After thinking about this blogpost for a minute I realized the blogpost actually literally argues for doing things the hard and stupid way. Not as a metaphor for integrity or quality.
Integrity isn't the point:
> It had nothing to do with integrity. I didn’t care about fooling the diners. What concerned me was the precedent we were setting.
The quality of the food isn't the point either:
> The dish was meant to be a difficult pickup that required constant coordination between the front and back of house.
The inefficiency is the point.
Doing it the long, hard and stupid way is the point.
This is a sermon against process improvements. Without seeming to realize that restaurants are a modern miracle of process improvements! How does this David think the kitchen gets fresh ingredients every morning? Where does David think fruit in the winter comes from? How did herbs and spices get so cheap? Because we decided for the past 200 years to relentlessly pursue efficiency. Because we decided not to do things the slow and stupid way any more. That's how!
> For example, one of my favorite Majordomo dishes is a whole boiled chicken. We present the bird to the table in a big pot, bring it back to the kitchen to carve it, and then return with a beautiful platter of rice topped with the sliced breasts and two different sauces spooned over the top. Once guests are finished with that, we bring out a soup made from the carcass. It’s so good.
The point is that the diner gets to see the chicken they will eat and understand the process.
The efficient way described in the blog is to instead use a stunt chicken which'll be paraded around the dining room instead of being cooked.
That's not a process improvement when the entire point of the dish is to show the diners what they will eat before they eat it and flex the restaurant's ability to coordinate.
Purposeful inefficiency is beautiful when it's about retro video game console programming or mechanical watches, because that's about spotlighting the process. Both of these are inefficient---modern computers are more powerful and quartz watch keep time better---but are fascinating because the difficulty of programming in assembly or an intricate series of tiny gears have inherent value to some people, far beyond the result of a video game or getting the current time.
It's a complicated finely tuned process to get a chicken from your table to the kitchen and back again. The chef wants employees that value the process itself, which is a fair ask when the process is the product.
"Once guests are finished with that, we bring out a soup made from the carcass."
Soup from the carcass is delicious, but there isn't time to do that during the meal. Even with a pressure cooker it's going to take at least an hour. (And if several tables order the same dish, you're gonna have a bunch of pressure cookers in your kitchen.)
So... the idea is sound, but I'm doubtful that they actually do it the way they claim. Which would make sense with the "hero chicken" story they admit to.
Sounds like they bring the chicken out after simmering it the first time, then take it back to the kitchen and carve it up and serve it. So you've probably got another 30 minutes or so while the guests are eating that to chuck the carcass back in the pot with the cooking liquid. Assuming you already simmered the chicken in stock the first time that would be plenty flavourful.
You can do it in less, with a pressure cooker. Even so, 30 minutes is not going to get maximum flavor and collagen out of the bones.
If they're also using the original poaching stock I could imagine you'll get a pretty stock even in 30 minutes. You'd still need to cook anything else you wanted in your soup -- vegetables, pasta -- though there are tricks for par-cooking these.
I don't own a pressure cooker, so I'm only reporting what I've read. And they do say that a pressure cooker makes better stock in shorter time -- there are things that not even a 10 hour simmer will get since the temperature never gets high enough to dissolve some things. Still, 30 minutes sounds sub-optimal, and I wouldn't expect anything to be even the slighest bit sub-optimal when you're paying two-Michelin-star prices.
Pressure cookers are magic. I get similar results making chicken stock in a pressure cooker for ~45 minutes as I do in a regular pot for ~4-6 hours. And you can properly make stock from beef bones in a couple of hours, which normally takes > 12 hours.
Right, I know a pressure cooker can reduce time. I seriously doubt it will drop it to 30, is all.
And yeah, best read is they already had fully done stock and just add these bones to that and drain off some for you to have. Leaving it in to continue to make more stock.
I'd go further, it is a common farcical joke that people want to see the animal they are about to eat. But part of the joke is that nobody knows or cares about this, in truth. I fail to see why I would care to see the ingredients that went specifically into the dish I'm about to eat. It can be neat to see the full process in parts, such that if you want to parade the food at different stages, have at it.
And entertainment is full of evidence that people don't need or want to see the full process. For example, good editing can make a movie. There is still a market for stage plays, of course. There is always a curtain, though.
Right, that would be an example of the farcical joke I meant. I think I even had that one in my mind. :D
And fair that there could be a market for this. Dozens of people, even. My point is that the market is almost certainly as much a stated market as it is an actual one. People want to be somewhat entertained, sure. And they want a good meal. Seeing the exact chicken that they are about to eat as it makes its way through the kitchen feels unlikely to be a deciding factor.
Yeah, I'm totally with you on this one. I think they make a stock from the carcasses of previous day's chickens. What Chang is claiming doesn't make sense.
Hmmm, that like the "inefficiency" of advertisements with lots of empty space, and fancy stores with sparse interiors.
In other words, it's not actual inefficiency so much as a hard-to-recognize spending on buying another asset, namely the marketing/advertising effect of conveying "luxury" or "successfulness".
Sort of like peacock feathers: They're "inefficient" from the perspective of abstract aerodynamics, but from a holistic and practical perspective...
And yet, he says "... I didn’t care about fooling the diners."
I agree with you, that the diner seeing what they are about to eat is an important part of the experience. But Chang seems to be saying that even that is not the point! The results (including diner experience, and the honesty of that experience) don't matter. It is purely about instilling and maintaining a culture.
I don't really buy it, myself. Should they also forge all their knives from iron ore, the long slow way, before being allowed to use them in the kitchen? As other people commented, I think this is more about weaving a story and casting a glamour than anything else.
I think a charitable interpretation of his point is "I didn't care about fooling the diners about this specific thing."
But if he allows that to happen and the staff internalizes a culture of corner-cutting and misdirection, then eventually they'll start lying to customers and taking shortcuts on things that do matter.
So, the idea is the long, hard, stupid and disrespectful way.
Basically, the idea is you don't want smart people who can decide what corners make sense to cut, what process to use to etc.
And this is because you don't want to have to rely on their intelligence. You want to rely on only your process, so you hire those without sense or intelligence as you expand.
It's saying you don't trust your people to make the right decisions. That you don't trust them to understand the difference between a shortcut that does and doesn't matter. The fact that Chang's staff emailed them to say "hey, we've started taking this shortcut" is a reason to trust them. Any deviation from the plan, and they let him know? Great! But he thinks that if he allows good shortcuts, sometime later, they'll start taking bad shortcuts, but he'll never find out, or won't find out until it's too late? It's profoundly insulting.
But at the same time, fighting human nature is hard. Judgment will suffer while under stress, and working in a kitchen is certainly a poster child for "stressful situation". Even with the best intentions, bad decisions will be made, even if they seem like good decisions in the moment.
I still think we should strive for that trust, though. Making people stick to an inefficient process where they can't see the reason for it is how you get detached, uncreative employees.
> I think a charitable interpretation of his point is "I didn't care about fooling the diners about this specific thing."
The funny thing is I actually do think he should be caring about this. Bringing out a chicken to show customers, and either explicitly saying or even implying that they're going to take that chicken back to the kitchen, carve it up, plate it, and bring it back out is a statement of intent. If you don't do it that way, then that's dishonest in a way I'd consider really bad. If I found out that parading the chicken out to my table was just a gimmick, and that's not the chicken I ended up eating, I'd feel lied to (or at least very much misled), and that would affect my enjoyment of the experience and my desire to go back.
Yes, this is nuts. It's performative micromanagement for the sake of maintaining status.
If the end product is indistinguishable, and the user experience is inferior (because it takes so much longer, and customers are just sitting there, waiting, hungry...) literally the only difference is the assertion of management/owner status for the sake of it.
That might have some marketing leverage for a restaurant, but "We write everything in machine code with a biro before hand-assembling it" isn't going to win any hearts and minds in software dev.
"The point is that the diner gets to see the chicken they will eat and understand the process."
What do you mean by "understand the process"? You only get that if you are in the kitchen with the cooks. Only open restaurants where you can see the cooks cooking help with that. Seeing a dead chicken ahead of time doesn't teach a guest anything. It is merely a flex, a story the restaurant sells to increase the price of a meal.
> "That was what made it great. If they wanted to sandbag it, they needed to figure out how they would make up for the lost energy elsewhere."
This seems to be the key quote. As a restaurant owner, as with any other type of team leader, his job is managing how the team's attention and energy is spent. Reading charitably, he doesn't want to formalize slack time into the system, because he thinks that slack will be eaten up by something else with the next process change, making the whole operation more brittle (also specifically in a restaurant setting, maximizing kitchen throughput is _not_ the same as maximizing efficient operation)
I could of course be reading too much into this, but from my own experience, it's the same difference between a sensible ad hoc meeting culture and being forced to use "efficiency" tools that inevitably make meetings less productive.
> I worried about the mindset of the server whose job it would be to parade a stunt chicken around the dining room. I was terrified of our culture stagnating.
It doesn't read to me like he would have any problem with a process improvement as long as the real chicken were still used.
Some things are better, but some are bad shortcuts that cost quality. A burger from a place that cooks it after you order will always be better than a burger where they start cooking before you walk in the door. Back when I worked fast food I sometimes made my own burgers, when it was fresh off the grill it was one of the best burgers I ever had, but that is a lot more individual labor and so not sustainable in a fast food model. Back then burgers were assembled before you walked in the door, but these days they have all backed off to assemble the burger after you order of ingredients cooked before - it is higher quality and they have managed to optimize assembly enough that it is now sustainable.
Where the fast food industry wants to be is a robot that sees you push the button and starts cooking your burger then before you get to paying for it. Robots could do all that, but they are too expensive for the price they need to hit at least so far. (there are also some fraud issues they have to work out) They have to start cooking before you finish the order to meet their fast goals which is one of the reasons people go to fast food.
He says he doesn't care about the integrity but I think he's wrong and he's misidentified the lesson from this.
Because you are absolutely right, doing things that are inefficient and stupid for the sake of it is absolutely dumb.
> I worried about the mindset of the server whose job it would be to parade a stunt chicken around the dining room. I was terrified of our culture stagnating.
This is where it makes sense. He does care about integrity. If you foster a culture of faking little things like this it can eventually grow into a culture of faking the big things that actually do matter.
quality is entirely the point, nowhere does he suggest quality is compromised; his staff's alternate idea was not reducing quality. he's making a different point.
It’s very simple actually. “The dish” is defined as a chicken you see before it is then taken away and carved. You see your chicken. That’s the promise. If they parade around with a display chicken then it is simply dishonest. Does it matter? That is a different question entirely. The point is there is a promise involved in “the dish”. If they want to use a parade chicken then they need a different promise.
> The inefficiency is the point. Doing it the long, hard and stupid way is the point.
Yes. This is what passes for "fine dining" today.
Starbucks used to make a thing of this. The process of making drinks was deliberately made manual and complicated to give customers the impression they were getting their money's worth for overpriced coffee. That was part of the Starbucks mystique, when they had one.
> You’re really trying to teach someone to better themselves through their own personal integrity.
I am subbed to /r/KitchenConfidential sub (a place where chefs and kitchen staff hang around) and there is a constant trickle of anecdotes of Chang being one of the greatest a*holes they have ever worked for.
He doesn't teach. He screams, denigrates and have anger episodes that keep everyone in the kitchen in a constant state of fear.
Ironically I've heard Gordon Ramsey is actually a pretty swell guy despite the impression some of his shows give. You can see it when he's trying to genuinely empathize with the people on kitchen nightmares and actually help them, or when he goes to a place like remote India to try any chutney and he's being extremely respectful to the local culture. He gets passionate and angry but there's little condescension unless you're a professional chef who should know better and he's playing it up for the camera.
Is this actually substantiated by people who've worked with him? Or is it put out by his PR team? Because I've also heard this several times, but only through comments like this on the internet.
He has been on shows where he’s an ass and shows where he is not. Watching both, it seems like the former is purposely done for the drama and latter is closer to what he’s actually like. Who knows what he’s like with no cameras in an actual kitchen, and maybe it’s just because he’s older now, but it seems to me that the majority of content he’s in he seems really nice.
Commercial kitchens are incredibly high pressure workplaces and many famous chefs are also assholes. It doesn't excuse Chang, but there's definitely a certain personality type that's drawn to and can function in these environments.
This "high pressure workplace" has always struck me as crazy. I grant that it looks true from the anecdotes, but it also seems that the vast majority of the pressure is self created. Often times specifically created by that second point, that many famous chefs are assholes.
Worse, as most of their asshole behavior seems to stem from the fact that they are buckling under pressure. Pressure that they themselves are causing.
High end kitchens really are high pressure, even though at the end of the day its just food.
From the moment you walk in the door for your shift, you are already hours behind. You will be given a couple of hours to prep an insane amount of food from scratch, often bouncing between 5-10 stations at a time to make it happen. I worked at a place that I was expected at all times to have food cooking on a giant flat top, charbroil grill, multiple ovens, 6 burner sauté range, deep fryers, steamers. While all this is cooking you also need to be doing the cold prep of cutting, measuring, weighing and portioning all of this prep work.
