Latest / Chef's PSA Podcast / Is The Culinary Ship Sinking? Ep. 66

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Is The Culinary Ship Sinking? Ep. 66 · Chef's PSA Podcast

• 0:00
  Hello chefs, This is Chef's PSA Podcast.
• 0:02
  I'm your host, Andre Natara. On today's episode, we're going
• 0:04
  to talk about is the culinary industry facing a crisis.
• 0:07
  Stay tuned. Recording this episode a little
• 0:21
  bit early. So today is Wednesday, September
• 0:24
  27th and 23. Tomorrow is actually my
• 0:27
  birthday, September 28th. I hope you wished me a happy
• 0:30
  birthday, but if you didn't, shame on you.
• 0:33
  I still expect a present. Put a chefspsa.com.
• 0:36
  Go get yourself a book, a journal, one of the free ebooks.
• 0:39
  Get some merch, get a happy cook hat, whatever.
• 0:43
  Go celebrate my birthday by buying yourself something nice.
• 0:46
  Anyway, the reason I bring up the date is because today on my
• 0:51
  Instagram I put up a poll. I put up several polls actually,
• 0:55
  wanting to take a pulse of what the state of the industry is.
• 0:59
  Everything from Is the industry harder since 20/20?
• 1:03
  What are your staffing levels looking like?
• 1:06
  Are your menus too big for the amount of staff that you have to
• 1:08
  pull it off? What's the skill level like of
• 1:11
  the current team that you have in the kitchen and how many jobs
• 1:16
  do you need to make sure you're making ends meet?
• 1:20
  So I put that up on Wednesday and the results are very
• 1:24
  interesting. And the reason I did that is
• 1:26
  because I was starting to sniff out that we're having some
• 1:30
  problems in the industry. This episode is going to be a
• 1:32
  bit of a rant. I'm not sure if I have any
• 1:34
  solutions as I wax poetically. We will find out if I could have
• 1:38
  some bright insights, but more so than anything I have
• 1:41
  concerns. If I'm being honest, I've been
• 1:43
  pretty connected to the industry as of late in terms of talking
• 1:46
  to a lot of my chef friends. I've been getting a lot of Dm's
• 1:50
  and I'm starting to notice a really repetitive pattern.
• 1:53
  A lot of chefs that I know are burnt crisp.
• 1:56
  They're bringing up the same issues.
• 1:58
  They don't have enough cooks. They're getting a lot of
• 2:00
  pressure from ownership to perform.
• 2:02
  Their menus are too big, They're working too hard, The hours are
• 2:06
  too long. Cooks are working two jobs.
• 2:09
  They're willing to leave for a buck here or a buck there.
• 2:11
  Restaurants are raising their rates very quickly in order to
• 2:15
  pull all the cooks from the market, at least all the good
• 2:17
  ones. Chefs have always worked hard.
• 2:20
  I don't think that's. I don't think that's new.
• 2:22
  I think I I was a chef for a very long time, so seven days a
• 2:26
  week then and seven days a week now.
• 2:28
  Hard is hard, but I think the difference is a lot of the chefs
• 2:32
  that I'm talking to are not only working the long hours, but it's
• 2:35
  at a sprinter's pace and they're having to compromise quality
• 2:38
  where before at least they had enough people where they didn't
• 2:41
  have to sacrifice the quality. Someone messaged me and they
• 2:44
  said that they had put in their notice and this is someone that
• 2:48
  I communicate with often. We're going a little bit back
• 2:51
  and forth, so I was asking him the question why he was leaving.
• 2:53
  He just said all his cooks have to come in at 4:00 PM.
• 2:56
  The restaurant opens at 5:00. So not only is he the prep cook,
• 2:59
  but he also has to set the line for all the other cooks.
