Kitchen Triage
The ultimate fine dining experiences are perfectly orchestrated successions of interactions between the waits and the customers involving discovering and meeting the needs for certain kinds of paced and structured sensory input. Every element of the evening should add to a customer's sense of being taken care of, pleasurably surprised and gratified.
In real life, all sorts of complications arise that make it impossible to deliver everything exactly as might be wished with exactly the timing that might be wished.
So, the task of a chef at any given time is to determine what can be done to most closely approximate the idea situation. Needless to say, this is a moving target. What is the best decision for a given plate may not be the best decision for the whole table, which may not be the best decision for all the tables being served or going to be served that evening. You have to triage the options.
Everyone serious about cooking is going to come up with their own list of relative priorities in their career, in their job, during their shift, while putting out an order. If you are employed, learning and working with your boss' (or your teacher's) scheme of priorities—stated or unstated—is your job. But ultimately, you yourself are going to be doing the dancing with all the different conflicting needs and personalities in a given cooking situation. So it is worth giving some thought to your values lest you blow something that is really important to you to accomplish something that isn't. One way to think about it is to imagine what is the worst that could happen if you do one thing rather than another. You tend to be judged according to your worst rather than your best.
As you come to better know your strengths, you will get a better sense of what you need to focus on at any given time. So for example, starting the bread dough may be more important than prepping garnishes for the night because you have to do bread all at once and you can't hurry the process. And not having bread when the customers sit is more likely to upset the smooth flow the the evening than a rushed to-order chiffonade. An overly simplistic example perhaps, but it is often easy and inviting to focus on some small task and lose sight of the big picture.
Certain priorities are less negotiable than others; good sanitation practices better not be sacrificed in order to ensure that a table gets their entrées simultaneously. Others--such as skimping on side vegetables for one table so the entrées can all go out acceptably hot in temperature--are calls that can be disagreed with without faulting them, depending upon what else is happening at the time.
On a personal note, timing of the progression of courses and serving a table together is probably my first priority. Then, I tend to focus on the textures and temperatures of a plate, then the seasonings and balance and last the visual presentation. Not every chef or restaurant owner or dining room manager (no, they do not always share the same priorities) would agree. The point is that restaurant service is a very high stress environment. Many of us make choices under stress that don't match even our own priorities in calmer moments. The more we think about our values and goals, the more likely we are to make good choices when there isn't much time for thought
Our ultimate goal is perfection. I'll settle for perfection, I say. That this can and should mean very different things on a slow and over-staffed night than on a slammed-somebody-didn't-show-for-work night. The concept of "triage" comes from battlefield medicine where quickly deciding where to focus your energies is a matter of life and death. Although it may only feel like you are under attack in the kitchen, the coordination, communication and cooperation you bring to bear are equally important to a victorious outcome to a service. And doing the best you can is always a victory
One goal of this class is to open up the discussion of what is really important in dining, both in broad outline and in minute time-dependent detail. If these were simple questions, the world would be filled with great, flourishing restaurants. The rules and traditions of the restaurant world are a great resource and essential knowledge in our field. Balancing that study with our actual practice is not just a matter of following rules (unless--perhaps--you are a baker.) Careful preparation vs. on time preparation, attractive plating vs. hot food, re-assuring guests by your relaxed, confident demeanor vs. re-assuring guests by your quick efficiency, your attentiveness vs. your non-overattentiveness: you are choosing between competing rules and guidelines hundreds of times a shift. And helping your co-working choose.
Sharing techniques and tactics, small successes and setbacks are part of building a team consciousness that will amplify all your efforts rather than diluting them. The post mortems after every shift are great times to bring up how well all these various needs got met and how skillfully this juggling can proceed. And how to let go of all the inevitable lapses. Re-visiting embarrassment is how many look at their mistakes and so our industry is filled with folks who want to forget what they just went through during a shift. Painful at the time, upon later reflection glitches can be great opportunities for fine-tuning your sense of kitchen triage.
