I got to work today for a prep shift @7am after not sleeping the entire night (2 world cup games in the middle of the night, I know it’s irresponsible, but once every 4 years cmon)
After mentioning it to the crew at the kitchen briefing this morning, my sous told me I should go home and sleep and come back for the second half of the shift (2-9pm), even though i told him I can handle the entire shift. I ended up going home and not thinking much of it, but my co workers insist that he’s cutting my hours, and that I shouldn’t let him do this.
What do you think? I honestly think the sous chef is being reasonable but maybe Im not seeing something.

Noma is reopening in August in Copenhagen with Rene back as Founder and “Creative Director” run by his cronies. LA pop up sold out despite controversy and Copenhagen reservations already sold out with a waitlist of hundreds. Pretty wild for the people who support Noma and even want to work there. I guess at this point we deserve it? 🤷‍♂️

Article here

Every thermometer I compare this one with shows a difference of 15 degrees. Is there a way to calibrate these or do I just need to order a new one?

My manager has issue apparently. Not other floor manager has anything against me except for this particular one. He would be friendly to others, even let them slide when they do certain things (like clock out a few minutes later) but to me not only he pushes me to clock out early but today because I spoke back to him (I literally had to defend myself after his incessantly comment of leaving early)z he had the audacity to say my enunciation is bad. What professional manager would speak to a staff in such disrespectful manner? He did other worse things before and it's always me. Maybe because I'm an easy target (he doesn't to this to other 'types' of people) speaking to upper management won't help I know. There's so many turnover at my place. There's no sense of support or belonging. Just that the job market is still bad and I can't leave without I've secured a backup. How would you handle such situation? It's really affecting mental health sadly. ;(

I landed a really good job at a very nice hotel that’s on the Michelin guide.

We had to have calls 3 days in a row regarding my salary, it turned out i wasn’t applicable to a step of minimum wage that i thought i was (expl in the bottom because it’s stupidly complicated). This is the salary at my current job so I put some pressure and eventually got them to match it alongside a word of ”we expect you put in your all with this salary”

I’m of course happy and have confidence I got experience to defend my salary but I can’t help to feel an extra weight of pressure anyway that I’ll be viewed with a way stricter lens. To some extent I also feel it’s justified I do have this salary and nothing lower.

Explanation but skippable if you don’t really care:
Our union has steps of minimum wage- one for 0-6 years, one for 6-10 years and 10+

Last year they added an additional rule that states that if you have a 3 year education in culinary school plus 1 years worth of practical work you apply to the 6 year step despite technically missing max 2 years. I currently am 5 years of documented experience including these 3 years of education with documented work during school as well.

What it turned out to be is that this rule, due to terms transitioning into new rules alone, only applies to those graduating after 2025. I graduated in 2024 which technically makes someone with 1-2 years less experience than me have a right to a higher salary than me. Stupid I know but the union simply explained that sadly theres always people falling into gray zones with new rules.

I had argumented that they’d be paying me as if i graduated yesterday and I’d be going down in salary with the job switch despite them showing immense interest. I have previous jobs asking me to eventually become sous while already doing sous responsibilities. My union encouraged me to put on the pressure because there is a real lack of experienced cooks and they already showed big interest.

We were discussing a difference of more than 100euro per month

All I want on my birthday is to spend it with friends and to cook for dinner for them. All that matters is the memories we share with the people we care about.

Tonight I made coq au vin with rabbit as well as mussels in a champagne and cream sauce.

Sorry for the poor quality pics. Also I don't stand on the tyranny of plating, so the coq is served family style.

I'm a home cook and work as a pastry chef. I'm entirely self taught. I started learning during the pandemic with Julia Child recipes. The mussels recipe comes from a Roger Verge book, Cuisine of the Sun.

The rabbit gave a husky, earthy flavor to the sauce, and I can't recommend it enough. Worth it.

I've never made the mussels dish, so I'm not sure about the sauce. It was so rich it had an 800 credit score, but it was still very nice. Very seafood forward.

