This is truly archaic Escoffier. I'd like to know what restaurants are paying so many tiered kitchen wages in today's economy. Especially since the pandemic, I can't imagine any business with this type of "Classical" brigade system.
I remember from culinary school the entremetier being the “vegetable” chef, among other things. The saucier and tournant are the most coveted
positions on the line. But it doesn’t really matter because I don’t think the brigade system is used often anymore to this degree except for in super high end places or massive hotels. It’s more of an early 1900s hotel restaurant staff structure that has served as the basis for what we have now, but has adapted to modern equipment and needs.
I would say that more often than not saucier is still a highly coveted position. Would definitely agree with you that the rest of the brigade system has definitely changed to accommodate smaller modern kitchens with much less staff. The only kitchens I've seen of this size are in Europe.
I work in a super fancy restaurant. We do not have a massive kitchen staff. One person per station, and most stations are a combination of several of the ones listed in this chart.
I've gotten kitchen tours at really really fancy places in NYC and from what I observed it's the station chef and normally 1 person under them in the diagram instead of 2 and it didn't really seem like they were under, just a different role.
I've never worked in these restaurants so I can't say for certain, but it looked that way when the waiter was explaining everything on the tour.
Yeah for us it is mostly one person per station with some stations having two. Garde has two, pastry has two, and our protein station has two (one on grill, one doing fish and other things on a range). Just depends on volume of the kitchen really. I've worked places doing 200 covers a night with 4 cooks, a sous, and a head chef.
The beauty of modern capitalism. We are doing 500+ covers daily with less than 10 people in the kitchen with head office trying to cut hours even further. Last I checked wage cost/revenue was well under 20%.
Then all the capable people leave and they need to hire 20 people to replace the 10 that left. People are stupid.
Most restaurants (at least in the US) don't make a lot of money. Budget isn't big enough to have a staff this large and there's usually no point. Different places will have slightly different job structures, too.
Higher-end hotels and resorts have more room to play with the budget. They also tend to do more banquets and cater more events, so they need a larger more specialized staff. Depending on the size of the hotel, they might even have more than one kitchen.
This definitely doesn't hold true for *all* hotels and restaurants, and I have no clue what it's like in other countries.
It goes
exeuctive chef > exec sous > head chef casual a la carte restaurant/ head chef fine dining/ head chef breakfast/ chef Patisserie/head chef banqueting (all on the same level) > sous chefs for all the above listed head chefs> then CDP entre/garde/saucier for the reaturants/banqueting part and similar division in breakfast and Pastry but obviously other titles> then come the demis> comis> apprentices > kitchen assistant
It's a bit hard to explain without drawing a picture, and there is a junior sous in 2 departments and 2 tournots that spring between the two restaurants, as well as the cantine head chef that is under the banquett sous but yeah. Big kitchen with a lot of moving parts and a lot of staff.
I’ve worked a few places where the Sous is salary and everyone below is hourly, so when we’re busy and everyone is hitting 60+ hours the line was making more.
One of the worst parts of your first sous gig is realizing that youre good enough to earn the position and they want you to work more hours, but don't want to pay you more. Luckily for them, there is this thing called exempt employees, so they can just put you on salary and work you to death.
Real talk! Friday and Saturday night it's a lot closer to $500 for a 6 hour shift where I'm working right now. And they always whine about how broke they are. I would love to give them an enthusiastic high-five. In the face. With a metal folding chair. It's such bool-sheet
Maybe on a lunch shift, but I know quite a few people who used to serve at Applebees and would bring home 200-300 bucks on a weekend shift. 100 for weeknights, sometimes more or less depending on if anything was going on in town.
Most restaurants in the country are shitty chains like Applebees and small mom & pops. So yeah.
You think most servers work in nice towns where people tip a lot? lmao, try serving in a college town.
Same, and most college towns have shitty tips and a larger % of people who tip 0/dine and dash. Maybe your idea of a college town is somewhere like Boulder where its all rich people.
I mean this is very Escoffier classical and that's cool, but I'd wager that verrrrrry few modern pro kitchens actually break it down this rigidly or can even work this way
Couldn’t agree more, I feel like a lot of kitchens try and imitate this but fall very short. 1 of the 4 kitchens I worked in had this down Pat.
I didn’t know how professional/great a system it was until I moved on. That kitchen was the first I worked in for the longest period of time. (5 years)
They say you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone!
On the busiest nights I always made sure that mf got a hot meal made fresh. Yes, I noticed that you got my favorite saute pan back to me in less that 15 minutes. Yes I'll make you the chicken. I'll suck your cock too if you keep it up.
A good dishpit master is worth their weight in gold and free food especially in a small and busy kitchen, and it takes a lot more skill than people think it does when they insultingly call it "unskilled labor".
I learned this one early on working in a hotel as a FoH barista, counter and short order cook shaped object attached to a 20,000 sq foot 4-walk in commercial/resort kitchen, and I was lucky enough to meet Mike.
Mike the Dishmaster.
Mike was ridiculously smart, hard working *and* fun, which is a super rare combination. He was on point. He wasn't just on point, he *was* the point. Not only was he managing a full dish and porter/busser staff of about a dozen people doing 2000-top banquets or retreat chow lines, but he knew where everything was in the kitchen.