After you finish this, you will have a little bit of time to start a mad rush to set up your actual station for the service. I worked at a place once where this was a two hour ordeal to set everything up while basically working at a slight jog the entire time. And all of this can be really heavy when it comes to moving around large buckets and containers of ice, for example.
Finally, once service starts on a busy weekend for example, you are now looking at a 4-5 hour rush with a minimum ambient temperature of 95 degrees, where you will be absolutely slammed with multiple orders all coming in steadily, requiring a tremendous amount of skill to balance the timing of all this. Think about how hard it can be just to time a main protein with a couple of side dishes when you are just cooking at home for the family, and now imagine having to cook that same amount of food 300 times within a few hours. There will be no break during any of this either, standing and running around the entire time.
Once the service rush is finally over, you might think that your day is winding down, but think again. You now get to start the multi hour process of breaking down and cleaning every single thing you dirtied over the course of the night. This will also be a somewhat fast paced time of the night as labor costs are always a concern in the restaurant industry, so there is no time to slack here either.
Finally the shift is done and you can go home after 10-12 hours, stuff your face with a peanut butter and jelly, and do it all again tomorrow, since you work 6 days a week, every holiday, every weekend.
I am a software engineer now and I can confidently say that I have never had a day in this profession even remotely close to as stressful as just a regular Tuesday could be in the restaurant industry.
I mean, this sounds legit, but it also sounds like any other job. Have you worked construction? You will have an absurd amount of stuff to get through, with no help if the weather decides not to cooperate. Bus driver? Good luck if traffic is bad. Teacher? Hope the kids are cooperative today. Working in a tech company when your stack is down?
That is, you are correct that it is higher stress than a healthy software job. It doesn't take a lot of searching to see that "grind" for game devs is absurd, though. And I'm sure you can find stories of toxic teams in any big company.
That is all to say, a ton of that pressure being "high stress" is specifically from people buckling under the pressure. I think it is fair to say that working an active event at the likes of Amazon can be as pressured as any food service work. Doesn't mean it has to be high stress.
I have actually done construction like work, and I have been a delivery driver (not bus driver though). Those don't even compare relative to the stress of a high paced kitchen. And yeah, when a tech stack goes down, that is stressful for sure, but again, that happens like once in a blue moon and lasts a short amount of time. I've have never had a 60 hour emergency work week in tech lol. This was every single week in the high end restaurant industry, for no pay on top of that.
I didn't even include the stressors involved in wondering if your pay was even going to cover your bills for the month, or stressing if the restaurant was just going to close its doors on you overnight. Never heard of a tech or construction company doing that, it happens all the time in restaurants. And I was specifically talking about my time in actual restaurants, not fast food chains or fast casual. I can't speak to them. I am talking white chef coat, table cloth with reservations type of restaurants.
I'm not arguing that tech work can't be stressful or hard (or any other job), from a skill level the tech work is much more difficult. But you asked if a the high stress stereotypes are true, and as someone that has worked in around dozen different industries over the years, restaurant work is far and away the most stressful of the bunch, it's not even remotely close. Not arguing that it should be that way, but it certainly is.
Again, most of this just sounds like it is typical for a bad job. Not most/all jobs, agreed; but nothing unique to food industry. You can say that it is a physically hot environment, but it probably isn't any worse than most agriculture jobs, all told.
Similarly, worrying if your pay will cover bills is not at all unique to the industry. Having lived on bounced checks for a time, I agree that sucks. I've also known friends who had their paycheck bounce. An absurd amount of stress that makes zero sense.
So, my pushback here isn't that I think you are wrong. My pushback is I see no reason it has to be true. Basically, your last point. There is nothing intrinsic here that dictates this is a high stress job. Certainly the stakes are lower than something like an ER. The folks I've known that work ER complain less about the stress of their job than folks I have known that did food service, though; and that just doesn't make sense.
> It had nothing to do with integrity. I didn’t care about fooling the diners. What concerned me was the precedent we were setting. I worried about the mindset of the server whose job it would be to parade a stunt chicken around the dining room. I was terrified of our culture stagnating.
I'm sort of surprised that he didn't worry about integrity, since it's literally an example of lying to your customers about the food they're paying for. Fooling is a pretty light word for what others would call false advertising: you tell people you're making soup out of the carcass you just ate from, and then you just don't do that. I imagine that could also have an effect on the restaurant's culture as well. I understand that fine dining is partly theatrical, but don't charge me a premium for doing something you're not actually doing and then say "fooled ya!"
He said if you were going to fool the guest, you had to make up for that lost energy by doing something else (or presumably lower the price)
The guest is paying for an overall experience. There are plenty of experiences where a guest is happy to pay to be lied to, like a magic show or a strip club or the Olive Garden. As long as the totality of the experience is providing enough value.
Now if you specifically chose the restaurant because of their honesty (for whatever that means), then it’s a different story
> He said if you were going to fool the guest, you had to make up for that lost energy by doing something else (or presumably lower the price)
I think in the context of the quote, that "something else" was meant to be some extra long, hard, stupid work. He didn't mean doing something to make it up to the customers. He's worried about the mindset of his team: he wants them not to take shortcuts, but only because doing that will make them worse at their jobs in an indefinable way.
Yeah that's what the article says, but you frame it argumentatively. He doesn't assert he doesn't care about integrity, reading it, its clear the communicated point is he cares about integrity because of how it affects culture, not just because the carcass you ate wasn't used to make soup: in that case, it'd be trivial to "solve" the problem by just not affirmatively claiming the soup was made from the exact same carcass.
When he said "it had nothing to do with integrity" I think he meant that it had nothing to do with personal integrity, i.e. he's not bothered by lying to customers. It's clear he cares about the morale and culture of his team, and I guess he's making some distinction I don't understand between integrity and feeling bad because you're the guy on staff parading around a decoy chicken all night. My point is that maybe they should also think about other kinds of integrity, if only not advertising a product you aren't really selling, but probably also not lying to your guests.
David Chang is a salesman and a businessman first. I get the point being made, but keep in mind that he is a brand, and part of that is the stories he tells.
He has slapped his name on so many subpar food goods that were a total disappointment that I actually have started avoiding things marketed under his brand name.
He might do things the hard way in his restaurants, but they certainly aren't ensuring tasty or high quality goods under his brand. I would rather he do things in a way that makes sense and provides the best tasting food.
More broadly, the point is that you should take advice only from people whose successes you want to emulate. The actual advice I get out of this article is:
Tell stories that paint the picture you want your customers to have about your product.
> Tell stories that paint the picture you want your customers to have about your product.
There’s one interpretation of the idea of business as not selling products but stories. Apple knows this and clearly exhibits it with every product demo. It’s all a story. One that I enjoy.
But low priced groceries also sell a story, about how a beleaguered mother can save a few dollars here in order to avoid bouncing a check or to buy herself one nice thing. Or a kid who wants something sweet and already blew their allowance on video games. A pattern they will repeat again every few months since it worked before.
Chang is definitely selling two stories and it sounds like they are a bit discordant when taken together.
> Apple knows this and clearly exhibits it with every product demo. It’s all a story. One that I enjoy.
That is true, but I've often seen that misconstrued (not by you in your comment) as somehow saying "Oh, Apple's success is just marketing! I can get feature XYZ for much lower elsewhere!"
Except that while Apple has generally great marketing, they also have generally great products. There is a ton of hard engineering and design work that goes into making a product that is easy to market in the first place. In fact, what the "it's just marketing" crowd tends to miss is that products are not just a collection of features, but are used to tell stories (or listen to stories) in users' own lives. They want to envision how a product will enrich their experiences, and Apple understands that's what they're selling.
In fact, if anything, I think the flop of the Vision Pro (may be quite premature to call it a flop, but I'll put my money on it being a flop) is directly due to the fact that Apple can't tell a story about it. By all accounts it has amazing, cutting edge technology. Except Apple can't tell a good story about what you're actually supposed to do with the thing that people believe and buy in to.
> Except Apple can't tell a good story about what you're actually supposed to do with the [Vision Pro] that people believe and buy in to.
The funny thing is that Apple is usually good at waiting to build and sell a product until customers are ready for it and want it (even if they don't realize they are ready and want it).
Vision Pro is a still just a cool tech demo. A very cool and very impressive tech demo, but still a tech demo. I don't mean that to say that it can't be a useful product, but Apple built it without a real market for it.
Maybe that's ok: maybe they need to build and sell the tech demo now in order to refine the tech so they can get to the actual product, with the real story, that they'll sell 5 or 10 or whatever years from now. Or maybe... yeah, maybe it's just a flop.
They also finish the product to a degree that more pedestrian companies feel is grandstanding and thus dismiss it. Instead of learning about UX sensitivity and the paradox of choice, they write it off as a fluke. A forty+ year fluke at this point.
What people “want” and what they will enjoy are rarely the same. Giving them fifty models of laptop is what focus groups think will make customers happy but it just fractures your attention to detail. It only makes a few customers happy. Probably less people than Apple’s market share.
My ex used to practically scream at her laptop until I bought her a MacBook. Most expensive present I ever gave but the best investment in peace and quiet.
I also dabble in woodworking. There are some very fancy woodworking tools out there. They do the job better than their cheaper counterparts, but at the end of the day 3/4 of them are still largely a lifestyle thing, fueled by low tolerance mechanical engineering, industrial design, and recycling old designs that existed before quantity trumped quality. Much of that is physics, but some is story, and the word spreading part of the job of selling is all story.
If you've ever used a good chisel without a mallet you know the difference between good and cheap. But the margin for some other tools is less pronounced. I was going to use files as an example but there are some pretty crazy rasps out there today that can hog almost as well as a power tool.
> Except that while Apple has generally great marketing, they also have generally great products.
I disagree, and presumably so do the people you're referring to. Apple products are nothing special. They are competently made, but so are lots of brands which charge you a lot less. It really is all about marketing with Apple.
I think it's really the integration between hardware and software, nearly all of which is under Apple's control. Most companies don't do vertical integration anymore, and it shows. It's harder to produce a polished product when the hardware parts come from a bunch of different manufacturers, and you have to fight to get your software to work on it.
Michelin stars seem to have the dynamics of a loss leader. Particularly as it's become known that many of the restaurants are badly unprofitable—and moreso if you think the chefs should earn something commensurate to their presumable talent or passion (you don't have to think this). It seems to be more the case that every award or signal of quality is capable of (and actually being used) this way.
Some people, like Chang, may know it and treat it transactionally as such. $X for a star, which leads to Y amount of exposure. Others, may know it or not, but treat it like a goal in life either way. It's very possible of course that many of the former start as the latter people until they later [realize/sell out/give up].
I guess it makes sense. The world is more competitive. Information is freely available. You need to find some other moat. With information and access to everything, a moat that might have been quality or talent, is more easily captured by buying the signal (which to be clear can include buying and maintaining the quality). Then once you have the signal, well, it's up to you whether you still need or want the quality. When push comes to shove, it's probably the case that the signal is worth more than the quality.
What would the more pedestrian equivalent be for Michelin stars? If you want to treat your middle class family to celebrate your daughter getting a full ride scholarship, whose ratings would you go with?
Maybe we need to just opt out and make our own yardstick.
If you trust the Michelin system and live in a city big enough to support it, Bib Gourmand is a good choice. Otherwise something like Google Maps combined with research related to what you want (something family casual, more upscale, etc.)
> Nobody in their right mind would choose to continue losing money.
In isolation, sure, but losing money in one area to make money (or some other form of currency such as fame) in another sounds a lot more reasonable. That's what a loss leader is.
Exactly! Every restauranteur knows the steak draws the attention but you pay your bills with baked potatoes and creamed spinach. There are only a handful of restaurant that are able to operate on that level, but the food loses money so you can make money on the cook books or merch or other opportunities (or even other restaurants. I promise you craftwich and craft have very different operation budgets/profitability).
When Michelin stars get involved it becomes really intrinsic(not monetary) vs extrinsic values. At certain levels of passion just achieving and keeping a star has value in itself. This then often comes with monetary cost.
Many of the chefs pushing for Michelin stars likely are not in their right mind.
Hi there! Please google “el buli profitable”. “The exception that proves the rule” or proof that some restaurants aren’t about making money through food sales alone.
Also, I spent a decade working in restaurants, I never met a single back of house employee that was in their right mind (myself included). It’s an entirely different breed from the HN set.
Don't forget he filed a trademark for chili crunch sauce (which has been used in several Asian cuisines for literally centuries) and sued to stop smaller restaurants and businesses from selling it, and only backed down when there was public outcry.
trademark refers to the name a product is sold as, not what the product is, and also has a local jurisdiction. What they do in Asia has nothing to do with trademarks in the US, and since not very much of Asia has spoken English for literally hundreds of years, I doubt they were calling it chili crunch sauce.
I'm not defending Chang nor trademarks, just pointing out how they work legally and the flaws in the argument you're making.
Remember, people called windows "windows", but they didn't sell products called Windows till Microsoft started and trademarked it.