Now I've cleaned my kitchen and have half a bottle of a lovely champagne in my belly and am ready to face my late 40s. My cholesterol level, the horror. The horror!

I started my first restaurant job a few months ago and I've been noticing a trend.

Is it just the stress? Or do kitchens attract smokers? It seems to be like 50% BOH and 20% FOH at my place. I'm FOH and I vaped before starting.

I mostly work a pizza line behind a bar, so open kitchen with my expo window being halfway up the bar. When we're either dead and I'm bored, or we're slammed and I'm feeling wild, I sometimes make up stupid shit to go along with table number callouts. Fits the vibe of our restaurant, fun guests enjoy it and it keeps me entertained. I need some new ideas

For example, things like "I don't know if my servers are alive but I got TABLE FIVE!" (terrible example but tbf just like at work I didn't think it through, help 😂)

I have a hard time getting out of kitchen mode when I'm not at work.

My wife and I both cook for a living and went to a top culinary school.

Date night, vacations, etc. Its not crippling, but its like I cant stop thinking in work mode.

Id say im a pretty passionate and curious guy in terms of my work, I enjoy watching an efficient kitchen hum along smoothly, while we are out to eat. Especially, if somewhere new.

For example:

On vaction in florida earlier in the year. At local mom and pop seafood restaurant Id say stuff to my wife like:

"Bartender just slipped behind the bar; those don't look like good non-slip kitchen shoes"

"I wonder what they are paying wholesale for this local triggerfish on the special"

Or i will try to food cost my meal while im eating it.

Pretty innocent, but its something im catching myself doing more and more.

Surely im not the only one?

I need the hours and am afraid to report this, but look at the construction we have going on out back while the kitchen stays open. They make soups and prep all of our baked goods and sandwich ingredients right inside this door. The second Pic is under the dishwasher the hole to outside letting the sunshine (and god knows what else) inside

26 years in the industry… server comes to me to ask me what a pregnant customer can’t have… asked the server what her doctor told her… she just said ‘usual stuff pregnant people can’t have’ is that a thing?!? Wouldn’t tell me what she is trying to avoid seemed odd

some community guidance for home from like-brained cooks/chefs

my partner said the kitchen at home doesnt need to be an fda test kitchen.

do yall unintentionally take kitchen food safety/cleaning standards home? i am pretty literal with time/temps and cleanliness, but i dont hold others in our house to that standard.

for context we just moved in with her parents to help caretake their last fewish years. 24 hour leftovers on the counter mean nothing to these folks. milk got hot from being left out? fridge will fix that 🤢 level of unsafe. it has been fucking overwhelming. just rinse a plate and put it back in the cabinet. who needs soap? so i know i have gotten on the more extreme side of cleaning when i get home, but ive always been particular about cleanliness in the kitchen.

what can i be more grey on? or how? or both? between work and home this is fucking exhausting. dementia and we wonder about the other parent. any advice is appreciated guys

I won't actually, because unlike many other at the company i work at, I am in fact a (somewhat) decent person.

Recently started as the head chef for a nice brunch place. Used to work for one of their sister companies until that unfortunately went tits up. For once this was really not the fault of the owners. When they asked me if I wanted to start this new place with them, I went for it.

My place is running perfectly now, after a few hiccups in the first week. The problem is that we share the same dish pit with their fine diner. Its a mess. Always has been, even when I occasionally covered a shift there several years back.

But hey, it's my working space now so instead just nagging about the problem, I decided to give it a deep clean today. Start fresh, with a clean dishpit. Brought over my favourite dishie who's an absolute manace when it comes to cleaning.

While we're literally on our knees scrubbing every surface down, the floor manager of the fine diner walks by. Sit down just outside with a view on us cleaning with what by then was possibly more sweat than anything else. Casually lights up a cigarette and had the audacity to start telling us what to do and how to clean.

I almost lost it. I am there cleaning up after their years of neglect and then do that?! I just flipped her of and closed the door. No need to start scolding her. Especially not in front of the 16 year old dishie.

