Wednesday, May 29, 2024

Staff Dining

 Every restaurant is more or less like a big family. There are times when there's fighting and tenseness and times when there's sitting down to eat like a proper clan. Nowadays many eateries are making sure that their employees eat together as opposed to feud,

Regular contributor Julia Moskin wrote about this perk in today's New York Times Food section,Many restaurants are featuring this however it;s not new. The great and legendary French chef Auguste Escoffier implemented this in  restaurant kitchens during the NIneteenth Century. There eateries served the three meals, from breakfast to dinner..Cooks ate while they sweated above their stove top. The communard, an employee who ranked only slightly below  the "kitchen boy" was tasked with keeping them with food and drink over the long hours. The low status of the meal was in place until only very recently. Long before food waste became a public and  chef's concern, cooks were preoccupied with how to use up every scrap of an ingredients. Scraps and trimmings were used in making some kind of dinner for waitstaff and sous chefs.it was usually bulked out wit some kind of pasta or rice.However this was not the case in fast food joints and casual restaurants. Employees usually had to pay  - at a discount for their food.

It all changed with the farm to table movement.in 1999 even The French Laundry Cookbook by Thomas Keller included recipes for "staff lasagna" and salad dressing. In 2000 David Wattuck co founder and chef of Chanterelle in TriBeCa dedicated a cookbook to the subject "Staff meals from Chanterelle." Dinners can also be a testing ground for chefs trying out new recipes. Sometimes it provides restaurants with signature dishes.,At LA's Budonowskl , chef Dan rabiwongse created charred sweet potato  with miso butter and chives for his staff along with fried chicken wings tossed in a SOuth Asian style sauce similar to Disney's Bengal Barbecue Stand.Some chefs even encourage their employees to bring in their cooking styles to the staff meals.Lala Bazahm, chef at Austen Texas's El Ravale wants to try  her staff's family recipes and to see how they're cooked Her'staff's international background from Vietnam to Senegal to Thailand influenced many dishes on her menu.

Restaurants are not just for outsiders eating in.They're also for staff to get to know each other and their recipes. It'sa great way to experience restaurant life.




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