I don't get your point. There are many other companies using the name chili crunch. He was not the first. But he tried to trademark it to stop all the others.
that he was not the first using that name in the US is a very good argument against a trademark in the US now that you've said that, but this is the first time that was said, is the point I was making
He's really trying to build an empire based on his name and recognition from a few good restaurants he founded. I think he wants to scale it as much as he can right now and sell it. He has commented before that a restaurant based around the chef's personality isn't really a business you can sell one day. But products based around the celebrity chef are. But yeah, most things he's putting his name on are so super over priced they are clearly selling to people with no price sensitivity. I'm sure his margins are fantastic and he'll get a big payday if he sells at just the right time.
I don't really understand any of this this thread, there's a lot of conflicting ideas. David Chang owns a frozen food empire that's super over priced and super low quality that's successful enough that he'll make a lot of money if he sells at the right time?
He has a personal brand built around his name and his in-person restaurant group, which are reportedly VERY good. Good enough that he has two Michelin stars.
He has used that reputation to start selling groceries under the same name. They are not very good in many cases, but he is able to charge high prices because of good marketing and his famous brand (Momofuku).
As an example he sells, what I judge to be not very good ramen noodles, for $4/pack. That is a lot of money for mediocre ramen noodles, even if it does have a famous name on the package.
A successful business is one that makes profits, not one that makes high quality goods. A profitable business can be retained for the profits, or it can be sold to some other entity. A chef, meanwhile, only makes money while they work.
> A successful business is one that makes profits, not one that makes high quality goods.
This attitude is the root of the problem with business culture in America today. A business needs to be profitable and make good quality stuff to be truly successful.
Momofuku Ko closed recently. I went once around 2016, partly exactly because of his name and brand. It was ok but nothing memorable, I think he wasn’t even there.
I guess the closing probably aligns with his goals of maximizing a brand / money, and not actually cooking good food.
Wow, I didn't realize Ko closed either. I went there around the same time and really liked it. But even then you could start to feel the fade a bit in what Chang did. He certainly had his moment and he was very influential. I still remember the first time I ate at Noodle Bar - was amazing.
It looks like they've closed nearly every restaurant they had except a couple Noodle Bars in NYC and Vegas and some other restaurant. Rough times for that industry. Ssäm Bar was a pretty good place, sort of shocked they couldn't keep the lights on there.
Ssam Bar was really good when I went there (also closed, though). It was a not-fucking-around good fine-dining/gastropub hybrid. The Momofuku cookbook is also excellent, and well written.
Pretty much. A great chef can only make so many meals in a day. That limits how much money you can make. So if you want to be more than a middle class income (even that is hard to reach) you have to do something else - become a brand that people will pay for, or start a business.
The great chefs are virtually never making any meals in a day; the actual test of a high-end chef is recruiting and retaining a CDC, sous, and line cooks that can deliver on the promises the exec makes. Grant Achatz has held on to 3 Michelin stars for I don't know how long, but I also don't know when the last time was he spent a night on the line. I assume it was a long, long time ago.
All this to say, going big doesn't necessarily mean blowing out all your quality.
I'm not even sure where the over-priced and low quality comments are coming from. The noodles are about 2.25 if you buy direct and the chili crunches are all great and highly addictive. I guess if you instacart individual noodle packs you would have a different take
$18 + shipping for a 5 pack on his own website. $97 with free shipping for 30 packs. Maybe I'm seeing different prices since I'm in Canada?
Even at $3.23 for the bulk price, it is an expensive bowl of ramen.
I buy my chili crunch from an asian market, and both their fresh stuff and their packaged imported stuff is cheaper and tastes better. David Chang's advantage is that he is selling in normal grocery stores so there isn't really competition. Put his stuff on a shelf at an asian market where there is 5 or 6 different brands and a consumer base that has been buying this for years, and they won't sell.
His chili crunch is fine but costs significantly more than many other chili crunch brands which are fine too. You're paying for the Momofuku branding on it that makes certain types of consumers feel good about themselves.
God, don't get me started on how insane his asking price for the "restaurant grade" soy sauce is. This is all subjective opinion on the quality and cost of good, of course. But the costs per ounce are very easy to shop.
I actually put his in a lineup with others when I got in a chili oil craze.
And while it definitely is good quality, it isn't mind blowing. And I personally prefer other brands instead! It's also, to my taste, much more Americanized. Much more refined sugar and using a different less complex method for the umami.
It's still delicious, but I personally won't be getting it again.
To be fair he is American and primarily marketing to an American(ized) audience. I’m personally a big fan of Americanization of foods. I’ve had dozens of “authentic” Mexican tacos and I love them - they’re fantastic things. I had a GF with an obese white trash mom who made an Americanized version of tacos which to my taste was incredible. Took the real parts and amplified certain things to the local palette. Like best tacos ever and just as authentic relatively.
His rice vinegar, which apparently is "restaurant tested" and has taken "years of research" to create the "vinegar of their dreams" is even worse in terms of pricing. But "you've never tasted anything like this before" as it comes from their "proprietary blend of rice".
Professional marketing copy like this costs money. When Chef Chang says "Buy it!" the only response is "YES CHEF!".
Not that it's well priced, but just because they're both "soy sauces", doesn't mean they are really comparable products intended to be used in a the same way while cooking. It's like the difference between an expensive olive oil you would use in a simple vinaigrette, eating with bread, or drizzling over a dish once it's cooked, and a cheaper neutral oil for sauteeing in the early steps of a recipe
I've been eating packaged ramen since when I had to and when I saw momofuku "tingly chili" noodle packages I bought 4. Don't remember the price, it was immaterial.
Turns out they're so boring and flavorless that 2 packages have been sitting on the shelf for 6 months. I thought I would have an idea what to do with them but so far no. I keep home toasted/ground Szichuan peppercorns in my pantry so I can get any level of "tingly" that I want but come on, there needs to be something else.
I've had these Momofuku instant noodles... I thought the noodles themselves were pretty good but the sauces were nothing special. The noodles are definitely just the same stuff A-Sha already sold on their own, and apparently many of the flavors are too, with Momofuku mostly contributing the branding.
Yeah, pretty much. He's leveraging his celebrity to sell over priced food relative to its quality (it's not bad per-se, but not worth the money) and if he can sell it before credibility is ruined and growth stops, he'll make a lot of money. Did that make it easier for you to understand?
I was thinking the exact same thing! Lucky I searched the page for Ratatouille before commenting.
Ratatouille is one of my all time favorite movies, but if you read it as a metaphor for director Brad Bird's own career, it's hard not to feel like it lets Walt Disney off the hook. Often in real life, the creative genius who founded the enterprise and the sycophant who has taken over it in his absence are both assholes. Though Ratatouille does touch on this by making Gusteau an idealized figment of Remy's imagination, who is shocked when he hears that the real man had a child via an affair.
I've been wondering about this for YEARS now: WTF happened to Milk Bar in NYC? Based on the taste and quality, it seems like the most egregious case of "selling out" I've ever seen. It seems like an overnight change to me
David Chang and Christina Tosi worked together, and I remember seeing a bunch of their marketing on Netflix
In 2015 the location in East Village was still GREAT. Interesting deserts, seemingly made by hand, with high quality ingredients
Then I go back a few years later, and it's this CHAIN and the food is inedible. I take one bite, can't eat it, and throw it away
It just tastes like sugary processed food now, like Twinkies or Chips Ahoy or something
I also saw Milk Bar products in Whole Foods, bought it, took one bite, and threw it away, and never bought it again
It's just weird to me that a chef would let the quality sink so low, so fast. Usually the "founders" care about quality, and are mission-focused
I always thought that process took decades, and changes in ownership. (Actually I am re-reading Pollan's account of the "big organic" Cascadian Farms brand now -- another very interesting case of counterculture going mainstream / industrial, but the change was more gradual I think)
They opened a Milk Bar near Harvard and it was total garbage.
They were so lazy that they didn't even make anything in Boston. It was all shipped over from NY. Stale and tasteless cubes of nothing wrapped in plastic.
Neither Christina Tosi nor David Chang have any integrity. They just peddle whatever garbage they can to people while building their own brand.
A year or two ago that Milk Bar location finally died out and was replaced by Joe's Pizza. Another NY chain. But one that is the opposite of Tosi/Chang in every way. Authentic. Careful. Customer-focused. Great NY-style pizza made on the spot with the same ingredients. Joe's is just as good in NY as it is in Boston.
Good riddance to Tosi and Chang. I now actively avoid anything associated with them.
But why? How is it different than any other bakery?
You can open a second location of a bakery and maintain the same quality ...
Anecdotally more than 5 locations seems to be a problem (my guess is some kind of management scaling issue like Dunbar's law)
But it seems they never went through the phase of 2 or 3 locations, or just quickly zoomed past it into packaged and preserved foods. With the actual stores also selling packaged foods
Maybe she had enough friends in the restaurant business to know that managing 2 or 3 locations is probably a hell-ish part of your career (???)
i.e. maybe you are doing a lot more work, not getting to actually make any food, and you might not make as much money (e.g. each new store is a big risk I imagine)
Milk bar was never a regular bakery. Its items mostly got popular because of their creativity and uniqueness. But when you scale it out and stop innovating, it's not unique any more.
I just remember the Saltie owner posting photos of the pavement outside their next door neighbor Milk Bar, being salty about the scores of serving cups and other detritus their customers would leave without the store taking responsibility for cleaning them up
As others have alluded too. At this point SC is high on its own supply. Create a food empire, hang out with rich or famous chefs. Create millions of aspiring chumps who'd take his words as gospel.
Milk bar always seemed like an example of using raw marketing power to convince people something is good. I saw Tosi on Chefs table and it was crazy how generic what she was doing was versus the other chefs on the show. Juxtaposing her with others on the show it felt like a bunch of artists who wouldn't compromise their vision versus a capitalist who was optimizing everything around money.
I wasn't saying that this is a particularly insightful message. I was saying that the message I took from this story wasn't about doing things the hard way. Its a meta lesson about messaging and showmanship.
he’s also reportedly a jerk to his staff and yells at them. and sues mom and pop shops for using his trademark of a really generic term... something like spicy chili oil or very similar.
"a failure to enforce a trademark by monitoring the mark for misuses will result in a weakening of the mark and loss of distinctiveness, which can lead to a loss of the trademark"
It’s annoying. Every time a company does basic enforcement they are required to by law to maintain their trademark, they get bonded and we go through the same cycle of outrage with the sensible people explaining that trademarks aren’t like patents and if someone is going around using your trademark, you will lose it.
Then the outrage dies down only to have the cycle repeated a few weeks later.
The problem is that the trademark was too generic (chili crunch, to be exact) and he was going after brands that sold a product that had always been known as that or crunchy chili oil, or chili crunch oil.
He didn’t invent the food, and started going after small brands and people that had been selling it since before he had tried registering the trademark.
yeah i fully understand that but his trademark was way too generic in the first place. used for a long time before that. i have the same issue with backcountry dot com over the widely used term backcountry before they named themselves backcountry... it’s scummy.
David Chang is the guy who sent cease and desist letters to other manufacturers selling chili crunch, a condiment that existed long before he was born. Maybe that is the "long, hard, stupid way"
My understanding is that another company owned the Chili Crunch trademark and took enforcement action against David Chang's company when it started selling products under that name. As part of the settlement, Chang's company ended up purchasing the trademark. As one of the obligations of owning a trademark is to enforce its use in the marketplace, Chang's lawyers did just that. But after blowback in the press, Chang arranged for the other brands to also use the trademark.
> As one of the obligations of owning a trademark is to enforce its use in the marketplace, Chang's lawyers did just that.
There is no such obligation. Yes, if you don't enforce a trademark you can lose it, but it isn't like you will be subject to fines or something if you don't. This is a ridiculously generic trademark that never should've been granted, and if Chang (or his lawyers) were good, decent people they would've just let it be. The trademark would've lapsed, and everything would've been fine.
> There is no such obligation. Yes, if you don't enforce a trademark you can lose it...
Your second sentence kinda refutes the first, doesn't it?
I mean, if your company gets a cease-and-desist demand from the owners of the Chili Crunch trademark, and ends up buying the trademark to continue running your business, it seems like a Pretty Bad Idea to not hold on to that trademark.
I know you think the trademark should never have been granted, but the USPTO did grant it, and Chang's company did get a C&D from the grantee. So, if Chang's company ever let that trademark go (e.g., to be "good, decent people," as you suggest), the history of this particular matter suggests that someone else could easily pick the trademark up, and probably would (not everyone is "good, decent people," right?), and would then start sending cease-and-desist demands to extract fees.
So I'm having a hard time faulting Chang's lawyers for avoiding the obvious trap.
Are you sure? Consider that one of the common ways that trademarks become "revoked" is that a third party files to have it canceled because they are trying to register the trademark for themselves:
> Petitions to cancel based on abandonment may be filed at any time. Often, a petition to cancel due to abandonment is filed because the attacked registration was cited as a basis to refuse a third-party’s later-filed application. In such a case, the Applicant may file a petition to cancel to overcome the refusal to register. If successful, the cited registration will be removed as a bar to the later-filed application.
Consider, for example, the somewhat infamous Flappy Bird trademark that was recently picked up by Gametech Holdings, LLC. That firm petitioned the USPTO to cancel the existing registration by Dong Nguyen Ha on the grounds of abandonment. He lost the trademark, and they were able to register it:
I’m generally in favor of “cheap and cheerful” - that is, friendly efficiency. Doing elaborately inefficient things to justify higher prices is a turnoff.
