Mission Chinese Food business model. (via The Evolution of a Restaurant: Mission Chinese Food | Food & Wine)
Eating at historic Tucker’s in Over-The-Rhine a week after a shooting. See if you can spot my nephew chowing down on goetta.
Part two of Sophie Brickman’s tours of top Bay Area kitchens. Part one was on French Laundry, tumbl’d earlier, and it was much more interesting.
Tweeted by Andy Wang. My favorite learnings:
- “Work ethic is established today.”
- “The rule of no repetition” — no ingredients can be featured more than twice in a night’s menu
- “The dance” — how skilled chefs move and hold themselves in the kitchen
- “Sense of Urgency”
- “Finesse”
- Expectations for new cooks: strong work ethic, cleanliness, initiative, humility, “a love of repetition”
- “Treat it like it’s yours, and one day it will be.” Cooks label their own ingredients to foster a sense of ownership and responsibility.
- Everyone is called “chef,” regardless of position.
- Each line cook comes up with own dishes.
- Everyone shakes each other’s hand at the end of the night.
We’re not the best cooks, we’re not the best restaurant—if you were a really good cook you wouldn’t be working here, because really good cooks are assholes. But we’re gonna try our best, and that’s as a team. Recently, over at Ssäm Bar, a sous-chef closed improperly, there were a lot of mistakes, and I was livid and I let this guy have it. About a week later, I found out that it wasn’t him, he wasn’t even at the restaurant that night. But what he said was ‘I’m sorry, it will never happen again.’ And you know what? I felt like an asshole for yelling at him, but, more important, I felt like, Wow, this is what we want to build our company around: guys that have this level of integrity. Just because we’re not Per Se, just because we’re not Daniel, just because we’re not a four-star restaurant, why can’t we have the same fucking standards? If we start being accountable not only for our own actions but for everyone else’s actions, we’re gonna do some awesome shit.
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David Chang. |
His ice cream addresses two major grievances in the contemporary culinary scene: boredom with menus that all look the same, and irritation with the orthodoxy governing how we’re all supposed to eat (local, sustainable, organic, etc.).
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| — | The story of Jake Godby and Humphry Slocombe. Who Wants Prosciutto Ice Cream? - NYTimes.com |
