05/29/2026
I have a funny story ending with a new catchy idiomatic expression you can use. (Yes, Rachael gave me those big words.) Humor me. How do chefs come up with menu items? Any good chef will consider a number of different factors. It's not just what suits our fancy. It's cost, seasonality, your customer base, and most importantly functionality. In most fine dining restaurants the kitchen is setup in a "brigade system." Meaning there are different stations responsible for different things in the kitchen. For example, on the line, there is grill, sauté , fry, and garde manger. Each station is responsible for different menu items. Steaks come off grill, salads and desserts come off garde manger, pastas come off sauté , and so fourth. A good chef makes sure that when creating a menu there are not too many dishes coming off of one station. The menu should be distributed evenly amongst them to avoid any station becoming backed up or overloaded during service. Keep this in mind as we continue. We catered a private gig last night and they happened to choose two items from "sauté," Wild Mushroom Risotto and the Thai Green Curry. Now a food truck doesn't have stations, right? Well, we do, and I tend to every one. A lot of food trucks from my understanding show up with everything already made so they just scoop and serve, turn and burn. That's fine, that's just not how I learned to do things. In any good restaurant there will be things already prepared. Pasta and the risotto rice are par cooked so they can be easily finished "ala minute" or at the last minute, right before they get plated and sent off to you. We do it the same way. The vegetables are sautéd, the sauce is thickened in a sauté pan all "ala minute." It's better that way. But things take a little longer and it's definitely not the easiest way. Back to last night, people were ordering a lot of everything, especially the two items off of sauté. In two hours I made about 11 Risottos and 12 Green Currys. Doesn't seem like much, but with only two sauté burners and all while making 75 other menu items it became very frustrating. "Who is this chef putting two items off of sauté on a busy night?" It's me, that's who I'm mad at, who I loathed every time Rachael called back another RISOTTO! or GREEN CURRY! So in life, make sure you don't have "too many irons in the fire", or when life gets dicey now you can say, "Don't have too many dishes coming off sauté!"
