A sneak peek into the culture of a restaurant kitchen!

The Hospitality industry is primarily people-driven and caters to two types of guests – one is
the internal guest, that is our staff and team & the other is the external guest who comes in
and uses our facility and we take care of them. This makes it extremely important to have a
healthy working culture, be it in the outlet, in the F&B operations, the kitchen, the storing,
the housekeeping, the service personnel, or the security teams to make the business run
smoothly.
The Challenges
If we look at the kitchen, the storing or housekeeping, the working personnel are very low on
literacy & education but they do make it up by their hard work and their intensity as the
operations demand that kind of dedication, passion, and tough mental & physical output.
Thereby, we deal with them on a different level of communication.
Life is not easy for them. Handling challenges like mood swings or atrocious demands of
guests, striking a work-life balance, upskilling along with their bundle of issues becomes
overwhelming at times.
There are challenges in terms of the working environment. Like, the heat and the intensity of
the atmosphere in the kitchen primarily make the chefs at play in a very hot-tempered mood.
They have a lot to deal with – temperature, speed, quality, precision – all at once, the minute
the places are open for operation. Food is such a vast and sensitive topic, the taste and liking
differ from person to person and hence, we as operators make sure that you first analyze the
offering.
So, irrespective of moods and likes and dislikes of individual people, cooking needs to follow
a standard recipe which is drawn, and they are then trained in that line to produce that recipe
irrespective of the day or anything. Things like this are how the dish is made, this is how it is
presented, this is how it is portioned out, everything is very specific on that front. However,
having said that, each Chef does have his hand and his special touches and that's what we
look into when we are forming our team and during the training.
So, putting together and running a successful F&B business is bringing all such teams
together and working under one roof in a happy state of mind. Food is an extremely sensitive
product and it’s where you have to be in a happy state of mind to deliver, while cooking and
maintain good quality consistently. For this to happen, the service personnel have to have
their heart & soul into the work to be pleasant & friendly to carry out their task.

Making things happen

On one hand, when we open high-end operations, like luxurious restaurants & hotels, the
personnel who are working in this kind of industry come from an extremely ordinary
background in terms of the economic scale. So, how does one make them understand who
probably earns ten thousand rupees a month or fifteen thousand a month that the food that’s
being served is sometimes five to ten thousand rupees per person per plate? How do we
convince them that you need to step-up beyond your reality of life and come & deliver at this
level?
We need extremely high personnel interaction and hence this industry is run by passion,
where once you put your uniform, you forget your background, you forget your reality and
you step-up into the work atmosphere & you are ready to perform at the highest level. There
are no rules and regulations – just some standard operating procedures, as everyone, but
human interaction often overtakes these procedures.
The various sections in the kitchen act as they gravitate towards their strengths. There is a
culture that is our work and we do it together, ensuring that they are delivering their
maximum outputs by putting in an area where they are strong. So, the kitchen is a dynamic
area where there is plenty to do all the time whereas areas like housekeeping, etc. follow
pretty much the standard operating procedures. However, the health of the place is when the
team comes together, joins hands together as one, where all the departments are merged into
one big operation and that's where our success lies! That's where successful brands &
individual entrepreneurs thrive.
I believe in the team having an ethos. We have had fabulous instances of people working
beyond their calling. We have drivers coming & helping to set up the food. We have had
occasions like banquet parties & halls and there is a challenge happening and people put up
their hands at the right time & that's what counts. So culture, when we say culture in the
hospitality industry is an amalgamation of human behaviour understanding & you do tend to
give or lose your rope than a standard black & white dry operation because of the human
interface involved in the operation.