Education, in all its forms, pays off when it is focused, sincere, and ongoing. Most world-class organizations quickly indicate training and education as keys to their success. However, it isn’t simply a matter of sending employees to classes and checking training off your to-do list. It is about using educational opportunities to strategically deepen the culture of the organization. The information in this article is applicable to all training efforts including orientation, on-the-job training, and ongoing training efforts.
Effective education/training in an organization should accomplish three objectives:
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Today we embark on the fist day of our French Food Safari.
A group of 12 Chefs and F&B managers will join us on this 3 day total immersion in the delights of the Provence cuisine.
The group will arrive in Marseilles Airport this afternoon and the first stop will be Oustau de Baumaniere .
Tonnie gives the participants the final briefing before departure from Copenhagen
A new book, “The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine,” released in the United States last month, Rudolph Chelminski, a journalist friend of Loiseau’s, outlines the tragic story that may be increasingly relevant to Americans watching their own chefs ascend the ladder of celebrity.What the book does not cover is the reaction to Loiseau’s suicide among the French culinary elite. Some of the country’s most revered chefs have recently condemned the system that many believe led to Loiseau’s death — the critics and the obsessive cultivation of Michelin’s top ranking. Three chefs have renounced the Michelin rating system this year, giving up their stars or asking not to be rated.
Washingtonpost
Yalie Cuisine. “We don’t want students to feel that eating well is suffering,” says Josh Viertel, explaining the philosophy behind the “sustainable” menu at Yale’s Berkeley College dining hall, as reported by Alison Leigh Cowan in The New York Times. Twist is, it’s the Yale students who can’t have Berkeley’s experimental organic meals who are suffering. They’ll do just about anything to have at the burgers of “grass-fed lamb and freshly picked mint … chicken brodo with pasta and greens and pork loin with fennel … They try to slip fake identification cards past the Yale employees stationed at the entrance. They don sweatshirts with the Berkeley insignia to make it look as if they belong …”
“Whatever they can get away with,” says Catherine Jones, Berkeley’s executive chef. It sure beats “picking from the same old nonorganic salad bars, scooping out the sugary cereals and chewing on chuck-patty hamburgers slipped into white bread rolls” like they do at Yale’s 11 other dining halls. The idea for this “sustainable” dining hall, yale.edu/sustainablefood, was hatched four years by Alice Waters, a chef, “when her daughter Fanny became a freshman.” The project started by turning “a vacant lot into a lush vegetable garden that doubles as a laboratory … The three-meal-a-day rollout came in September 2003.” The thinking is “that people and communities thrive when meals consist of locally produced, seasonal ingredients, rather than food that is shipped long distance or processed so it keeps.”
Reveries
Much of PF Chang’s success comes from its operations practices, analysts say. Restaurant managers are partial owners in the eateries they run. This helps reduce turnover — the bane of the industry — allowing the company to deliver the key factor in a restaurant’s success: a consistent customer experience in food and service, says Sharon Zackfia, an analyst with William Blair & Co. in Chicago, who rates PF Chang’s stock outperform.
What also helps, says PF Chang Chief Executive Richard Federico, is that his places offer extras not found at many mom-and-pop Chinese restaurants: upscale decor, dessert menus, cappuccino, and a 50-bottle wine list. “PF Chang’s has offered an alternative without compromising product quality,” he says.
Business Week