• 3:01
  The reason the cooks have to come in late is because they all
• 3:03
  have second jobs. Because one job doesn't pay
• 3:05
  enough, which one thing leads to another, Which leads to bad
• 3:09
  service, not enough product, mediocre quality, Not something
• 3:14
  that they're happy with. The hours are still long, but
• 3:17
  sometimes you could put up with long hours if you're enjoying
• 3:20
  what you're doing, If you're not as frustrated, you could deal
• 3:22
  with it, right? It's kind of like if you're
• 3:24
  playing a video game that you enjoy, you can play it all
• 3:26
  night. It doesn't matter that you've
• 3:28
  been playing it for 24 hours. You know when you were a little
• 3:31
  kid, you'd play video games 24 hours a day, if not longer.
• 3:34
  But if you didn't enjoy the video game all of a sudden, you
• 3:37
  might not want to play it for 24 hours straight, much less 10
• 3:40
  hours straight. That's kind of what's happening
• 3:42
  in the kitchen. A lot of times people would say
• 3:45
  why do they work so many hours? A lot of chefs enjoy being in
• 3:48
  the kitchen that long. I know right now personally, I'm
• 3:52
  doing a chef in residence program at a restaurant in
• 3:54
  Dripping Springs and I wake up in the morning and I get ready.
• 3:58
  I go to work and I'm there all day.
• 3:59
  And then I come home. I go to sleep and I do the same
• 4:00
  thing and I'm like back in the grind for a short period of
• 4:03
  time. But I'm fully switched on and I
• 4:05
  can't turn it off right. I'm an all in type of chef, so
• 4:10
  I'm driving to work. I'm making my notes to talk
• 4:12
  about When I get there, I come home, I'm thinking about new
• 4:16
  things. If I have any time off, I'm
• 4:19
  looking at things that I could incorporate, whether it's the
• 4:21
  culture or the philosophy or even on the menu.
• 4:24
  So there are some chefs like that, just they are so into it,
• 4:28
  they can't turn it off because it's fun.
• 4:30
  It's like a video game. They're racking up the high
• 4:32
  score, but what if it's not fun? If it's not fun, you're not
• 4:35
  going to be doing that. You're not going to be trying to
• 4:37
  move things forward. You're not going to be trying to
• 4:39
  push. And so this guy that I was
• 4:40
  talking to says to me that he's put in his notice and he's going
• 4:43
  to leave. He doesn't have a plan.
• 4:44
  He doesn't know where he's going.
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  He's picking my brain. Where do you think I should go?
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  It's an interesting question because here's what I do know,
• 4:51
  is that not all places are suffering the same.
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  A lot of the smaller independent restaurants may be suffering
• 4:58
  more so than the big players. A lot of the chain restaurants
• 5:03
  are suffering, especially those chain restaurants that have
• 5:05
  massive menus. You know, the ones that have
• 5:07
  like 50 menu items and three cooks to pull it off, right?
• 5:11
  And when you have massive menus and a few cooks to do it, one
• 5:15
  thing has to give, right? Usually the cooks can only do so
• 5:18
  much, so you're probably going to take shortcuts and compromise
• 5:21
  on the quality. So I had said to him, as taboo
• 5:24
  as this sounds to a lot of people, it's not taboo.
• 5:26
  And I think we have to reframe how we think about this.
• 5:29
  I said to him, and he's working in a great restaurant, I won't
• 5:32
  say which one, but he's working in a very top end restaurant
• 5:35
  with a big name chef. And I said to him, sometimes you
• 5:39
  need to take the corporate job so that you can have more free
• 5:42
  time and you have more infrastructure.
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  You get the benefits, you have more resources, You have a human
• 5:46
  resources department. You might get the free gym
• 5:49
  membership, the health benefits, the PTO, all the things that I
• 5:53
  think are valuable, especially for what today's cooks are
• 5:55
  looking for. And you could find that in a
• 5:59
  corporate environment. It's much more difficult to find
• 6:01
  in an independent restaurant that's independently owned and
• 6:03
  independently run. But there's a tradeoff, and that
• 6:06
  tradeoff is usually you're trading the chef life for
• 6:10
  quality of life. Might be giving up a little bit
• 6:13
  of that creativity, depending on, you know, if you have, if
• 6:15
  you're in a corporate structure where they're writing the menu
• 6:17
  for you, something that you got to think about because quality
• 6:20
  of life seems to be a hot topic. People are talking about burnout
• 6:23
  all the time, being overworked and underpaid.