Unfortunately, from a restaurant’s point of view, they may care about customer satisfaction, but their incentives are to get more money per visit. A lot of things restaurants do make more sense from that perspective.
For example, large portions can be seen as a way to justify moderately higher prices while keeping customers feeling like they got good value for their money. Elaborate, unnecessary service is a way to justify really high prices.
And nowadays they care less about perception, so they just add extra changes.
Ignoring the explicit text which everyone seems to be overly concerned with... I'm not really worried about that. The article makes you think for a second...
The thing I like about this article is that you should be concerned with these things. You should make active decisions about quality, culture, integrity, the way you produce things, etc. You should not skip to "the long, hard, stupid way" or the shortcut in your proprietary process without consideration. Even the thought that there could be more value in an inefficient process is worth considering if you haven't before.
I like him but his food is just a white-person’s version of Korean food. It’s not a bad thing but his food lacks soul and this is reflected in everything he does.
Food is allowed to be different from its origins. Just parroting what Korean food already is isn't particularly special - consider that basically every Korean restaurant is doing exactly that. And that might be part of the reason they, for the most part, don't have 2 Michelin stars.
That’s a fair point but a lot of his food may taste good to uninitiated western palate. I also see this in Indian cuisine because the spices are on the strong side, it takes awhile (years even) to be able to differentiate between good and subpar. Again, I like the guy and he worked his ass off and took necessary risks to succeed.
I'm fine with fusion foods, and borrowing from different cultures to make something new.
The problem with Momofuku Goods (No idea about ther resaturant group) is that they aren't even good to the unrefined palate. I'm not particularly tuned into the asian cuisines that he specializes in, but I can tell you that his packaged noodles are pretty middling even by grocery store ramen standards.
To complete the LARP[1], would you mind finding a boomer-age Korean father and complaining jealously about his "white-person's version of Korean food?"
Different parts of the bird take different times to cook, so for food quality, cooking a bird as a whole makes no sense: either the breasts are overcooked, or the thighs are undercooked. There is just one reason, which is that cooking the animal whole makes for an arresting presentation. Then, you'd carve the animal tableside (like is done for Peking duck, see one of the other comments).
This requires having waitstaff that can carve a bird or having cooks that are presentable to the guests, and extra space in the dining room.
Clearly, David Chang is taking a shortcut already by carving the chicken in the kitchen.
> And ultimately I think being a chef is one of the hardest jobs to motivate people because there’s no lure of a giant paycheck or bonus or stock options. You’re really trying to teach someone to better themselves through their own personal integrity.
1. jobs that are monetarily incentivized in this way are quite common though.
2. for certain kinds of jobs, if an employer desires employees to go the "long, hard, stupid way" while short-cuts lie in plain sight, the employer might wish to incorporate forms of incentives and disincentives into their payout system rather than rely on their employee to "just do it".
I have lived the story from "Eat A Peach" at the end of the article.
My family were regulars at a local Chinese restaurant for years.
One of the dishes we usually ordered was Peking Duck.
First, the waiter brought out the cooked duck on a trolley and carved up the duck, arranging the cut pieces of duck meat on a dish. The duck meat, pancakes/tortillas, sauce, and condiments were placed on the table.
At this point, the duck carcass was taken back to the kitchen to be prepared for the second dish - this restaurant just carved up the duck carcass and brought out the cut up duck carcass as a second dish.
My family were never that interested in the remaining pieces of duck since there was little meat on them.
Instead, my dad would ask the waiter to be given the duck carcass to take home so my dad could prepare the remaining duck meat his way (call him old school).
One time, after the Peking duck was presented and my dad had been given the duck carcass for later enjoyment, another waiter came out holding a dish filled with cut up pieces of duck.
But OUR duck that we ordered was in a bag near my dad.
The waiter claimed that the duck dish was for our table.
I've had similar dinning experience, where they would take the carcass and prepare a soup from it after carving meat. However, they didn't promise that your soup would only come from your duck. I got interested because if I had to prepare that soup by myself it would have taken at least one hour, but they brought it out in 10 minutes.
Many chefs go on about this; I don't see anything unique or insightful in the article.
Personally, I think the Japanese ryokan tradition is amazing. It's obsessive food, and you /can/ taste the difference. I thought it was mindblowing even as a 20-sth dude in the early 2000s that grew up with Zagats in Atlanta.
The difference is spending 30 minutes (Chang) vs 30 years (ryokan).
The reality he is trying to describe is that COOKING is ART. You could take the shortcut of skipping technique and realism and go straight to splashing paint on a page, but that wouldn't be ART. You have to EARN YOUR STRIPES before you can do something like that.
I like this. And there's a time and place for everything. If I were inclined to try this boiled chicken, hell yeah I'm going to appreciate that I'm getting served the real chicken I saw earlier AND I believe in developing that kind of kitchen culture about caring for what you make. But I also still eat pizza from the shop down the street when hungry and impatient.
Other long, hard, stupid things I like to do: read novels, take walks, invest my time to learn fundamentals of a practice
Short, easy, stupid things I like to do: skip the occasional long post on hackernews and just read the comments, automate and simplify my work, watch short videos on how to fix broken things, send one-line emails instead of sit through meetings
There's also the long, hard, smart way. You can focus on making things excellent in a way that it actually gets easier over time. It depends on your goals.
See, that's the moment you've lost the plot. That's where, for me, I realized this article may have been dancing around a good idea, it ultimately fails.
This is the most important question of THE WHOLE THING.
Is it fair or good to FOOL THE DINERS? Would the diners even care?
These are the only two important questions, and he kind of ducked them.
Is the presentation bird alive or dead? What is "fired" in this
context? Is the presentation bird unrested? What does "rested" mean in
this context? Why does the kitchen need to "butcher" the chicken that's
"rested"? Doesn't that mean the rested chicken is still alive? What
does "slowing" the other, presumably presentation, chicken mean?
A dish being "fired" means finish the cooking process, eg put into the fire.
When a meat comes out hot from the cooking process, it needs to "rest" a certain amount of time for the temperature to even out and the juices to be reabsorbed before being sliced/butchered. This is time that the diners now need to wait before they get their meal.
So, in David Chang's model, when the dish is ordered a prepared, dead chicken is "fired" and heated so that it finishes cooking. Then, while hot and still in the pot, presented to the diners. It's taken back, must rest outside of the hot boiling pot, and then is sliced into pieces and plated to be served and eaten by the guests. The remaining carcass is supposed to then be boiled down into a stock for a 3rd dish.
However, the resting and boiling steps could be skipped. Why does it all have to be the exact same chicken!? Have a presentation bird, another that is fired and rested (while the other is presented) you can carve and serve quicker, and make a large amount of bulk stock that can be served on order. The only difference is you don't have the exact same bird going through the whole 3 steps to the diners and instead have the 1. dead cooked presentation bird, 2. the carved bird, and 3. stock from a bird from yesterday.
In cooking, that can mean applying direct heat in any number of ways. In this guess, I'm guessing that it means finishing (i.e. doing a last small amount of cooking for color and texture) the bird by roasting or searing.
> Is the presentation bird unrested? What does "rested" mean in this context?
In cooking, resting means to remove the item from heat and let it sit for a while. Food cooks from the outside in so the surface temperature can be much higher than the internal temperature. Resting gives some time for those to equalize. It lets the inside finish cooking using the residual heat on the surface.
> Why does the kitchen need to "butcher" the chicken that's "rested"?
It's a boiled whole chicken. After it's rested, it gets broken down into parts that the diner can eat. For chicken, that's usually breasts, thighs, wings, and legs/drumsticks.
> What does "slowing" the other, presumably presentation, chicken mean?
Resting and breaking down a chicken takes time, especially resting. By having a separate presentation chicken, it means the staff can be simultaneously resting some other cooked chicken and butchering it while the presenetation is being paraded around.
I needed to read the article a few times - the quotes from David are a bit vague.
His presented focus is on great experiences for the customer, which demands high operational excellence from his team. His team found a reasonable way to save time, but his reaction was that's the wrong focus. Focusing on saving time will eventually hurt the customer experience (like advertising models lead to enshittification), even if this particular one doesn't.
So they need to re-orient this - either go back to the hard way, or justify the easy way in terms of the customer. To quote, "they wanted to sandbag it, they needed to figure out how they would make up for the lost energy elsewhere."
This strikes me as really dumb. An efficiency that the diner would never notice and he wants to make his staff work harder to prove a point. Way to make people resent their work.
He believes it will bleed into other things where it does make a difference. So he takes a 0 tolerance policy into cheating so it doesn't become a habit and a culture and instead hopes to instill the value of not taking shortcuts as a measure to prevent a lapse.
As a programmer, this still seems overly dogmatic. Why not just develop the discipline to put effort where it's actually needed instead of burning gas all around like a moron? Every programmer knows this. The extreme dogma seems the real lack of discipline to me.
As a programmer I probably don't know very much about how to run a kitchen, the kinds of people that work in them, and the reasonable expectations the kitchen manager might have. Not to mention, the outcome of the majority of software project is failure lol.
This is actually quite a good point. A single person taking shortcuts is not bad, but certain things are done in a particular way for good reason.
One shortcut today is another tomorrow and the day after. It's not about the single person either, but rather the culture itself.
Now this is different from improving processes or efficiencies. The incentives and motivations also matter. Take a large group 1 hour before the restaurant closes. For the staff, it's shit, why didn't they come earlier. But for the restaurant it's great news, more money and potential repeat customers.
I disagree. The final product (the food) is not better in any way for doing this. I do see the value of not making the server lie to the customer by pretending that they were going to get the "stunt chicken", but this whole problem seems to be caused by trying to make the preparation of the food into a show, and here is a case where the showmanship is getting in the way of efficiency.
If they just got rid of parading out the chicken in the middle of the process they could stage more things without implicitly lying to the customers, while improving timing. You would just lose some showmanship, which might be part of the brand.
After thinking about this blogpost for a minute I realized the blogpost actually literally argues for doing things the hard and stupid way. Not as a metaphor for integrity or quality.
Integrity isn't the point:
> It had nothing to do with integrity. I didn’t care about fooling the diners. What concerned me was the precedent we were setting.
The quality of the food isn't the point either:
> The dish was meant to be a difficult pickup that required constant coordination between the front and back of house.
The inefficiency is the point.
Doing it the long, hard and stupid way is the point.
This is a sermon against process improvements. Without seeming to realize that restaurants are a modern miracle of process improvements! How does this David think the kitchen gets fresh ingredients every morning? Where does David think fruit in the winter comes from? How did herbs and spices get so cheap? Because we decided for the past 200 years to relentlessly pursue efficiency. Because we decided not to do things the slow and stupid way any more. That's how!
> For example, one of my favorite Majordomo dishes is a whole boiled chicken. We present the bird to the table in a big pot, bring it back to the kitchen to carve it, and then return with a beautiful platter of rice topped with the sliced breasts and two different sauces spooned over the top. Once guests are finished with that, we bring out a soup made from the carcass. It’s so good.
The point is that the diner gets to see the chicken they will eat and understand the process.
The efficient way described in the blog is to instead use a stunt chicken which'll be paraded around the dining room instead of being cooked.
That's not a process improvement when the entire point of the dish is to show the diners what they will eat before they eat it and flex the restaurant's ability to coordinate.
Purposeful inefficiency is beautiful when it's about retro video game console programming or mechanical watches, because that's about spotlighting the process. Both of these are inefficient---modern computers are more powerful and quartz watch keep time better---but are fascinating because the difficulty of programming in assembly or an intricate series of tiny gears have inherent value to some people, far beyond the result of a video game or getting the current time.
It's a complicated finely tuned process to get a chicken from your table to the kitchen and back again. The chef wants employees that value the process itself, which is a fair ask when the process is the product.
"Once guests are finished with that, we bring out a soup made from the carcass."
Soup from the carcass is delicious, but there isn't time to do that during the meal. Even with a pressure cooker it's going to take at least an hour. (And if several tables order the same dish, you're gonna have a bunch of pressure cookers in your kitchen.)
So... the idea is sound, but I'm doubtful that they actually do it the way they claim. Which would make sense with the "hero chicken" story they admit to.
Sounds like they bring the chicken out after simmering it the first time, then take it back to the kitchen and carve it up and serve it. So you've probably got another 30 minutes or so while the guests are eating that to chuck the carcass back in the pot with the cooking liquid. Assuming you already simmered the chicken in stock the first time that would be plenty flavourful.
30 minutes is not a lot of time to boil out the bones. That process takes upwards of 10 hours, no?
You can do it in less, with a pressure cooker. Even so, 30 minutes is not going to get maximum flavor and collagen out of the bones.
If they're also using the original poaching stock I could imagine you'll get a pretty stock even in 30 minutes. You'd still need to cook anything else you wanted in your soup -- vegetables, pasta -- though there are tricks for par-cooking these.
