above and beyond, but not necessarily? Have it looked at as this is just going to be more work for me.

Justin Khanna:

Sure. So this was one of the biggest challenges I had. As I was reflecting on that inadequacy, I felt the steps I took to kind of like get out of that slump and then ultimately turn it into something that I could give to folks as a resource. And so I got stuck with a sense of my first version of my kind of like how to run a station effectively, kitchen productivity being adaptable and high caliber environments was basically a series of me talking just like this to a group of people from my audience who you know, came in and decided willingly to basically beta test this you know kind of like program for me. And it was a set of stories. It was basically kind of like, when encountered with this situation, here's how I approached it. Here's what I would have potentially done differently, and here are some basic steps you can take, regardless of the station that you're running, to potentially improve there. And the real thing that kicked it off for me was going from stories to quantified measures and that was like a really big breakthrough for me. And so I basically take stations and you can apply this to anybody that's working in your team if you're a restaurant owner that's listening and basically evaluate them across. I have nine. You can certainly add on more if that decides to be something that you're interested in.

Justin Khanna:

I evaluated in something called a station score and it basically takes these more holistic view of how this person is performing. Because how does it typically happen? You walk up to the person station. You probably don't have that much time because you need to go into a meeting or you know somebody else is asking for your ear, has a bunch of questions for you. It's the question of how are you looking today, right? Or it's like how are you doing this week? Or like so, very casual, like oh, I checked in with my team, yeah. And then you look at the team member and it's kind of like how do I voice this to my boss that is basically relying on me to consistently perform on a daily basis. You are not incentivized as an employee member to kind of like voice the fact that I'm really struggling with the fact that, like you told me that this played up was really bad yesterday and it's still dwelling on my mind.

Justin Khanna:

I actually measure that in a feedback category and there's a basic rubric that takes people through. I basically say there's four levels. Which one of these most aligns with you and then you as the business owner, basically get that fed to you as a report across all your team members and, listen, you might have there might be a distribution here it might be a prior distribution of 80, 20. You might have only 20% of your team members who actually want to have that growth mindset and improve, and there might be other people who just like I don't think it's necessarily bad to have people in your organization who wants to just have the position they want to show up and do the job well, and then they want to get paid and they want to go home Like I think that's okay.

Justin Khanna:

I don't think every single person needs to be a high performer, but I still think that a system like this at least gets us closer to being able to evaluate folks in a way that actually aligns with more open communication, because you're directly positioning the questions in a way that speaks to what their actual experience is on their station, versus this just kind of like well, I think you maybe could be a little bit more organized and it's like we both maybe know that you know what I mean.

Justin Khanna:

But then there's the how to potentially back that up and so that to kind of get to the core of your question.

Justin Khanna:

It's kind of like I don't think people are always approaching these conversations with enough depth and nuance and data ideally, and that's what you know, like I'm trying to solve for some of these things, and it's been immensely helpful on the folks that I work with, because it's like, oh, now we're actually having a conversation. Now it's this funny thing of like, instead of you and I sitting on opposite ends of the table and I'm almost doing this interrogation thing to a team member, it turns into this thing where we have this report and we can both sit on the same side of the table, look at the report together and say, look, you're really crushing it here. There's a couple things here that I think could potentially be improved on. And then that's when, like, the folks that really kind of like decide to work with me, go full score, full score, total, same total, station nomination, they get. The ones who like have the full video library, they get the lessons, and then, ultimately, there's also people that get coaching.

Christin Marvin:

For me too, will you break down the basics? I know this is your world.

Justin Khanna:

Totally yeah, yeah, happy to share whatever.

Christin Marvin:

What is a great kitchen shift look like.

Justin Khanna:

Oh cool. So I folks who are working in restaurants on the day to day will kind of know this. There's almost like a vibe check you can do at the start of the day, which is this kind of like amalgamation of a couple things. It is like what's ahead, obviously, how busy are we today? I think everybody, like on their coming into their shift. If they were here yesterday, they want to know that, even if they're coming off of their weekend. It's this question of just kind of like how many are on the books today? How many covers do we have?

