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PSA: stop telling new cooks to "earn their stripes" on the salad station for a year
I keep hearing the same speech in kitchens around Denver: put in a year on salads and cold prep before you touch a pan, that's how you earn it. I think that advice is flat out wrong and it's costing us good cooks. I ran a 14 seat counter spot for 3 years and hired 9 people with zero line experience, and the ones I threw straight onto the flat top with someone watching them actually stuck around longer than the ones I parked on garde manger. Salads teach you knife work and plating, sure, but they don't teach you heat, timing, or how to move when the printer spits out 6 tickets at once. One guy I hired, Marcus, spent 8 months at his last job just washing lettuce and prepping dressings, and he told me he almost quit cooking for good because he was bored out of his mind. Bored cooks leave, and then we act shocked that nobody wants to work the line. If you can teach someone to taste and season, you can teach them a sear in two weeks. So what actually happened when you got your first real station, was it too soon or not soon enough?
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felix48828d ago
Marcus washing lettuce for 8 months sounds like a punishment, not training.
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