I don't own a pressure cooker, so I'm only reporting what I've read. And they do say that a pressure cooker makes better stock in shorter time -- there are things that not even a 10 hour simmer will get since the temperature never gets high enough to dissolve some things. Still, 30 minutes sounds sub-optimal, and I wouldn't expect anything to be even the slighest bit sub-optimal when you're paying two-Michelin-star prices.
Pressure cookers are magic. I get similar results making chicken stock in a pressure cooker for ~45 minutes as I do in a regular pot for ~4-6 hours. And you can properly make stock from beef bones in a couple of hours, which normally takes > 12 hours.
Right, I know a pressure cooker can reduce time. I seriously doubt it will drop it to 30, is all.
And yeah, best read is they already had fully done stock and just add these bones to that and drain off some for you to have. Leaving it in to continue to make more stock.
It's a 2 michelin star restaurant. Insanity is the point.
It is not so much insane as "they either have people wait for an hour or are not telling the truth".
I'd go further, it is a common farcical joke that people want to see the animal they are about to eat. But part of the joke is that nobody knows or cares about this, in truth. I fail to see why I would care to see the ingredients that went specifically into the dish I'm about to eat. It can be neat to see the full process in parts, such that if you want to parade the food at different stages, have at it.
And entertainment is full of evidence that people don't need or want to see the full process. For example, good editing can make a movie. There is still a market for stage plays, of course. There is always a curtain, though.
Well... we're talking about a foodie restaurant. I don't think you're the target market. The target market is closer to this old Portlandia sketch:
https://youtu.be/ErRHJlE4PGI?si=gz1D7h45Kq0dtMHt
Right, that would be an example of the farcical joke I meant. I think I even had that one in my mind. :D
And fair that there could be a market for this. Dozens of people, even. My point is that the market is almost certainly as much a stated market as it is an actual one. People want to be somewhat entertained, sure. And they want a good meal. Seeing the exact chicken that they are about to eat as it makes its way through the kitchen feels unlikely to be a deciding factor.
The soup is from leftover carcass meat, different than people are imagining from the quote. https://www.majordomo.com/blogs/recipes/boiled-chicken-two-w...
Yeah, I'm totally with you on this one. I think they make a stock from the carcasses of previous day's chickens. What Chang is claiming doesn't make sense.
Hmmm, that like the "inefficiency" of advertisements with lots of empty space, and fancy stores with sparse interiors.
In other words, it's not actual inefficiency so much as a hard-to-recognize spending on buying another asset, namely the marketing/advertising effect of conveying "luxury" or "successfulness".
Sort of like peacock feathers: They're "inefficient" from the perspective of abstract aerodynamics, but from a holistic and practical perspective...
And yet, he says "... I didn’t care about fooling the diners."
I agree with you, that the diner seeing what they are about to eat is an important part of the experience. But Chang seems to be saying that even that is not the point! The results (including diner experience, and the honesty of that experience) don't matter. It is purely about instilling and maintaining a culture.
I don't really buy it, myself. Should they also forge all their knives from iron ore, the long slow way, before being allowed to use them in the kitchen? As other people commented, I think this is more about weaving a story and casting a glamour than anything else.
I think a charitable interpretation of his point is "I didn't care about fooling the diners about this specific thing."
But if he allows that to happen and the staff internalizes a culture of corner-cutting and misdirection, then eventually they'll start lying to customers and taking shortcuts on things that do matter.
So, the idea is the long, hard, stupid and disrespectful way.
Basically, the idea is you don't want smart people who can decide what corners make sense to cut, what process to use to etc.
And this is because you don't want to have to rely on their intelligence. You want to rely on only your process, so you hire those without sense or intelligence as you expand.
I have mixed feelings about this sort of thing.
It's saying you don't trust your people to make the right decisions. That you don't trust them to understand the difference between a shortcut that does and doesn't matter. The fact that Chang's staff emailed them to say "hey, we've started taking this shortcut" is a reason to trust them. Any deviation from the plan, and they let him know? Great! But he thinks that if he allows good shortcuts, sometime later, they'll start taking bad shortcuts, but he'll never find out, or won't find out until it's too late? It's profoundly insulting.
But at the same time, fighting human nature is hard. Judgment will suffer while under stress, and working in a kitchen is certainly a poster child for "stressful situation". Even with the best intentions, bad decisions will be made, even if they seem like good decisions in the moment.
I still think we should strive for that trust, though. Making people stick to an inefficient process where they can't see the reason for it is how you get detached, uncreative employees.
> I think a charitable interpretation of his point is "I didn't care about fooling the diners about this specific thing."
The funny thing is I actually do think he should be caring about this. Bringing out a chicken to show customers, and either explicitly saying or even implying that they're going to take that chicken back to the kitchen, carve it up, plate it, and bring it back out is a statement of intent. If you don't do it that way, then that's dishonest in a way I'd consider really bad. If I found out that parading the chicken out to my table was just a gimmick, and that's not the chicken I ended up eating, I'd feel lied to (or at least very much misled), and that would affect my enjoyment of the experience and my desire to go back.
I would describe it as "founder mode". If he lets the restaurant morph its process while he is outside the kitchen the vision is lost.
Obviously young and hungry with nothing to lose but your standards one can make certain decisions that build the story and the quality.
Once the weekly payroll is $140k a week plus all the other expenses selling one's name seems justified to keep the balls in the air.
The problem is the idea of the billionaire chef.
Yes, this is nuts. It's performative micromanagement for the sake of maintaining status.
If the end product is indistinguishable, and the user experience is inferior (because it takes so much longer, and customers are just sitting there, waiting, hungry...) literally the only difference is the assertion of management/owner status for the sake of it.
That might have some marketing leverage for a restaurant, but "We write everything in machine code with a biro before hand-assembling it" isn't going to win any hearts and minds in software dev.
"The point is that the diner gets to see the chicken they will eat and understand the process."
What do you mean by "understand the process"? You only get that if you are in the kitchen with the cooks. Only open restaurants where you can see the cooks cooking help with that. Seeing a dead chicken ahead of time doesn't teach a guest anything. It is merely a flex, a story the restaurant sells to increase the price of a meal.
> "That was what made it great. If they wanted to sandbag it, they needed to figure out how they would make up for the lost energy elsewhere."
This seems to be the key quote. As a restaurant owner, as with any other type of team leader, his job is managing how the team's attention and energy is spent. Reading charitably, he doesn't want to formalize slack time into the system, because he thinks that slack will be eaten up by something else with the next process change, making the whole operation more brittle (also specifically in a restaurant setting, maximizing kitchen throughput is _not_ the same as maximizing efficient operation)
I could of course be reading too much into this, but from my own experience, it's the same difference between a sensible ad hoc meeting culture and being forced to use "efficiency" tools that inevitably make meetings less productive.
He explains the point in the lines you omitted:
> I worried about the mindset of the server whose job it would be to parade a stunt chicken around the dining room. I was terrified of our culture stagnating.
It doesn't read to me like he would have any problem with a process improvement as long as the real chicken were still used.
Some things are better, but some are bad shortcuts that cost quality. A burger from a place that cooks it after you order will always be better than a burger where they start cooking before you walk in the door. Back when I worked fast food I sometimes made my own burgers, when it was fresh off the grill it was one of the best burgers I ever had, but that is a lot more individual labor and so not sustainable in a fast food model. Back then burgers were assembled before you walked in the door, but these days they have all backed off to assemble the burger after you order of ingredients cooked before - it is higher quality and they have managed to optimize assembly enough that it is now sustainable.
Where the fast food industry wants to be is a robot that sees you push the button and starts cooking your burger then before you get to paying for it. Robots could do all that, but they are too expensive for the price they need to hit at least so far. (there are also some fraud issues they have to work out) They have to start cooking before you finish the order to meet their fast goals which is one of the reasons people go to fast food.
He says he doesn't care about the integrity but I think he's wrong and he's misidentified the lesson from this.
Because you are absolutely right, doing things that are inefficient and stupid for the sake of it is absolutely dumb.
> I worried about the mindset of the server whose job it would be to parade a stunt chicken around the dining room. I was terrified of our culture stagnating.
This is where it makes sense. He does care about integrity. If you foster a culture of faking little things like this it can eventually grow into a culture of faking the big things that actually do matter.
>The quality of the food isn't the point either
quality is entirely the point, nowhere does he suggest quality is compromised; his staff's alternate idea was not reducing quality. he's making a different point.
It’s very simple actually. “The dish” is defined as a chicken you see before it is then taken away and carved. You see your chicken. That’s the promise. If they parade around with a display chicken then it is simply dishonest. Does it matter? That is a different question entirely. The point is there is a promise involved in “the dish”. If they want to use a parade chicken then they need a different promise.
> The inefficiency is the point. Doing it the long, hard and stupid way is the point.
Yes. This is what passes for "fine dining" today.
Starbucks used to make a thing of this. The process of making drinks was deliberately made manual and complicated to give customers the impression they were getting their money's worth for overpriced coffee. That was part of the Starbucks mystique, when they had one.
> You’re really trying to teach someone to better themselves through their own personal integrity.
I am subbed to /r/KitchenConfidential sub (a place where chefs and kitchen staff hang around) and there is a constant trickle of anecdotes of Chang being one of the greatest a*holes they have ever worked for.
He doesn't teach. He screams, denigrates and have anger episodes that keep everyone in the kitchen in a constant state of fear.
For example - https://www.reddit.com/r/KitchenConfidential/comments/1c3l66...*
Ironically I've heard Gordon Ramsey is actually a pretty swell guy despite the impression some of his shows give. You can see it when he's trying to genuinely empathize with the people on kitchen nightmares and actually help them, or when he goes to a place like remote India to try any chutney and he's being extremely respectful to the local culture. He gets passionate and angry but there's little condescension unless you're a professional chef who should know better and he's playing it up for the camera.
Is this actually substantiated by people who've worked with him? Or is it put out by his PR team? Because I've also heard this several times, but only through comments like this on the internet.
He has been on shows where he’s an ass and shows where he is not. Watching both, it seems like the former is purposely done for the drama and latter is closer to what he’s actually like. Who knows what he’s like with no cameras in an actual kitchen, and maybe it’s just because he’s older now, but it seems to me that the majority of content he’s in he seems really nice.
Iirc his UK shows are turned down alot. Though I guess either the US or the UK personality could be the fake one lol
Commercial kitchens are incredibly high pressure workplaces and many famous chefs are also assholes. It doesn't excuse Chang, but there's definitely a certain personality type that's drawn to and can function in these environments.
This "high pressure workplace" has always struck me as crazy. I grant that it looks true from the anecdotes, but it also seems that the vast majority of the pressure is self created. Often times specifically created by that second point, that many famous chefs are assholes.
Worse, as most of their asshole behavior seems to stem from the fact that they are buckling under pressure. Pressure that they themselves are causing.
I've always wondered about this. Apart from the small fine dining market, people just want decent food at a decent price and timeliness.
But I am right that the general narrative is definitely that kitchen help staff is a high stress job? I just don't get it.
Now I'm curious if this is reputation that is legit, or just one that everyone parrots. :(
High end kitchens really are high pressure, even though at the end of the day its just food.
From the moment you walk in the door for your shift, you are already hours behind. You will be given a couple of hours to prep an insane amount of food from scratch, often bouncing between 5-10 stations at a time to make it happen. I worked at a place that I was expected at all times to have food cooking on a giant flat top, charbroil grill, multiple ovens, 6 burner sauté range, deep fryers, steamers. While all this is cooking you also need to be doing the cold prep of cutting, measuring, weighing and portioning all of this prep work.
After you finish this, you will have a little bit of time to start a mad rush to set up your actual station for the service. I worked at a place once where this was a two hour ordeal to set everything up while basically working at a slight jog the entire time. And all of this can be really heavy when it comes to moving around large buckets and containers of ice, for example.
Finally, once service starts on a busy weekend for example, you are now looking at a 4-5 hour rush with a minimum ambient temperature of 95 degrees, where you will be absolutely slammed with multiple orders all coming in steadily, requiring a tremendous amount of skill to balance the timing of all this. Think about how hard it can be just to time a main protein with a couple of side dishes when you are just cooking at home for the family, and now imagine having to cook that same amount of food 300 times within a few hours. There will be no break during any of this either, standing and running around the entire time.
Once the service rush is finally over, you might think that your day is winding down, but think again. You now get to start the multi hour process of breaking down and cleaning every single thing you dirtied over the course of the night. This will also be a somewhat fast paced time of the night as labor costs are always a concern in the restaurant industry, so there is no time to slack here either.
Finally the shift is done and you can go home after 10-12 hours, stuff your face with a peanut butter and jelly, and do it all again tomorrow, since you work 6 days a week, every holiday, every weekend.
I am a software engineer now and I can confidently say that I have never had a day in this profession even remotely close to as stressful as just a regular Tuesday could be in the restaurant industry.
I mean, this sounds legit, but it also sounds like any other job. Have you worked construction? You will have an absurd amount of stuff to get through, with no help if the weather decides not to cooperate. Bus driver? Good luck if traffic is bad. Teacher? Hope the kids are cooperative today. Working in a tech company when your stack is down?
That is, you are correct that it is higher stress than a healthy software job. It doesn't take a lot of searching to see that "grind" for game devs is absurd, though. And I'm sure you can find stories of toxic teams in any big company.
