Ken Burgin

chef training

Podcast 13: Teaching Chefs About Kitchen Management and Menu Design

We expect a lot from chefs – not only to manage production and service, but keep to a budget, organise a team of people and handle safety issues, changing food trends, menu design & engineering, plus social media and a bit of marketing. It’s a big ask, especially when they may not have had training beyond hands-on experience with another chef.

In this podcast, Ken Burgin talks with Liz Perkins, a chef, former hospitality business owner, and trainer with The Hospitality Company, where she teaches chefs all about leadership and team management, food costing, menu engineering and stock control. Details of her excellent course are outlined here.

Topics they discussed:

  • How to train people in ‘financial literacy’ and a better understanding of numbers – what does that mean each day for most restaurants or cafes?
  • How Liz moved from running a kitchen to teaching how to run one.
  • What do most people not understand about recipe costing and menu design? How do we make things clearer?
  • What are the bad habits of stock management you try to improve, and how do people get a handle on this in a busy workplace?
  • Developing systems – what does a business need as a priority, and how do we avoid more paperwork and bureaucracy?
  • Developing kitchen leadership and a high-performance team – challenges for chefs or all ages, male and female, local and non-local?
  • Putting theory into practice – what are the main challenges chefs find once they’ve ‘seen the light’ and go back to work?
  • Developing teaching and coaching expertise – what Liz calls ‘the teaching heart’.

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