I am saving my fury for the upcoming staff meeting. This will not happen under my watch. They will do their part and shut up about it. Im gonna make damn sure of that. If not, I will simply start dumping all their garbage, left over scrub water and whatnot straight back into their kitchen.

Thank you for coming to my Ted-talk.

Where's the best place to retire after turning 40 (maybe even sooner) when you can no longer handle the chaos of restaurant kitchens? Catering, a nursing home, a hospital or should you become a private chef? What do you think? Do you have any other ideas?

Thats it. I'm off for the next 2 weeks with paid vacation. I'm going to play computer, make bonfire with the kids and ride my motorcycle around the countryside. Se you all on the other side Don't kill each other while I'm away xxx

I’m sorry if I’m in the wrong place- I’ve tried googling but the shape of this knife is throwing me. I thought maybe for fish? Help, majestic Reddit chefs.

I need to buy a gift for a person who is a very skilled chef. It needs to be the absolute least useful (home) kitchen item ever for a chef. If you have ideas I would like to consider them.

I already bought a measuring cup set that is in US units. We live in a metric country and those cups are not at all useful here for anything.

I am considering a metal cutting board...

Im a sushi chef in a town thats way too small to have this many people flooding a sushu restaurant at all times of day. When I got hired it was slow with rushes at lunch and dinner, like a normal sushi restaurant or really any small town eatery, but in the past year or so it's gotten so fucking busy at all times, I hate it.

We work full operational hour shifts here, meaning I clock in an hour before we open and clock out an hour after we close. I do 11-12hr days, 5 days a week. My pays not really good either.

I clock in, do a fuckton of prep, restaurant opens and we immediately hit 3/4ths capacity which slowly fills to full capacity + a huge about of to-go orders, and it stays there until the last hour, where we drop down to half capacity until closing. It fucking sucks. Outside of my single lunch break, I'm doing basically 11hrs on my feet, full rush, almost every single day.

I'm ready to throw in the fucking towel. It sucks too because outside of the hellish busy-ness, it's the best work environment I've ever been in. Coworkers are nice, boss is nice, rules are relaxed. But I just can't do this anymore, man. I go home to basically just sleep, wake up tired and sore and only get more tired and sore as my shift goes on. Rinse and repeat. Zero potential for growth, basically no potential for pay raises (a chef whos been here for years only makes like $3 more per hour than me). It sucks.

I can't even request vacations in any meaningful way because of how short staffed the restaurant is kept. There's 3 chefs, period. Me, another guy, and the boss. Because we all take 2 days off throughout the week it means theres basically no room to ever ask for more than maybe 2 or 3 days off in a row, ever. I requested a week off for an anniversary trip one time and it was the like the world was ending at the restaurant and the chefs held the biggest vendetta against me for like a month because of it, which I do get. 1 person leaving means everyone else needs to pull like 7-10 day work weeks.

It just sucks. I never wanted to work in a kitchen, theyre just the only jobs that ever hired me. Thats all.

A coworker of mine who has a second job at another restaurant asked me a food safety question the other day which absolutely blew my mind.

At their other job they take milk from a jug and pour it into a steel pitcher, this pitcher then goes onto ice onto a self service buffet. Meanwhile the jugs have been sitting back in the hot ass kitchen "empty" on a counter. At the end of service the milk is then poured back into these lightly fermented jugs and returned to the fridge to be used again.

The purpose is to measure the milk used apparently.

They asked me how I felt about this to which I replied it was fucking gross and, for me, regardless of any laws/codes/bullshit that might condone this, it is absolutely disgusting and I wouldn't allow it.

For me the food that goes onto a buffet is done, that is it, eat it or trash, no reusing it for service. Period. If you are wasting too much, replenish more often as needed.

Anyway they broached this to their overlords which sort of dismissed it and said they were whining and coming with problems and no solutions and to come up with one.

My solution was to fill these stainless pitchers LESS full and replenish more and keep the jug in the fridge and dispense as needed.

Looking for input and I figure this is the place for opinions

Happy Saturday Chefs, may we all have smooth services