That is all to say, a ton of that pressure being "high stress" is specifically from people buckling under the pressure. I think it is fair to say that working an active event at the likes of Amazon can be as pressured as any food service work. Doesn't mean it has to be high stress.
I have actually done construction like work, and I have been a delivery driver (not bus driver though). Those don't even compare relative to the stress of a high paced kitchen. And yeah, when a tech stack goes down, that is stressful for sure, but again, that happens like once in a blue moon and lasts a short amount of time. I've have never had a 60 hour emergency work week in tech lol. This was every single week in the high end restaurant industry, for no pay on top of that.
I didn't even include the stressors involved in wondering if your pay was even going to cover your bills for the month, or stressing if the restaurant was just going to close its doors on you overnight. Never heard of a tech or construction company doing that, it happens all the time in restaurants. And I was specifically talking about my time in actual restaurants, not fast food chains or fast casual. I can't speak to them. I am talking white chef coat, table cloth with reservations type of restaurants.
I'm not arguing that tech work can't be stressful or hard (or any other job), from a skill level the tech work is much more difficult. But you asked if a the high stress stereotypes are true, and as someone that has worked in around dozen different industries over the years, restaurant work is far and away the most stressful of the bunch, it's not even remotely close. Not arguing that it should be that way, but it certainly is.
Again, most of this just sounds like it is typical for a bad job. Not most/all jobs, agreed; but nothing unique to food industry. You can say that it is a physically hot environment, but it probably isn't any worse than most agriculture jobs, all told.
Similarly, worrying if your pay will cover bills is not at all unique to the industry. Having lived on bounced checks for a time, I agree that sucks. I've also known friends who had their paycheck bounce. An absurd amount of stress that makes zero sense.
So, my pushback here isn't that I think you are wrong. My pushback is I see no reason it has to be true. Basically, your last point. There is nothing intrinsic here that dictates this is a high stress job. Certainly the stakes are lower than something like an ER. The folks I've known that work ER complain less about the stress of their job than folks I have known that did food service, though; and that just doesn't make sense.
> It had nothing to do with integrity. I didn’t care about fooling the diners. What concerned me was the precedent we were setting. I worried about the mindset of the server whose job it would be to parade a stunt chicken around the dining room. I was terrified of our culture stagnating.
I'm sort of surprised that he didn't worry about integrity, since it's literally an example of lying to your customers about the food they're paying for. Fooling is a pretty light word for what others would call false advertising: you tell people you're making soup out of the carcass you just ate from, and then you just don't do that. I imagine that could also have an effect on the restaurant's culture as well. I understand that fine dining is partly theatrical, but don't charge me a premium for doing something you're not actually doing and then say "fooled ya!"
He said if you were going to fool the guest, you had to make up for that lost energy by doing something else (or presumably lower the price)
The guest is paying for an overall experience. There are plenty of experiences where a guest is happy to pay to be lied to, like a magic show or a strip club or the Olive Garden. As long as the totality of the experience is providing enough value.
Now if you specifically chose the restaurant because of their honesty (for whatever that means), then it’s a different story
> He said if you were going to fool the guest, you had to make up for that lost energy by doing something else (or presumably lower the price)
I think in the context of the quote, that "something else" was meant to be some extra long, hard, stupid work. He didn't mean doing something to make it up to the customers. He's worried about the mindset of his team: he wants them not to take shortcuts, but only because doing that will make them worse at their jobs in an indefinable way.
Yeah that's what the article says, but you frame it argumentatively. He doesn't assert he doesn't care about integrity, reading it, its clear the communicated point is he cares about integrity because of how it affects culture, not just because the carcass you ate wasn't used to make soup: in that case, it'd be trivial to "solve" the problem by just not affirmatively claiming the soup was made from the exact same carcass.
When he said "it had nothing to do with integrity" I think he meant that it had nothing to do with personal integrity, i.e. he's not bothered by lying to customers. It's clear he cares about the morale and culture of his team, and I guess he's making some distinction I don't understand between integrity and feeling bad because you're the guy on staff parading around a decoy chicken all night. My point is that maybe they should also think about other kinds of integrity, if only not advertising a product you aren't really selling, but probably also not lying to your guests.
David Chang is a salesman and a businessman first. I get the point being made, but keep in mind that he is a brand, and part of that is the stories he tells.
He has slapped his name on so many subpar food goods that were a total disappointment that I actually have started avoiding things marketed under his brand name.
He might do things the hard way in his restaurants, but they certainly aren't ensuring tasty or high quality goods under his brand. I would rather he do things in a way that makes sense and provides the best tasting food.
More broadly, the point is that you should take advice only from people whose successes you want to emulate. The actual advice I get out of this article is:
Tell stories that paint the picture you want your customers to have about your product.
> Tell stories that paint the picture you want your customers to have about your product.
There’s one interpretation of the idea of business as not selling products but stories. Apple knows this and clearly exhibits it with every product demo. It’s all a story. One that I enjoy.
But low priced groceries also sell a story, about how a beleaguered mother can save a few dollars here in order to avoid bouncing a check or to buy herself one nice thing. Or a kid who wants something sweet and already blew their allowance on video games. A pattern they will repeat again every few months since it worked before.
Chang is definitely selling two stories and it sounds like they are a bit discordant when taken together.
> Apple knows this and clearly exhibits it with every product demo. It’s all a story. One that I enjoy.
That is true, but I've often seen that misconstrued (not by you in your comment) as somehow saying "Oh, Apple's success is just marketing! I can get feature XYZ for much lower elsewhere!"
Except that while Apple has generally great marketing, they also have generally great products. There is a ton of hard engineering and design work that goes into making a product that is easy to market in the first place. In fact, what the "it's just marketing" crowd tends to miss is that products are not just a collection of features, but are used to tell stories (or listen to stories) in users' own lives. They want to envision how a product will enrich their experiences, and Apple understands that's what they're selling.
In fact, if anything, I think the flop of the Vision Pro (may be quite premature to call it a flop, but I'll put my money on it being a flop) is directly due to the fact that Apple can't tell a story about it. By all accounts it has amazing, cutting edge technology. Except Apple can't tell a good story about what you're actually supposed to do with the thing that people believe and buy in to.
> Except Apple can't tell a good story about what you're actually supposed to do with the [Vision Pro] that people believe and buy in to.
The funny thing is that Apple is usually good at waiting to build and sell a product until customers are ready for it and want it (even if they don't realize they are ready and want it).
Vision Pro is a still just a cool tech demo. A very cool and very impressive tech demo, but still a tech demo. I don't mean that to say that it can't be a useful product, but Apple built it without a real market for it.
Maybe that's ok: maybe they need to build and sell the tech demo now in order to refine the tech so they can get to the actual product, with the real story, that they'll sell 5 or 10 or whatever years from now. Or maybe... yeah, maybe it's just a flop.
They also finish the product to a degree that more pedestrian companies feel is grandstanding and thus dismiss it. Instead of learning about UX sensitivity and the paradox of choice, they write it off as a fluke. A forty+ year fluke at this point.
What people “want” and what they will enjoy are rarely the same. Giving them fifty models of laptop is what focus groups think will make customers happy but it just fractures your attention to detail. It only makes a few customers happy. Probably less people than Apple’s market share.
My ex used to practically scream at her laptop until I bought her a MacBook. Most expensive present I ever gave but the best investment in peace and quiet.
I also dabble in woodworking. There are some very fancy woodworking tools out there. They do the job better than their cheaper counterparts, but at the end of the day 3/4 of them are still largely a lifestyle thing, fueled by low tolerance mechanical engineering, industrial design, and recycling old designs that existed before quantity trumped quality. Much of that is physics, but some is story, and the word spreading part of the job of selling is all story.
If you've ever used a good chisel without a mallet you know the difference between good and cheap. But the margin for some other tools is less pronounced. I was going to use files as an example but there are some pretty crazy rasps out there today that can hog almost as well as a power tool.
> Except that while Apple has generally great marketing, they also have generally great products.
I disagree, and presumably so do the people you're referring to. Apple products are nothing special. They are competently made, but so are lots of brands which charge you a lot less. It really is all about marketing with Apple.
I think it's really the integration between hardware and software, nearly all of which is under Apple's control. Most companies don't do vertical integration anymore, and it shows. It's harder to produce a polished product when the hardware parts come from a bunch of different manufacturers, and you have to fight to get your software to work on it.
Michelin stars seem to have the dynamics of a loss leader. Particularly as it's become known that many of the restaurants are badly unprofitable—and moreso if you think the chefs should earn something commensurate to their presumable talent or passion (you don't have to think this). It seems to be more the case that every award or signal of quality is capable of (and actually being used) this way.
Some people, like Chang, may know it and treat it transactionally as such. $X for a star, which leads to Y amount of exposure. Others, may know it or not, but treat it like a goal in life either way. It's very possible of course that many of the former start as the latter people until they later [realize/sell out/give up].
I guess it makes sense. The world is more competitive. Information is freely available. You need to find some other moat. With information and access to everything, a moat that might have been quality or talent, is more easily captured by buying the signal (which to be clear can include buying and maintaining the quality). Then once you have the signal, well, it's up to you whether you still need or want the quality. When push comes to shove, it's probably the case that the signal is worth more than the quality.
What would the more pedestrian equivalent be for Michelin stars? If you want to treat your middle class family to celebrate your daughter getting a full ride scholarship, whose ratings would you go with?
Maybe we need to just opt out and make our own yardstick.
If you trust the Michelin system and live in a city big enough to support it, Bib Gourmand is a good choice. Otherwise something like Google Maps combined with research related to what you want (something family casual, more upscale, etc.)
Depending on where you live, there is likely at least one publication that reviews restaurants.
Word of mouth is probably best, followed by online reviews, if that doesn't work.
I don't believe you. If a restaurant is unprofitable, it would be closed. Nobody in their right mind would choose to continue losing money.
> Nobody in their right mind would choose to continue losing money.
In isolation, sure, but losing money in one area to make money (or some other form of currency such as fame) in another sounds a lot more reasonable. That's what a loss leader is.
Exactly! Every restauranteur knows the steak draws the attention but you pay your bills with baked potatoes and creamed spinach. There are only a handful of restaurant that are able to operate on that level, but the food loses money so you can make money on the cook books or merch or other opportunities (or even other restaurants. I promise you craftwich and craft have very different operation budgets/profitability).
You don't think there are rich backers out there willing to eat money on a restaurant in order to achieve status amongst their peers?
When Michelin stars get involved it becomes really intrinsic(not monetary) vs extrinsic values. At certain levels of passion just achieving and keeping a star has value in itself. This then often comes with monetary cost.
Many of the chefs pushing for Michelin stars likely are not in their right mind.
we already know that many top restaurants are toxic work environments with rampant drug abuse and scandals.
Forbes interviewed a bunch of chefs about what they think of The Bear.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinwolfe/2024/07/31/real-ta...
Seems to be considered fairly biographical.
Hi there! Please google “el buli profitable”. “The exception that proves the rule” or proof that some restaurants aren’t about making money through food sales alone.
Also, I spent a decade working in restaurants, I never met a single back of house employee that was in their right mind (myself included). It’s an entirely different breed from the HN set.
I can’t figure out where ambition and rationality diverge.
To the point someone else made about one part of the business propping up another, I wonder how many hotel restaurants are profitable?
A lot of people buy a business so that they can say they are a business owner instead of a inheritor.
Money laundering? Drinks? Both?
They do not break even on food alone. All their profits come from alcohol sales.
If this were true, nobody would ever try to build a career as an artist.
Never watched kitchen nightmares?
Don't forget he filed a trademark for chili crunch sauce (which has been used in several Asian cuisines for literally centuries) and sued to stop smaller restaurants and businesses from selling it, and only backed down when there was public outcry.
trademark refers to the name a product is sold as, not what the product is, and also has a local jurisdiction. What they do in Asia has nothing to do with trademarks in the US, and since not very much of Asia has spoken English for literally hundreds of years, I doubt they were calling it chili crunch sauce.
I'm not defending Chang nor trademarks, just pointing out how they work legally and the flaws in the argument you're making.
Remember, people called windows "windows", but they didn't sell products called Windows till Microsoft started and trademarked it.
I don't get your point. There are many other companies using the name chili crunch. He was not the first. But he tried to trademark it to stop all the others.
that he was not the first using that name in the US is a very good argument against a trademark in the US now that you've said that, but this is the first time that was said, is the point I was making
He's really trying to build an empire based on his name and recognition from a few good restaurants he founded. I think he wants to scale it as much as he can right now and sell it. He has commented before that a restaurant based around the chef's personality isn't really a business you can sell one day. But products based around the celebrity chef are. But yeah, most things he's putting his name on are so super over priced they are clearly selling to people with no price sensitivity. I'm sure his margins are fantastic and he'll get a big payday if he sells at just the right time.
I don't really understand any of this this thread, there's a lot of conflicting ideas. David Chang owns a frozen food empire that's super over priced and super low quality that's successful enough that he'll make a lot of money if he sells at the right time?
He has a personal brand built around his name and his in-person restaurant group, which are reportedly VERY good. Good enough that he has two Michelin stars.