• 6:25
  I'm not really sure how I feel about burnout.
• 6:27
  I think burnout is a very real thing, and I've experienced it
• 6:30
  before. But when I've experienced
• 6:32
  burnout, it's never been in jobs that I like.
• 6:34
  When I'm having fun at work, I am not burned out.
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  When I'm enjoying myself, I can work there all day long.
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  You're around people that you love.
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  The kitchen crew is just humming.
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  They're like your second family. Don't feel burned out.
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  You're cooking food that you enjoy.
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  Don't feel burned out. Change that situation up.
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  You're cooking with people that you really don't like, People
• 6:51
  that you don't get along with. You don't like your boss.
• 6:53
  You're cooking food that you're not inspired by burnout.
• 6:56
  A lot of the burnout has to do with not just the amount of
• 7:00
  hours that you're working, but the amount of joy that you're
• 7:02
  getting out of those hours that you're putting it.
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  It's the missing part that not a lot of people talk about, but I
• 7:07
  think it's equally as important as you really have to enjoy what
• 7:11
  you're doing, or if not, that burnout comes on a lot quicker.
• 7:14
  If you have a chance, you need to go back and listen to Chefs
• 7:16
  PS:. A episode one.
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  And in that very first episode, I talked about the state of the
• 7:20
  union coming right out of the pandemic.
• 7:23
  And what we were facing and some of the things that I had brought
• 7:26
  up was that during the pandemic, a lot of people left and they
• 7:30
  found other careers where they can make more money, a side
• 7:33
  hustle, whatever the case may be.
• 7:34
  So a lot of people left, which put a lot of stress on the
• 7:37
  restaurants that were opening. Then a lot of the people that
• 7:40
  came back were basically playing arbitrage between employers.
• 7:44
  Meaning I'll work here and I'll get a raise and then I'll go
• 7:47
  there and I'll get $0.25 more and then I'll come back and I'll
• 7:50
  get a dollar more. Where previously chefs would say
• 7:53
  if you leave, you're not coming back.
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  But post COVID, they were begging people to come back,
• 7:58
  even if they had burned the bridge, because they were all
• 8:00
  desperate for staff. One of the other things is we
• 8:03
  had promoted many people into positions of leadership, which
• 8:07
  they were not ready for, but we were desperate.
• 8:10
  We needed people to lead the teams.
• 8:11
  So maybe someone became a sous chef or an executive chef that
• 8:14
  was maybe two or three years removed from where from being
• 8:18
  ready for that position prior to the pandemic.
• 8:22
  So now here we are, 2023, basically pretty close to
• 8:25
  wrapping up the year. And where are we?
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  We created a big mess. We promoted people that weren't
• 8:29
  ready. We're seeing the fruits of that
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  people were overworked, was almost like we didn't learn the
• 8:36
  lesson from the pandemic to streamline the menus and make
• 8:38
  something that's more cost efficient.
• 8:40
  Cooks came in with different expectations, right?
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  The industry feels different. I could tell you that for sure
• 8:45
  in just three short years, the industry feels different.
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  I'm not saying it feels better or worse.
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  I'm just saying it feels different.
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  I can't necessarily put my finger on what is so different
• 8:54
  about it, but I can tell you it feels different.
• 8:57
  And if you've been cooking for a while pre 2020, you know what
• 9:00
  I'm talking about. It's very difficult to put your
• 9:02
  finger on exactly what it is that's different, but it is
• 9:05
  different. I don't know if it's social
• 9:07
  media or if it's the type of food that we're cooking or if
• 9:10
  we've lowered the bar. I'm not sure exactly what it is,
• 9:13
  but it's definitely not the same.