Justin Khanna:

If you're at a place that you know is taking pre-orders, it's kind of like maybe like what's the line out the door? Like right now? There's that. You know those funny memes of you know, you see the what am I looking like today. Then there's the kind of like what energy are you bringing in from potentially yesterday? So if you guys crushed it yesterday and you're just like everybody was fist bumping and just saying like see you tomorrow, yesterday, you can sometimes carry a little bit of that energy. And, conversely, what if it was really bad? Chef got really upset, a guest gave a piece of feedback that wasn't great. Food took a little bit too long. Do you know what I mean?

Justin Khanna:

Like any of those things, you can sometimes often bring that into the next day and different teams and different individuals kind of like come up, come at this in different ways. One thing is like, oh man, I hope that doesn't happen again, and the other side of it is, ideally, we will make sure that does not happen again and that's a really good place to be. So there's like that, that energy check you know like at the start of the day. Then I think, like the best teams that I've been a part of or that I've either led or like just had secondhand experience seeing it's this very kind of like open communication. I teach this premise, this principle in total station nomination called getting eyes on at the start of your day. And so what do you know? A lot of people do they'll, you know, just kind of like take the easy cherry picked projects at the beginning of their day, the things that are just like I know I need to do this, or I know I'm running low on this, or I know this is like a relatively easy thing to get on In some of the high caliber environments that I had the pleasure of being a part of it was always this like you show up a little bit early so you can have that 15 minute window where you're going to check what the books look like tonight.

Justin Khanna:

You're going to check it in the walk-in and you're going to see exactly how many eggplant we have. You're going to check your low boy and just see, did somebody come on my station and I thought I had sliced radishes? But somebody came in and we had a private event for lunch today and one of the cooks decided to come in and the sous chef told them to just take the radishes off my station. That's, in a lot of ways, not necessarily 100% of my control, but what is in my control is the fact that I can take that time.

Justin Khanna:

And again, I'm saying 15 minutes here because I really want it to be like the first time you do this, it might take a half hour, and if there's multiple levels to the restaurant and you need to take the elevator to go downstairs to the walk-in, that's actually what I'm suggesting you do, because what does that do? It gives you confidence in what your day is going to look like, going forward, and then you ultimately do that. Again, the communication happens both interpersonally so I'm talking to my sous chef, I'm talking to my station partner, we're talking about what staff meal today, but then it's also this kind of like almost insular communication with yourself, combined with some sort of prep list. That's like, again, one of the bigger things that I've seen.

Justin Khanna:

You don't have to follow the template that I am probably, you're probably, going to link in the show notes and that I share for free with folks, but it is this idea of like you have to keep track of tasks in some way, shape or form, because relying on your brain to store that information is just like pardon the pun, but a recipe for disaster. Like you deciding that like, oh, I have enough of this and I'm going to keep track of this and I'm going to make sure that I put this on anybody who's like put something in the oven and not set a timer on it and then you know, 43 minutes later you're like, oh shoot. You know what I mean. Like had that feeling. The prep list is exactly the same thing. It's like offloading that information from your brain onto this source of truth that you can keep track of.

Christin Marvin:

Hey there, podcast friends. I hope you're enjoying these impactful conversations and leadership insights I'm bringing you each week. Before we dive back into today's episode, I want to take a moment and reach out and ask a small favor. That would go a long way in supporting the show. If you've been loving the content I'm providing, please take a moment to leave a rating and review. Wherever you listen to your podcasts, Not only does it make my day, but it also plays a pivotal role in helping the show grow. Your reviews boost my visibility, attract new listeners and encourage exciting guests to join me on the mic. So if you want to be part of my show's growth journey, hit that review button and let me know what you think. Thanks a million for being awesome listeners. I love it. So I hear you talking about prep lists. I hear you talking about line checks. I hear you talking about reservation checks. What other systems are critical to success for a shift and for a week from a chef's perspective?

Justin Khanna:

Totally so. The next piece is like ideally, that's the start of your day and then you can really get into the meat of things and really get going. I think the other piece, that place that people get stuck is that continued communication throughout the entire shift. And so what typically happens we got a case of something and, for whatever reason, a fifth of it 20% was bad, and so does that make it means that I need to order more, or is that going to be the thing where I just kind of like try to squeak, to get by and cross my fingers and hold my breath and hope that it's going to potentially be enough? Same thing comes with timing. It's like oh my goodness, a project came out of nowhere, I dropped something Again.