He has used that reputation to start selling groceries under the same name. They are not very good in many cases, but he is able to charge high prices because of good marketing and his famous brand (Momofuku).
As an example he sells, what I judge to be not very good ramen noodles, for $4/pack. That is a lot of money for mediocre ramen noodles, even if it does have a famous name on the package.
A successful business is one that makes profits, not one that makes high quality goods. A profitable business can be retained for the profits, or it can be sold to some other entity. A chef, meanwhile, only makes money while they work.
> A successful business is one that makes profits, not one that makes high quality goods.
This attitude is the root of the problem with business culture in America today. A business needs to be profitable and make good quality stuff to be truly successful.
Had two Michelin stars.
Momofuku Ko closed recently. I went once around 2016, partly exactly because of his name and brand. It was ok but nothing memorable, I think he wasn’t even there. I guess the closing probably aligns with his goals of maximizing a brand / money, and not actually cooking good food.
Wow, I didn't realize Ko closed either. I went there around the same time and really liked it. But even then you could start to feel the fade a bit in what Chang did. He certainly had his moment and he was very influential. I still remember the first time I ate at Noodle Bar - was amazing.
It looks like they've closed nearly every restaurant they had except a couple Noodle Bars in NYC and Vegas and some other restaurant. Rough times for that industry. Ssäm Bar was a pretty good place, sort of shocked they couldn't keep the lights on there.
Ssam Bar was really good when I went there (also closed, though). It was a not-fucking-around good fine-dining/gastropub hybrid. The Momofuku cookbook is also excellent, and well written.
Pretty much. A great chef can only make so many meals in a day. That limits how much money you can make. So if you want to be more than a middle class income (even that is hard to reach) you have to do something else - become a brand that people will pay for, or start a business.
The great chefs are virtually never making any meals in a day; the actual test of a high-end chef is recruiting and retaining a CDC, sous, and line cooks that can deliver on the promises the exec makes. Grant Achatz has held on to 3 Michelin stars for I don't know how long, but I also don't know when the last time was he spent a night on the line. I assume it was a long, long time ago.
All this to say, going big doesn't necessarily mean blowing out all your quality.
I'm not even sure where the over-priced and low quality comments are coming from. The noodles are about 2.25 if you buy direct and the chili crunches are all great and highly addictive. I guess if you instacart individual noodle packs you would have a different take
$18 + shipping for a 5 pack on his own website. $97 with free shipping for 30 packs. Maybe I'm seeing different prices since I'm in Canada?
Even at $3.23 for the bulk price, it is an expensive bowl of ramen.
I buy my chili crunch from an asian market, and both their fresh stuff and their packaged imported stuff is cheaper and tastes better. David Chang's advantage is that he is selling in normal grocery stores so there isn't really competition. Put his stuff on a shelf at an asian market where there is 5 or 6 different brands and a consumer base that has been buying this for years, and they won't sell.
His chili crunch is fine but costs significantly more than many other chili crunch brands which are fine too. You're paying for the Momofuku branding on it that makes certain types of consumers feel good about themselves.
God, don't get me started on how insane his asking price for the "restaurant grade" soy sauce is. This is all subjective opinion on the quality and cost of good, of course. But the costs per ounce are very easy to shop.
I actually put his in a lineup with others when I got in a chili oil craze.
And while it definitely is good quality, it isn't mind blowing. And I personally prefer other brands instead! It's also, to my taste, much more Americanized. Much more refined sugar and using a different less complex method for the umami.
It's still delicious, but I personally won't be getting it again.
To be fair he is American and primarily marketing to an American(ized) audience. I’m personally a big fan of Americanization of foods. I’ve had dozens of “authentic” Mexican tacos and I love them - they’re fantastic things. I had a GF with an obese white trash mom who made an Americanized version of tacos which to my taste was incredible. Took the real parts and amplified certain things to the local palette. Like best tacos ever and just as authentic relatively.
It tastes burnt to me.
His chili crunch has a lot of sugar, so it tastes great. Most other chili crunches are more subdued on that front.
The Momofuku soy sauce is $1.31/oz while the Kikkoman’s soy sauce is $0.37/oz. Truly ridiculous pricing.
His rice vinegar, which apparently is "restaurant tested" and has taken "years of research" to create the "vinegar of their dreams" is even worse in terms of pricing. But "you've never tasted anything like this before" as it comes from their "proprietary blend of rice".
Professional marketing copy like this costs money. When Chef Chang says "Buy it!" the only response is "YES CHEF!".
Not that it's well priced, but just because they're both "soy sauces", doesn't mean they are really comparable products intended to be used in a the same way while cooking. It's like the difference between an expensive olive oil you would use in a simple vinaigrette, eating with bread, or drizzling over a dish once it's cooked, and a cheaper neutral oil for sauteeing in the early steps of a recipe
I've been eating packaged ramen since when I had to and when I saw momofuku "tingly chili" noodle packages I bought 4. Don't remember the price, it was immaterial.
Turns out they're so boring and flavorless that 2 packages have been sitting on the shelf for 6 months. I thought I would have an idea what to do with them but so far no. I keep home toasted/ground Szichuan peppercorns in my pantry so I can get any level of "tingly" that I want but come on, there needs to be something else.
I've had these Momofuku instant noodles... I thought the noodles themselves were pretty good but the sauces were nothing special. The noodles are definitely just the same stuff A-Sha already sold on their own, and apparently many of the flavors are too, with Momofuku mostly contributing the branding.
Yeah, pretty much. He's leveraging his celebrity to sell over priced food relative to its quality (it's not bad per-se, but not worth the money) and if he can sell it before credibility is ruined and growth stops, he'll make a lot of money. Did that make it easier for you to understand?
This is all reminding me of the mean dude in Ratatouille. Only the mean dude is now also Gasteau.
I was thinking the exact same thing! Lucky I searched the page for Ratatouille before commenting.
Ratatouille is one of my all time favorite movies, but if you read it as a metaphor for director Brad Bird's own career, it's hard not to feel like it lets Walt Disney off the hook. Often in real life, the creative genius who founded the enterprise and the sycophant who has taken over it in his absence are both assholes. Though Ratatouille does touch on this by making Gusteau an idealized figment of Remy's imagination, who is shocked when he hears that the real man had a child via an affair.
I've been wondering about this for YEARS now: WTF happened to Milk Bar in NYC? Based on the taste and quality, it seems like the most egregious case of "selling out" I've ever seen. It seems like an overnight change to me
David Chang and Christina Tosi worked together, and I remember seeing a bunch of their marketing on Netflix
https://rseventures.com/milk-bars-christina-tosi-went-momofu...
In 2015 the location in East Village was still GREAT. Interesting deserts, seemingly made by hand, with high quality ingredients
Then I go back a few years later, and it's this CHAIN and the food is inedible. I take one bite, can't eat it, and throw it away
It just tastes like sugary processed food now, like Twinkies or Chips Ahoy or something
I also saw Milk Bar products in Whole Foods, bought it, took one bite, and threw it away, and never bought it again
It's just weird to me that a chef would let the quality sink so low, so fast. Usually the "founders" care about quality, and are mission-focused
I always thought that process took decades, and changes in ownership. (Actually I am re-reading Pollan's account of the "big organic" Cascadian Farms brand now -- another very interesting case of counterculture going mainstream / industrial, but the change was more gradual I think)
They opened a Milk Bar near Harvard and it was total garbage.
They were so lazy that they didn't even make anything in Boston. It was all shipped over from NY. Stale and tasteless cubes of nothing wrapped in plastic.
Neither Christina Tosi nor David Chang have any integrity. They just peddle whatever garbage they can to people while building their own brand.
A year or two ago that Milk Bar location finally died out and was replaced by Joe's Pizza. Another NY chain. But one that is the opposite of Tosi/Chang in every way. Authentic. Careful. Customer-focused. Great NY-style pizza made on the spot with the same ingredients. Joe's is just as good in NY as it is in Boston.
Good riddance to Tosi and Chang. I now actively avoid anything associated with them.
The stores in Manhattan are also packaged food! They don't make them there either
It's basically like they bought some Chips Ahoy from Target and devoted an entire store to reselling it, with prime real estate
I mean maybe part of that was a pandemic thing, but I remember thinking how bad it was before the pandemic
Milk Bar only ever worked when it was Christina Tosi's personal baking project. The second they tried to corporatize it, it was done.
But why? How is it different than any other bakery?
You can open a second location of a bakery and maintain the same quality ...
Anecdotally more than 5 locations seems to be a problem (my guess is some kind of management scaling issue like Dunbar's law)
But it seems they never went through the phase of 2 or 3 locations, or just quickly zoomed past it into packaged and preserved foods. With the actual stores also selling packaged foods
Maybe she had enough friends in the restaurant business to know that managing 2 or 3 locations is probably a hell-ish part of your career (???)
i.e. maybe you are doing a lot more work, not getting to actually make any food, and you might not make as much money (e.g. each new store is a big risk I imagine)
Milk bar was never a regular bakery. Its items mostly got popular because of their creativity and uniqueness. But when you scale it out and stop innovating, it's not unique any more.
What was unique about it besides the recipes?
You can teach someone else the recipes, and plenty of people know how to bake
So I don't see the problem with making 3 stores at a high quality
I just remember the Saltie owner posting photos of the pavement outside their next door neighbor Milk Bar, being salty about the scores of serving cups and other detritus their customers would leave without the store taking responsibility for cleaning them up
As others have alluded too. At this point SC is high on its own supply. Create a food empire, hang out with rich or famous chefs. Create millions of aspiring chumps who'd take his words as gospel.
Edit SC -> DC (David Chang)
Who or what is SC?
Typo, DC not SC. David Chang
You want to be chef you have to be in the kitchen.
There is now another category of "Netflix Chef" where one has to work hard in kitchen until they get featured on Netflix series.
It is almost as if some people want to cook like a chef and some people want been seen as a chef.
Milk bar always seemed like an example of using raw marketing power to convince people something is good. I saw Tosi on Chefs table and it was crazy how generic what she was doing was versus the other chefs on the show. Juxtaposing her with others on the show it felt like a bunch of artists who wouldn't compromise their vision versus a capitalist who was optimizing everything around money.
He also tried to sue all the other small businesses using the chili crunch name. I stopped buying his after that.
> Tell stories that paint the picture you want your customers to have about your product.
Isn't that just called advertising? This is so blatantly obvious, it doesn't sound like much of an advice.
Advertising is always attempting to disguise itself as anything other than advertising.
Pretty much.
I wasn't saying that this is a particularly insightful message. I was saying that the message I took from this story wasn't about doing things the hard way. Its a meta lesson about messaging and showmanship.
he’s also reportedly a jerk to his staff and yells at them. and sues mom and pop shops for using his trademark of a really generic term... something like spicy chili oil or very similar.
In the US, trademarks have to be enforced to remain valid.
https://www.justia.com/intellectual-property/trademarks/enfo...
"a failure to enforce a trademark by monitoring the mark for misuses will result in a weakening of the mark and loss of distinctiveness, which can lead to a loss of the trademark"
It’s annoying. Every time a company does basic enforcement they are required to by law to maintain their trademark, they get bonded and we go through the same cycle of outrage with the sensible people explaining that trademarks aren’t like patents and if someone is going around using your trademark, you will lose it.
Then the outrage dies down only to have the cycle repeated a few weeks later.
He trademarked “chili crunch” which is just what that food is called.
It’s like trying to trademark “breakfast cereal” or “hot sauce”.
If it had gone to court he would have lost eventually since other people had been using that name earlier for the same product, and it was too broad
The problem is that the trademark was too generic (chili crunch, to be exact) and he was going after brands that sold a product that had always been known as that or crunchy chili oil, or chili crunch oil.
He didn’t invent the food, and started going after small brands and people that had been selling it since before he had tried registering the trademark.
He did eventually back down.
yeah i fully understand that but his trademark was way too generic in the first place. used for a long time before that. i have the same issue with backcountry dot com over the widely used term backcountry before they named themselves backcountry... it’s scummy.
David Chang is the guy who sent cease and desist letters to other manufacturers selling chili crunch, a condiment that existed long before he was born. Maybe that is the "long, hard, stupid way"
My understanding is that another company owned the Chili Crunch trademark and took enforcement action against David Chang's company when it started selling products under that name. As part of the settlement, Chang's company ended up purchasing the trademark. As one of the obligations of owning a trademark is to enforce its use in the marketplace, Chang's lawyers did just that. But after blowback in the press, Chang arranged for the other brands to also use the trademark.
Here's a summary from NBC News:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/david-chang-momof...
> As one of the obligations of owning a trademark is to enforce its use in the marketplace, Chang's lawyers did just that.
There is no such obligation. Yes, if you don't enforce a trademark you can lose it, but it isn't like you will be subject to fines or something if you don't. This is a ridiculously generic trademark that never should've been granted, and if Chang (or his lawyers) were good, decent people they would've just let it be. The trademark would've lapsed, and everything would've been fine.
> There is no such obligation. Yes, if you don't enforce a trademark you can lose it...
Your second sentence kinda refutes the first, doesn't it?