• 9:15
  I'm going to share some of the results from the poll that I put
• 9:18
  up with you. The first one I put up was, is
• 9:21
  the industry harder now than it was in 2020 or I should say
• 9:25
  prior to twenty 2081% of the people that voted yes, the
• 9:29
  industry is harder now. That got me curious, why is it
• 9:33
  harder now? So I wanted to dig a little bit
• 9:34
  deeper. I put up a lot of questions.
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  The next question I had put up was how staffed is your kitchen?
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  Are you fully staffed, down a few cooks, or are you desperate?
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  Only 21% said they were fully staffed.
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  Think about that. Only 21 percent, 21 out of 100
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  restaurants are fully staffed. That's crazy.
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  That's crazy to think back when all the culinary schools were
• 9:57
  popping up, like around 2010 to 2015, and you had a stack of
• 10:03
  resumes and people were doing stages and working for free and
• 10:06
  culinary labor was just a plenty.
• 10:09
  There was a line out the door to work at mediocre places.
• 10:13
  Now you have some of the best restaurants in the world putting
• 10:16
  ads on Facebook and Craigslist for cooks and sous chefs.
• 10:20
  Places where you would have to get tapped on the shoulder to go
• 10:23
  work are now putting ads. Interesting times.
• 10:26
  The next question I put up is your menu too big?
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  Only 13% said it could be bigger, 52% said it was the
• 10:32
  right size and 35% of the people said it was too big, which I
• 10:36
  find interesting because I actually, I thought that number
• 10:38
  would be higher, which tells me that some chef owners are
• 10:41
  putting a lot of thought into the menu and are focusing on
• 10:44
  better quality, fewer, fewer items.
• 10:46
  But there's a trade off, right, because the customer has to
• 10:48
  understand that too. Some of the best restaurants
• 10:51
  that people are talking about in the last few years really are,
• 10:55
  are sniper specialists. They do a few things very well.
• 11:00
  They don't have big menus. I'll give you an example.
• 11:02
  Maybe they're a Taco shop or a ramen shop, or they serve this
• 11:06
  pizza and it's excellent. They don't have 100 items on the
• 11:09
  menu that are OK. They have 10 that are excellent.
• 11:14
  I mean, there's a couple of restaurants in Austin that I
• 11:16
  could think of. You know, Franklin's BBQ is a
• 11:17
  legendary restaurant in Austin, TX.
• 11:19
  There's a line out the door. People are camping out, so when
• 11:22
  they run out of brisket, sold out, sign goes up and their
• 11:24
  brisket is world class. Best in the world arguably.
• 11:27
  But they only just do a few things and they do it very well.
• 11:30
  And then you get owners of other places that think they got to be
• 11:35
  something for everybody and they have too many items on the menu
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  and then it puts a strain on the staff and then you start to
• 11:41
  deliver. Mediocre, because there's no way
• 11:43
  you could put out excellent food when menus are.
• 11:47
  It's just not practical. Maybe you could point to a
• 11:50
  restaurant that does that very well.
• 11:52
  But in my opinion, if you want to be a successful restaurant,
• 11:55
  you got to hone in on your concept and your brand, and you
• 11:58
  have to deliver that very well. The next question I asked was
• 12:02
  the skill level of the team around you.
• 12:05
  Is it better, worse or the same? 23% said that the team that
• 12:09
  they're with right now is better, 40% said it's worse.
• 12:13
  Now think about that. And 16% said it's really bad.
• 12:17
  So let's call that 5056% are saying that it's way worse than
• 12:21
  it currently was, 21%, the same 23% are saying it's better,
• 12:26
  right? So a large portion of the chefs
• 12:29
  and cooks that answered on the polar saying that the situation
• 12:32
  is worse. So not only is the industry
• 12:34
  harder, but the cooks are not as skilled as they used to be
• 12:37
  before 2020. What happened?
• 12:39
  I don't know. I I don't know what happened.
• 12:41
  And these are rhetorical questions.