Justin Khanna:

Notice, in each of these situations I'm not talking about picture perfect performance every single time. I'm talking about the fact that all of us encounter problems in our workday and sometimes the behavior that we exhibit can compound the problem, make it worse fuel, pour more gasoline on the fire because we want to protect what Our egos, the relationships we have with people. We don't want to look like an idiot, and so some of that, just like encouraging people to speak up more if and when there's a problem that needs to come up and then ultimately doing it from a sense of can I provide a solution here, not this, you know, like woe is me, I'm going to put my hand up and say like, hey guys, I'm going down, because then you turn into chicken. Little in the sky is falling and again, talking about the vibe and the energy of the kitchen, you start to shift that a little bit right. Like you become the person who's dragging the team down and you're saying I'm not going to be there, I'm not going to be set up on time, I'm pan. It's like everybody else starts to like they don't come to your rescue all the time. They start to say, oh man, this person is going to get chewed out, I'm going to make sure I'm good, and that turns into a problem.

Justin Khanna:

First is this idea of like hey, is there any world where you're going to be set up early on time today? Like you're going to be set up early today, is there a world where you could potentially jump in for 15 minutes right before service and help me pick the cilantro, because I think that I'm, you know, going to be. It's going to be kind of tight for me today, like there's a way to communicate these things that is a little bit more you know what I mean Like cohesive. And then, lastly, I think that, like I talk about this problem solving just kind of like pillar in my program because I think that that is another thing that again I talked about the speaking up part, but we can take a step beyond this because problems are unavoidable, like in a lot of ways, like yes, you can kind of like be ahead and start to preempt them, but they're still going to happen.

Justin Khanna:

No-transcript, being able to have some of those conversations again through, you know, like proactive communication before service even starts, ideally the day before, and being able to order something special so that if you have a gluten free guests and they can't have the pasta, what are they going to have, it can make the world of difference again from the way the team feels, from the way the guest experiences, from the way that the financials come out at the end of the month.

Justin Khanna:

And that's why I like to bring up all of those things, because different people have different preferences that they like to put on a pedestal. And some people could like, if you're a chef de partie, it's like I don't see the financial statement at the end of the month. So, framing any of these lessons from the sense of like, oh, it's going to make your you know, like you're going to be more profitable at the end of this thing, it's just kind of do you close the gap between line cook and chef Totally? I like to think of this as there's a little bit of a combination of it's mostly responsibility. The first time I was asked to move into a sous chef position from a lead line cook position, I felt it it very much so, felt like they were taking the knife out of my hand and I was being handed a clipboard and I still felt like I needed to show my line cooks, my team, basically that I was still like the most capable you know cook quote unquote in the kitchen.

Justin Khanna:

In that regard, from a technique perspective, from a speed perspective, from an organization perspective, and what I failed to kind of see was this principle of like I'm working for my team now and that was just a fundamental again shift that I that I failed to see in that first management position and it was a painful lesson that like. That's why I try to share this stuff, because I don't want, I want to make sure that people are at least aware of these things and that they can, you know, ultimately maybe make make steps to to make this transition less painful. But it's little things. When it's like, what does working for your team look like? I think a lot of people hear that sentence and they're like cool, I'm going to go to Kristen station and I'm going to take stuff off of her prep list and I'm going to do that work for her. But it's it doesn't often look like that.

Justin Khanna:

Yeah, the example that I like to give was what the sous chef before me used to do with orders was, right after service ended, as people were breaking down, he would go to individual stations with his clipboard of the order list, things that he needed from people, and he would say what is it that you need order for tomorrow? And then you're catching a line cook in this like horrible place where it's like just coming off the adrenaline of service, I haven't got a chance to see what I need for tomorrow. I don't even have all my mise en place put away yet, and so I don't technically know. And so what would happen four times a week minimum? Uh, I put seven items on the order list. As I'm breaking down or as I go down to the walk-in and see that somebody else took the last of the buttermilk, it's like, oh my God, I need buttermilk. I need to go tell the sous chef that I need buttermilk now. And it would constantly be this thing of like this headache.

Justin Khanna:

You, as you're stepping into that, going the shift from line cook to sous chef, for example, you can take a look at that. And what I tried to do was like, what if I put a white it's order list, underline, and everybody that that's basically the conversation throughout the day. Hey, everybody, as you start to come up with things that you need throughout your day, put them on the order list here, and then I'm only going to come at the end of the night after everybody's broken down and I'm going to maybe do other things while you know breakdown is happening. Or I'm going to jump in with breakdown or I'm going to, you know, like coordinate with front of house on wine pairing stuff during that time, and so that turns into this you're working for your team in the same way that, like again, you might think about making these little tweaks to optimize your station and make it a little bit fancier. That, like increased responsibility is like it's got to be number one for me.