I mean, if your company gets a cease-and-desist demand from the owners of the Chili Crunch trademark, and ends up buying the trademark to continue running your business, it seems like a Pretty Bad Idea to not hold on to that trademark.
I know you think the trademark should never have been granted, but the USPTO did grant it, and Chang's company did get a C&D from the grantee. So, if Chang's company ever let that trademark go (e.g., to be "good, decent people," as you suggest), the history of this particular matter suggests that someone else could easily pick the trademark up, and probably would (not everyone is "good, decent people," right?), and would then start sending cease-and-desist demands to extract fees.
So I'm having a hard time faulting Chang's lawyers for avoiding the obvious trap.
If a trademark gets revoked it's gone, it's not like it goes to someone else
Are you sure? Consider that one of the common ways that trademarks become "revoked" is that a third party files to have it canceled because they are trying to register the trademark for themselves:
> Petitions to cancel based on abandonment may be filed at any time. Often, a petition to cancel due to abandonment is filed because the attacked registration was cited as a basis to refuse a third-party’s later-filed application. In such a case, the Applicant may file a petition to cancel to overcome the refusal to register. If successful, the cited registration will be removed as a bar to the later-filed application.
Source: https://www.trademarklitigationguide.com/petition-to-cancel-...
Consider, for example, the somewhat infamous Flappy Bird trademark that was recently picked up by Gametech Holdings, LLC. That firm petitioned the USPTO to cancel the existing registration by Dong Nguyen Ha on the grounds of abandonment. He lost the trademark, and they were able to register it:
https://ttabvue.uspto.gov/ttabvue/v?pnam=Dong%20Nguyen%20Ha%...
I’m generally in favor of “cheap and cheerful” - that is, friendly efficiency. Doing elaborately inefficient things to justify higher prices is a turnoff.
Unfortunately, from a restaurant’s point of view, they may care about customer satisfaction, but their incentives are to get more money per visit. A lot of things restaurants do make more sense from that perspective.
For example, large portions can be seen as a way to justify moderately higher prices while keeping customers feeling like they got good value for their money. Elaborate, unnecessary service is a way to justify really high prices.
And nowadays they care less about perception, so they just add extra changes.
Ignoring the explicit text which everyone seems to be overly concerned with... I'm not really worried about that. The article makes you think for a second...
The thing I like about this article is that you should be concerned with these things. You should make active decisions about quality, culture, integrity, the way you produce things, etc. You should not skip to "the long, hard, stupid way" or the shortcut in your proprietary process without consideration. Even the thought that there could be more value in an inefficient process is worth considering if you haven't before.
"The hard way is pretty hard, but not as hard as the easy way"
-- Granny Weatherwax
"The path forward seems to go back, the direct path seems long"
-- Lao Tzu
Those who seek the easy way do not seek the true way — Dogen Zenji
(It is hilarious to me that Dogen is being downvoted)
I like him but his food is just a white-person’s version of Korean food. It’s not a bad thing but his food lacks soul and this is reflected in everything he does.
Food is allowed to be different from its origins. Just parroting what Korean food already is isn't particularly special - consider that basically every Korean restaurant is doing exactly that. And that might be part of the reason they, for the most part, don't have 2 Michelin stars.
That’s a fair point but a lot of his food may taste good to uninitiated western palate. I also see this in Indian cuisine because the spices are on the strong side, it takes awhile (years even) to be able to differentiate between good and subpar. Again, I like the guy and he worked his ass off and took necessary risks to succeed.
I'm fine with fusion foods, and borrowing from different cultures to make something new.
The problem with Momofuku Goods (No idea about ther resaturant group) is that they aren't even good to the unrefined palate. I'm not particularly tuned into the asian cuisines that he specializes in, but I can tell you that his packaged noodles are pretty middling even by grocery store ramen standards.
To complete the LARP[1], would you mind finding a boomer-age Korean father and complaining jealously about his "white-person's version of Korean food?"
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Prodigal_Son
Both David Chang and his staff are ridiculous.
Different parts of the bird take different times to cook, so for food quality, cooking a bird as a whole makes no sense: either the breasts are overcooked, or the thighs are undercooked. There is just one reason, which is that cooking the animal whole makes for an arresting presentation. Then, you'd carve the animal tableside (like is done for Peking duck, see one of the other comments).
This requires having waitstaff that can carve a bird or having cooks that are presentable to the guests, and extra space in the dining room.
Clearly, David Chang is taking a shortcut already by carving the chicken in the kitchen.
> And ultimately I think being a chef is one of the hardest jobs to motivate people because there’s no lure of a giant paycheck or bonus or stock options. You’re really trying to teach someone to better themselves through their own personal integrity.
1. jobs that are monetarily incentivized in this way are quite common though.
2. for certain kinds of jobs, if an employer desires employees to go the "long, hard, stupid way" while short-cuts lie in plain sight, the employer might wish to incorporate forms of incentives and disincentives into their payout system rather than rely on their employee to "just do it".
I have lived the story from "Eat A Peach" at the end of the article.
My family were regulars at a local Chinese restaurant for years.
One of the dishes we usually ordered was Peking Duck.
First, the waiter brought out the cooked duck on a trolley and carved up the duck, arranging the cut pieces of duck meat on a dish. The duck meat, pancakes/tortillas, sauce, and condiments were placed on the table.
At this point, the duck carcass was taken back to the kitchen to be prepared for the second dish - this restaurant just carved up the duck carcass and brought out the cut up duck carcass as a second dish.
My family were never that interested in the remaining pieces of duck since there was little meat on them.
Instead, my dad would ask the waiter to be given the duck carcass to take home so my dad could prepare the remaining duck meat his way (call him old school).
One time, after the Peking duck was presented and my dad had been given the duck carcass for later enjoyment, another waiter came out holding a dish filled with cut up pieces of duck.
But OUR duck that we ordered was in a bag near my dad.
The waiter claimed that the duck dish was for our table.
So where had the duck for the dish come from?
I've had similar dinning experience, where they would take the carcass and prepare a soup from it after carving meat. However, they didn't promise that your soup would only come from your duck. I got interested because if I had to prepare that soup by myself it would have taken at least one hour, but they brought it out in 10 minutes.
Many chefs go on about this; I don't see anything unique or insightful in the article.
Personally, I think the Japanese ryokan tradition is amazing. It's obsessive food, and you /can/ taste the difference. I thought it was mindblowing even as a 20-sth dude in the early 2000s that grew up with Zagats in Atlanta.
The difference is spending 30 minutes (Chang) vs 30 years (ryokan).
Been very unimpressed with his restaurants and more-so by his personality. This hard/stupid blog post just reinforces that.
The reality he is trying to describe is that COOKING is ART. You could take the shortcut of skipping technique and realism and go straight to splashing paint on a page, but that wouldn't be ART. You have to EARN YOUR STRIPES before you can do something like that.
I like this. And there's a time and place for everything. If I were inclined to try this boiled chicken, hell yeah I'm going to appreciate that I'm getting served the real chicken I saw earlier AND I believe in developing that kind of kitchen culture about caring for what you make. But I also still eat pizza from the shop down the street when hungry and impatient.
Other long, hard, stupid things I like to do: read novels, take walks, invest my time to learn fundamentals of a practice
Short, easy, stupid things I like to do: skip the occasional long post on hackernews and just read the comments, automate and simplify my work, watch short videos on how to fix broken things, send one-line emails instead of sit through meetings
I’m a big fan of high-end restaurants, but you don’t need to show me the food and take it away and then bring it back.
I think he needs a better way to authenticate the chicken. Maybe he can use the blockchain to show proof of work.
There's also the long, hard, smart way. You can focus on making things excellent in a way that it actually gets easier over time. It depends on your goals.
"I didn't care about fooling the diners."
See, that's the moment you've lost the plot. That's where, for me, I realized this article may have been dancing around a good idea, it ultimately fails.
This is the most important question of THE WHOLE THING.
Is it fair or good to FOOL THE DINERS? Would the diners even care?
These are the only two important questions, and he kind of ducked them.
Is the presentation bird alive or dead? What is "fired" in this context? Is the presentation bird unrested? What does "rested" mean in this context? Why does the kitchen need to "butcher" the chicken that's "rested"? Doesn't that mean the rested chicken is still alive? What does "slowing" the other, presumably presentation, chicken mean?
The presentation bird is still dead and cooked.
A dish being "fired" means finish the cooking process, eg put into the fire.
When a meat comes out hot from the cooking process, it needs to "rest" a certain amount of time for the temperature to even out and the juices to be reabsorbed before being sliced/butchered. This is time that the diners now need to wait before they get their meal.
So, in David Chang's model, when the dish is ordered a prepared, dead chicken is "fired" and heated so that it finishes cooking. Then, while hot and still in the pot, presented to the diners. It's taken back, must rest outside of the hot boiling pot, and then is sliced into pieces and plated to be served and eaten by the guests. The remaining carcass is supposed to then be boiled down into a stock for a 3rd dish.
However, the resting and boiling steps could be skipped. Why does it all have to be the exact same chicken!? Have a presentation bird, another that is fired and rested (while the other is presented) you can carve and serve quicker, and make a large amount of bulk stock that can be served on order. The only difference is you don't have the exact same bird going through the whole 3 steps to the diners and instead have the 1. dead cooked presentation bird, 2. the carved bird, and 3. stock from a bird from yesterday.
> Is the presentation bird alive or dead?
Dead and boiled.
> What is "fired" in this context?
In cooking, that can mean applying direct heat in any number of ways. In this guess, I'm guessing that it means finishing (i.e. doing a last small amount of cooking for color and texture) the bird by roasting or searing.
> Is the presentation bird unrested? What does "rested" mean in this context?
In cooking, resting means to remove the item from heat and let it sit for a while. Food cooks from the outside in so the surface temperature can be much higher than the internal temperature. Resting gives some time for those to equalize. It lets the inside finish cooking using the residual heat on the surface.
> Why does the kitchen need to "butcher" the chicken that's "rested"?
It's a boiled whole chicken. After it's rested, it gets broken down into parts that the diner can eat. For chicken, that's usually breasts, thighs, wings, and legs/drumsticks.
> What does "slowing" the other, presumably presentation, chicken mean?
Resting and breaking down a chicken takes time, especially resting. By having a separate presentation chicken, it means the staff can be simultaneously resting some other cooked chicken and butchering it while the presenetation is being paraded around.
I'm looking at games and all the hacks the do in the name of efficiency.
I needed to read the article a few times - the quotes from David are a bit vague.
His presented focus is on great experiences for the customer, which demands high operational excellence from his team. His team found a reasonable way to save time, but his reaction was that's the wrong focus. Focusing on saving time will eventually hurt the customer experience (like advertising models lead to enshittification), even if this particular one doesn't.
So they need to re-orient this - either go back to the hard way, or justify the easy way in terms of the customer. To quote, "they wanted to sandbag it, they needed to figure out how they would make up for the lost energy elsewhere."
> I was terrified of our culture stagnating.
That’s something I can relate to.
A lot of my personal “secret sauce” is habit, and a lot of habit is synonymous with motivation.
I find that establishing great habits has a kernel of great motivation.
Sometimes, I just do something a certain way, because of the way it makes me feel. No other reason.
Personal satisfaction and Integrity are vital parts of all that I do, and these come from a lifetime of experience.
I heard a great quote from a friend of mine, recently, who is a retired union exec:
What’s the substitute for 30 years of experience?
There is none.
This strikes me as really dumb. An efficiency that the diner would never notice and he wants to make his staff work harder to prove a point. Way to make people resent their work.
He believes it will bleed into other things where it does make a difference. So he takes a 0 tolerance policy into cheating so it doesn't become a habit and a culture and instead hopes to instill the value of not taking shortcuts as a measure to prevent a lapse.
As a programmer, this still seems overly dogmatic. Why not just develop the discipline to put effort where it's actually needed instead of burning gas all around like a moron? Every programmer knows this. The extreme dogma seems the real lack of discipline to me.
As a programmer I probably don't know very much about how to run a kitchen, the kinds of people that work in them, and the reasonable expectations the kitchen manager might have. Not to mention, the outcome of the majority of software project is failure lol.
This is actually quite a good point. A single person taking shortcuts is not bad, but certain things are done in a particular way for good reason.
One shortcut today is another tomorrow and the day after. It's not about the single person either, but rather the culture itself.
Now this is different from improving processes or efficiencies. The incentives and motivations also matter. Take a large group 1 hour before the restaurant closes. For the staff, it's shit, why didn't they come earlier. But for the restaurant it's great news, more money and potential repeat customers.
[dead]
"The dish was meant to be a difficult pickup that required constant coordination between the front and back of house. That was what made it great."
This feels like the crux. It's not arbitrarily doing the hard, stupid thing, but the ones that are based in making the product or process better.
I disagree. The final product (the food) is not better in any way for doing this. I do see the value of not making the server lie to the customer by pretending that they were going to get the "stunt chicken", but this whole problem seems to be caused by trying to make the preparation of the food into a show, and here is a case where the showmanship is getting in the way of efficiency.
If they just got rid of parading out the chicken in the middle of the process they could stage more things without implicitly lying to the customers, while improving timing. You would just lose some showmanship, which might be part of the brand.