• 12:42
  I wish I had answers. Like I said, this podcast was
• 12:45
  going to be a little bit of a rant because I don't know the
• 12:47
  answers to some of these questions, but I feel like they
• 12:49
  need to be discussed, and I'm hoping that this podcast starts
• 12:52
  to open up the conversation. At least it's identifying what
• 12:54
  the problem is, because if we want to move the industry
• 12:57
  forward, we have to understand what the problem is.
• 12:59
  The last question I had put up on the poll was how fairly
• 13:02
  compensated are you? Are you compensated well?
• 13:05
  You're fine. You get by with one job or you
• 13:09
  need to have more than one job to make ends meet. 18% said they
• 13:12
  need more than one job, and 48% said they struggle.
• 13:16
  They struggle with what their pay rate is, but they make ends
• 13:19
  meet. But they struggle a little bit.
• 13:20
  And only 33% felt that they were fairly compensated, which I
• 13:24
  thought was interesting because if you know anything about human
• 13:29
  nature, we could all make more money, right?
• 13:31
  You give me a $10 raise, I'd like an $11.00 raise, right?
• 13:34
  That's just, it's just how we're wired, right?
• 13:36
  We always want a little bit more.
• 13:38
  At least a lot of us are. Clearly 33% are not wired that
• 13:41
  way. So as I was looking at all of
• 13:42
  this and I'm just trying to, I'm just trying to pinpoint what the
• 13:45
  issue is. So it's harder now.
• 13:46
  Like I said, some of the issues have to do with the pandemic.
• 13:50
  A lot of people leaving, a lot of the good cooks not coming
• 13:52
  back. A lot of it feels like we were
• 13:54
  on pause for three years and we weren't seeing improvement.
• 13:58
  A lot of people left fun jobs that they enjoyed for a little
• 14:03
  bit more money, right? And then the people that were
• 14:05
  left behind didn't enjoy them as much and they're no longer fun
• 14:08
  jobs. Sometimes it's people can't make
• 14:10
  ends meet financially. Menus are too big.
• 14:12
  We haven't fully corrected that issue across the board.
• 14:15
  And the industry's harder. I'll share a little story with
• 14:17
  you. I had quit a job years ago and
• 14:22
  one of my best friends and I, we were sitting down and he wanted
• 14:25
  to quit. And I would talk to him out of
• 14:26
  quitting and then I would want to quit and he would talk me out
• 14:29
  of quitting. And we were there for each
• 14:31
  other. Like I said, we were like
• 14:31
  brothers. Like I pulled him off to the
• 14:34
  side and I told him I had quit while he was off for a few days.
• 14:37
  The thing was is when we're having a conversation, he's the
• 14:40
  the place was screwed up. He understood.
• 14:41
  He understood why I had quit, but he told me, he says, I know
• 14:44
  this place was screwed up, but at least it was screwed up and
• 14:47
  we were here together. Like we had each other's back.
• 14:50
  I remember that that hit me pretty hard because he was
• 14:53
  right. I felt like I was abandoning
• 14:54
  him, abandoning him as a cook and chef.
• 14:57
  And you have to think about that like they're they're the
• 14:59
  industry is more than just you sometimes.
• 15:04
  And sometimes things do not get better when everyone starts to
• 15:08
  jump ship for a dollar here or $0.50 there.
• 15:11
  Sometimes if you're enjoying where you're at and you're
• 15:14
  enjoying the people that are around you and you care about
• 15:17
  them, sometimes the bigger decision is to help rebuild the
• 15:21
  team. It's not everyone's job.
• 15:24
  Rebuilding the team isn't everyone's job, but it's some
• 15:26
  people's jobs. It's when the leaders step up,
• 15:29
  it goes back to that saying win together, fail together, if you
• 15:33
  can lift up your team. Because understand that when one
• 15:36
  person leaves, it creates A domino effect.
• 15:38
  When you leave, you're putting your work on the person that's
• 15:42
  left behind and it makes it more stressful for them.
• 15:45
  And then they leave, and so the other person that's left behind,
• 15:49
  it's triple the work for them and so on and so forth.