Christin Marvin:

Yeah, I love it. I love it. Talk to me about the importance of inventory.

Justin Khanna:

I have a potentially like controversial take on inventory here, and part of it is because, like, I worked at places that have, um, you know, like constantly changing menus, um, and so it was this thing where inventory wasn't this thing, that we were just like we'd get tons and tons and tons of stuff and just try to, like, you know, work our way through it. It would be this thing where we just got enough for, you know, maybe that week and you know, part of it was the last restaurant where I worked, where I worked at kind of didn't scar me in this in this sense, but it did provide a different perspective where we had a growing season for produce on the West coast of Norway that was only like four months long because, like, the fjords are all over the place, so there's not a lot of flat land and, you know, the temperature swings are kind of crazy and the sunlight is also all over the place, and so you have this funny thing where we would get tons and tons and tons of produce in, you know, those four months of the year. And then I had to create a larger program to basically, you know, like ferment and preserve and pickle and do all those things, to have that inventory, and then it's a whole nother can of worms of like working through that inventory in the wintertime and all those sorts of things. I think that like inventory from a from a practical perspective can really really help from the sense of like giving, be able to use that. As you know, like we're going to make a fumet block sauce in the in the in the wintertime, when you know like we need to use that.

Justin Khanna:

But then I think that there's this other funny thing where like it can almost become this like dead weight, that you're feeling where it's like well, we have this stuff and I preserved it, and you know like I would do things like pickled carrots with I don't I can't remember what I would do like coriander seed and black pepper, for example, and then we'd take a look at that and be like well, now we have to build this whole dish around this flavor profile we used for these carrots. And so, yeah, I think like there's the perspective of like you're keeping track of the inventory and you know like we need to use it. We're committed to this thing, we brought it in and we're keeping track of it and it's on our balance sheet and we need to kind of like move through this. But then there's the other side of it which is like I think it's okay to like let things go sometimes or relegate things to staff meal or just decide like we've been holding onto this for a little bit too long. I would much rather people focus on kind of like what are the heavy hitting things on the tasting menu or on the menu that are the over and above high performers? Because, like anybody who's run an R&D program that has an inventory of just like experimental dry goods or whatever in their kitchen is just like, oh my God, again it feels like that dead weight. But yeah, from an inventory perspective it helps to give that high level view of just kind of like our purveyor statements look like this what are we still holding?

Justin Khanna:

And as the person who's stepping into that first manager role, you might not see the importance of it, but ultimately that does help to make sure that the decisions that are being made by the people who are above you can have more accurate data.

Justin Khanna:

That comes back to exactly that clean data analogy that I that I tried to make here. Um, because when you're in those early roles it's not always clear to you why inventory matters and why some of these things ultimately like oh man, um, we had a really good month, but you know, like we're down. Do you know what I mean? Our food cost is really high. You know what I mean. Like sometimes that can come out in the inventory, um, so like, again, it's one of those funny things where it's the awareness piece and it's understanding how it fits into the grander picture. But ultimately coming to terms with the fact that, like, if you're the one doing inventory or even being asked to, like I used to give some of my line cooks like, hey, I need you to inventory the dairy this month because I was trying to invest into them a little bit, to basically say I want you to see how this ultimately comes together in the spreadsheet.

Justin Khanna:

I don't know, it's one of those funny things where, like, I don't think it's the thing that always makes or breaks concepts, but it is this funny thing where it's like you can't completely discount it. It's a really interesting variable.

Christin Marvin:

Yeah, it was. I agree with you. I think it depends on the concept.

Justin Khanna:

Totally.

Christin Marvin:

Right and if it makes sense or not. I know, when I've worked in a lot of high volume concepts with a lot of management turnover, it was so important for us to make sure those young managers got eyes on all those products. And we're looking at expiration dates of things and we're just blind ordering because they retired at the end of the day, right. But again, that's a concept where the menu never changes Right, or maybe changes quarterly. But yeah, I've had this conversation a lot with people in the fine dining space. It's like we don't do inventory, we don't really get it, it doesn't make sense for us and I appreciate that perspective too.

