To get your kitchen up and running, it’s not enough to find a chef who can cook. The first step is to fully develop the menu and think through all the steps involved in preparing the food. Then, the workplace for the chef (or chefs) and the storage system for preparations need to be organised to suit specific tasks and dishes. These tasks are usually decided by the head chef or chef in cooperation with the technologist.
The success of a small café where only one or two employees are permanently in the kitchen depends largely on how well the menu is drawn up and all the technical processes are organised, which you can control yourself. If you are planning to open a large cafe, chef is a must – to monitor the work of the kitchen and supervise the line cooks, as well as distribute the load between them. But for a small establishment, keeping a chef in-house all the time is neither profitable nor necessary. He is needed during the start-up period, and then about once a season – to update the menu, draw up flow charts for dishes and semi-finished products (these are documents in which the full composition and method of preparation of all dishes from the menu is described) and control the work of ordinary chefs.