• 15:51
  It compounds pretty quick. Sometimes when things are bad,
• 15:54
  the best thing to do is to not leave.
• 15:56
  If you're attached to the place and you care about the people,
• 15:59
  where you're at is to weather the storm and get through the
• 16:01
  tough times. I don't know what we're going to
• 16:03
  do about this wage situation because it's a real problem.
• 16:07
  And if you go back and listen to my podcast on food cost
• 16:10
  management, you should have a better understanding of money.
• 16:12
  But I could tell you this, it's not as simple as waving a magic
• 16:15
  wand. I know I see a lot of comments
• 16:17
  and I read a lot of things where people say, oh, owners are
• 16:19
  making so much money. It's not necessarily true.
• 16:22
  A lot of times owners make no money and they keep putting
• 16:26
  money into the restaurant to keep it open, to supply salaries
• 16:29
  for the staff that is there. I know that's.
• 16:31
  I know that for a fact. A lot of times owners don't take
• 16:34
  home any money and it's a money pit.
• 16:36
  They lose millions of dollars when the restaurant closes.
• 16:38
  It's a big investment and I think a lot of people think that
• 16:41
  some rich person is putting all their money into a restaurant
• 16:43
  and the restaurants making them rich.
• 16:45
  It's not necessarily the case. I think more people go broke
• 16:48
  opening restaurants than get rich opening restaurants.
• 16:51
  There's unicorns. Of course, There's always
• 16:53
  exceptions to the rule, but the majority of the people aren't
• 16:56
  getting rich off off restaurants.
• 16:58
  They do it because it's a passion project and if they make
• 17:01
  money, great. But I can tell you the majority
• 17:04
  don't. So we need to look at raising
• 17:06
  menu prices. But then people don't want to go
• 17:08
  out and eat. Do they want to pay for what
• 17:10
  we're serving? I've seen restaurants starting
• 17:12
  to add a couple of dollars to the menu price to provide
• 17:17
  affordable healthcare for their employees.
• 17:19
  There's restaurants that are doing tipping for the front of
• 17:21
  the house, service teams and culinary teams.
• 17:25
  There has to be some creative options out there.
• 17:26
  And I'm and I'm not sitting here and say I have.
• 17:28
  I have all the answers, but I want to begin the discussion
• 17:31
  because I truly do love this industry and I do love the
• 17:34
  people in it. I love the cooks, I love the
• 17:35
  chefs, and that's what chefs PS:.
• 17:38
  A is all about. I'm trying to help everyone win.
• 17:40
  Well, let me rephrase that. I'm trying to help everyone win
• 17:42
  That listens to Chef's PS:. A.
• 17:43
  If they don't listen to chef's PS:.
• 17:44
  A. Fuck them.
• 17:45
  Anyway, let's keep the discussion going and let's make
• 17:48
  the industry better. Obviously it's not a one person
• 17:51
  job. We're all in it together.
• 17:53
  A better industry for all of us. We all win.
• 17:55
  We all get better. We all make more money, We all
• 17:57
  cook better food, We're all successful.
• 18:00
  Anyway, If you want to support the show, you know what to do.
• 18:03
  Make sure you leave five stars. If you're watching on YouTube,
• 18:06
  hit the like button and subscribe.
• 18:08
  Go to chefspsa.com. You get all the books merge.
• 18:11
  I just started a Facebook page. I guess I forgot to say that.
• 18:15
  Look for Chefs PSA on Facebook. I'm on there.
• 18:18
  I'm posting on there. Don't message me on there.
• 18:20
  I I really don't like using the Facebook app.
• 18:24
  I have enough apps as it is, right?
• 18:25
  Twitter. Facebook threads, like all these
• 18:27
  social media apps are a little overwhelming.
• 18:30
  Instagram is the best way to get ahold of me or Twitter.
• 18:33
  I'm on all the other social apps.
• 18:35
  Let me know what you think of the show.
• 18:36
  You could comment in the poll if you're watching on Spotify.
• 18:38
  Thank you very much. See you next week.
• 18:40
  Hit the porno music.