Justin Khanna:

Yeah, because if you really look at costing out a tasting menu, I needed to do this when I was doing my culinary school externship. We had to do this whole workbook and the workbook and the premise of one of the exercises in the workbook was you need to take a dish from the place where you're externing at and you need to do a food costing analysis on it. And my sous chef that I was working for was basically like uh, you know what I mean, like shrugged his shoulders because he was like this is one course on a tasting menu that changes, that has supplements, that is a fixed cost that we're ultimately maybe doing a loss on this dish because we know that the person who orders this dish is also going to order wine. It's like this really complicated Rube Goldberg machine where you can't point to one specific thing and say this costs this and because the reality is what happens, I give the example of fish stock. But we also would do langoustines, whole live langoustines, and what we would do is we would take the tails and that would be on the tasting menu, but then we would make langoustine stock and we'd take the meat from the claws and ultimately save that. Pick it like boil it, pick it, uh, cryovac it and we would use that for like a pasta farce later on, you know, in the, in the, in the season, and so it's like costing that is a complete nightmare, right, because it's like, yeah, you're adding additional labor, but then you're also able to sell something further down the line. We don't know what the price is that we're going to be able to sell this for down the track, because we don't know what the dish is yet. We just have this raw Lango meat, um, and so it turns into this thing where you want um getting super to your point on the concepts, where the menu never changes and you're getting stuff from consistent suppliers and nothing has changed.

Justin Khanna:

And you know every single variable in the equation is clean. Yes, let's get down to the 22.1% food cost that you were able to nail, but when we're talking about some of these more nebulous things, where's the waste going of these more nebulous things? Where's the waste going Again, what was labor on this, all those sorts of unknowns and dynamic variables? I think people are better off taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture of maybe more binary questions of were we profitable, yes or no? Have we reached capacity on one of these storage systems whether it's a freezer or a shelf in dry storage, yes or no and then you can make decisions, ideally based off some of those binary things, versus trying to agonize over, like I don't know, what my exact food cost percentage is down to the second decimal point and that, I think, can again help people focus on the more pertinent problems.

Christin Marvin:

Yeah, and I can only imagine what that type of stress would do to the entire environment of your kitchen.

Justin Khanna:

Yeah, and what is it? You know how does it help? You know what I mean? Like, what's the action that you're gonna do from one of these things? Yeah, and if the answer is probably not a lot, it's like you can take a step back and again focus on other things.

Christin Marvin:

Yeah, I love it. Justin, this is awesome, thank you. Would you talk a little bit about your resources and how people can get a hold of you?

Justin Khanna:

Totally so. I'm available to search my name basically anywhere. I'm incredibly easy to get a hold of if anybody wants to jam or continue to have the conversation on any of these pieces. I am continuing to expand the organizations that I'm working with on the total station nomination side and so using the nine domination measures as a system to manage your team better, decrease turnover, increase performance and ultimately, like, have that entire staff happiness onboarding experience be a little bit more personalized and nuanced. I'd love to get in touch Again. I think I've given you a link to share in the show notes, but if not, please send me a message and I'm happy to direct you there. Any of my content I'm writing very short form actionable insights in my newsletter as well. That's available at joinrepertoirecom slash newsletter and then, yeah, I think, just happy to continue the conversation with anybody who's interested in moving their hospitality organization forward in a positive way.

Christin Marvin:

I love it. Every restaurant needs this. If you're in the process of opening, you're thinking about what it would look like to run a kitchen and start a restaurant, or you've been in operations for 20 years and you need a refresh, or you want to refresh on how to do things a little bit differently, justin's your guy, so thank you, you bet. Thank you. All right, everybody that's going to do it for us this week. Please share this episode with anyone you know in the industry who could benefit and we'll talk to you next week.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Christin Marvin

Host

Podcasts we love

Check out these other fine podcasts recommended by us, not an algorithm.

A Bit of Optimism Artwork

A Bit of Optimism

Simon Sinek
CULINARY MECHANIC Artwork

CULINARY MECHANIC

Simon Zatyrka
Restaurant Unstoppable with Eric Cacciatore Artwork

Restaurant Unstoppable with Eric Cacciatore

Inspiring interviews with todays most successful restaurateurs 2-days a wee