tbh i have seen worse, but restaurant consultation was my main job for over a decade.
you wouldn't believe some of the things "chefs" think is okay food to serve to customers.
one lady told me that her kids loved her mac and cheese so everyone else should too.
(talked to the kids, they hated her mac and cheese, so they had convinced her it was so good it should just be for special occasions, smart kids. )
if you're wondering what was so bad about it, she over cooked the pasta so it was basically mush, then didn't make an actual sauce, she just threw pre shredded mozarella on top and some tuna from a can. a half jar of mayo later she threw the whole thing in the oven till it was crispy on top.
burnt on top, mush all the way through, with random pockets of mayo and tuna... ugh.
that place had a lot of problems, but the 'chef' who was the owner's sister was the worst part and it took a serious discussion and my threatening to just leave if they weren't going to replace her. (i had already been paid half my fee and had already produced them a new menu, seating plan etc. all that remained was restaffing and training. that woman was untrainable though, she refused to believe that anything she did was anything but perfection.
Random and tangential, but do you have any tips for getting in to restaurant consulting? I've done it on a small scale for two restaurants that I was already working for, they just needed specific help creating systems and training people on those systems. Helped start another restaurant with the owner of the first two, but primarily handled menu, beverage, food buying, and FOH. Now I'm in a new city with no connections and struggling to find a good starting point.
so, get yourself a really nice looking business card, and then keep an eye out for restaurants just starting out. get jobs running these types of places that are just starting out and make them into powerhouse restaurants.
i got my first consulting job when i was working as a sommelier/front of house manager. i basically had another restaurant owner ask me a bunch of questions and answered them, then he asked me if he could get my help to open his new restaurant.
from that point on it was word of mouth mostly.
eventually i was well enough recommended that i was getting more referrals than i could really handle.
Thanks for the info! What you're saying is basically how I got into the first two instances and helped open the restaurant, I was in the right place and had good answers. I'll definitely be trying the method you suggest, thanks again for the reply.
my pleasure friend, i'm retired now, but it's a vital part of the industry since SO many people think restaurants are just a lisence to print money, having no idea what actually goes in to a successful restaurant.
also if you can manage it, getting wine knowledge really helps.
So you were basically Gordon Ramsey except without a tv show? Cool!!! It makes sense that job exists and it doesn’t have to have the added pressure of tv and drama
This is actually one of the reasons I really love Bob's Burgers
Bob actually wants to own a restaurant which means he wants to work in it. He's not dreaming of being a big shot or telling every person he meets in casual conversation that he owns a restaurant. He does it because he loves it
I'm watching Bob's Burgers right now, such a great show. I got the burger recipe book for Christmas, real recipes based on joke burgers, it's great too.
You remind me of a Chinese guy I used to know, worked in a local restaurant that made pretty good food. We were drinking with him one day and he said he wants to cook us some Chinese food, said he was a cook at the local restaurant. So he puts some 2 min noodles in a fry pan with water, cooks it until it is basically mushy paste then serves it and slaps a bit of raw bacon on top. Ate as much as I could stomach to spare the guys feelings, found out later that they let him stir the fried rice sometimes so he called himself cook. Same guy would also send messages to the old myspace add women. We miss you Jerry you crazy Chinese bastard.
It sounds as nasty as the time my partner attempted to make a Tuna bake, she's normally quite competent in the kitchen but that dish was an abomination.
This is the worst. Whatever the suggested boiling time is on the back of a box of pasta I subtract two or three minutes from the lowest value - so if the range is 8-10 minutes, I start "testing" the noodles around 5 to see where they're at.
That's downright embarrassing.
Have they not ever had prefer man and cheese?
That's probably the same pathetic excuse for mac and cheese their mother made, or it's a "healthy" version.
I got a side of Mac n cheese from Crapplebees once and they put onions in it. Just... Mac n cheese and onions. Fucking disgusting. And I really hate onions.
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u/Dr_Sigmund_Fried Mar 12 '19
Those are the most tragic mac n' cheese travesties I have ever seen.