Kitchen Management: Prep Lists, Pressure & the Art of Running a Kitchen
Pot Luck Food Talks: Kitchen Stories From Behind the PassShow Notes
🎙️ EP161 - Chefs live and die by the prep list. This episode is kitchen discipline: owning your section, juggling a thousand timers, costing without bullshit, and letting go of those ego dishes nobody orders.
🎧 Topics Covered in This Episode: 📋 Night Prep Lists – Building a bulletproof station 🐂 Grab the Bull by the Horns – Taking real control of your section (and surviving clopening) 🗣️ Commies, Demi, CDP – Communication and chain of command that actually works ⏱️ Chefs as Project Managers – Living inside a storm of timers 💻 Apps & Excel – Why most kitchen software still sucks 📊 Costing 101 – Steak, fries, rosemary salt & the hidden percentages 💸 Margin of Error – Airport pricing and not lying to yourself 📈 Dynamic Pricing – When burgers behave like plane tickets 🤝 Front of House Magic – The golden goose and the perfect check ⭐ Dogs, Plow Horses & Stars – Menu engineering for real kitchens 🥔 Buying Better Product – Quality vs. racing to the bottom 🧠 Ego Dishes – Specials, sweetbreads & gently educating guests
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🔥 Enjoy!
More from Pot Luck Food Talks: Kitchen Stories From Behind the Pass
🎙️ EP208 — Leaving the line isn't starting over: the years you spent cooking are your unfair advantage everywhere else.
🎙️ EP207 — The better you are at keeping a broken kitchen running, the less reason anyone has to fix it.
🎙️ EP206 — It shouldn't be two teams: the kitchen and the floor win or lose the same service together.
🎙️ EP205 — Better restaurants often pay less, and nobody teaches cooks about finances: why are so many of us struggling to make good money?
🎙️ EP204 — Low pay, long hours, starting at the bottom: are kitchens only built for cooks who start young, or is there an advantage to starting at 30, 40 or 50?