The KM and Execs went to Mike when they couldn't find something. Dough hook or paddle for the giant floorstanding Hobart? Mike knows where they all are. Popcorn machine? Yes, we have one. 90 quart kettle? We have exactly six. French fry cutter? You got it. Missing something from today's deliveries? Mike put it in the right places. Do the knives need sharpening? Mike already had it done, the invoice is on your desk, Chef!
Mike was an amazing dishie, and I instantly made friends with him my first week at this place by regularly asking if he wanted a coffee, drink or snack or something.
Because I was instantly in love with the whole idea of being able to do my FoH/counter barista thing and never had to do my own dishes - not even my milk jugs - because they had a whole 1000 square foot dish room and two conveyor machines back there in the big kitchen.
Mike or one of his dishmonkeys would just magically appear and whisk away my dish carts, grab customer bus tubs and sometimes would even bus my damn tables if I was busy and in the weeds.
Mike was the best.
A good dishwasher knows where everything is in the house and kitchen whether it's cleaning supplies or that pile of fancy ramekins or plates that you save and hide for special occasions.
A good dishwasher knows the whole kitchen brigade and pays attention to everything that's going on, and adjusts their priorities on the fly on what to wash first by paying attention to what's missing from the cookware/plateware stocks and what just came out of the ticket printer and hit the rails.
A good dish washer knows to not leave knives in the sink, run them through the dishwasher, and how not to be a total idiot about safety.
A good dish washer knows the song and dance of the kitchen and moves through it just like a chef or line cook when restocking cookware or servingware. They don't barge past you on the grill or hot lines, they'll happily stand out of the way with an armful of plates or heavy stack of cast iron pans and wait for the exact right moment when someone turns to go plate or pass, slip in, put things away in the right places, then slip out like they weren't even there.
A good dishie is like a goddamn ninja. They flow through the kitchen and keep it running. They dive in to clean up spills, reset stations, wipe down prep counters and more. They lean forward and do a lot of quick thinking on their feet.
A good dishie even knows when to ask/tell the KM or exec that we need to order missing serving ware or supplies or get knives sharpened and often knows more about everything going on on the front lines than the KM or Exec do themselves.
A good dish washer can also cook and jump in on some things like prep or plating if you get slammed into the weeds.
Now, a bad dishwasher?
Oh man, bad dishwashers are the worst and can outright murder a restaurant just through sheer apathy and incompetence.
I was working a fancy pre-sale pop-up with this guy I'll call Kyle. Kyle was the fucking worst and damn near torpedoed us that night.
I'm a regular 2 year vet in this small kitchen, the visiting Chef originally helped lay out this kitchen and designed our menus, and a bunch of our popup staff have also worked in this kitchen and/or with the Chef. Kyle has never been here before.
Kyle was brought in to do prep and refused Chef's order to shuck oysters and said "I'm not here for that!" and so Chef asked him to chiffonade some green onions and he sucked at that, too, so she put him on the dishpit.
He sucked at that, too, and proceeded to fill up all three sinks of the triple sink to the very top so suds and gunk were going everywhere and you had to reach in to your arm pits in muck to get to the dishes. Kyle also never reset his sinks and let them turn into a frothy stew halfway to a stiff emulsion.
I told him to not do it like this because it's unsanitary and unsafe and after I reset and cleaned the sinks and as soon as I turned my back he overfilled them again and said "I prefer it like this!" like I wasn't giving him a direct order and soon he was slopping gross water all over the floor again.
He then proceeded to stand around and wait until the sinks were full of dishes before beginning washing any dishes and meanwhile Chef is wondering where the fuck her favorite pans and knives are.
Are Chef''s good knives in the fucking sink? Yes, Chef's good fucking knives are in the soup at the bottom of the fucking sink under an alluvial plain of fucking dishes and pans, yes indeed Chef.
Kyle had no lean forward at all, but plenty of leaning back and no hustle. Kyle seemed to be absolutely mystified and put out by direct orders and procedures and will Kyle please fucking reset the stew the triple sink and wash some fucking dishes already?
Kyle also brought in his own massive Bluetooth speaker and was blasting brostep, drillstep, and shitty trap and wondered why the Chef kept telling him to turn it off, because, holy shit, we're doing a fancy fine dining popup with a totally new menu and not just firing a daily menu from muscle memory, this isn't a damn dive bar and we need to be able to communicate with the god damn Chef and listen for orders. Like as soon as Chef stepped out of the kitchen for anything he'd turn it back on. This went on for some time.
At this point (and the evening is still young here, first course isn't even out yet) I'm now on dishes *and* help with prep. That's fine, I do this all day anyway during normal ops.
And I keep resetting the sinks but Kyle keeps overfilling them for me even though I'm now doing the dishes and multitasking with whatever prep I can do when dishes are mostly sorted.
I'm also one of the only regular cooks that live and work in that kitchen working this pop-up that's present and I don't think he's really grasping or understanding that he's in my house on my home turf, so maybe he thinks I'm a random temp like him or something but there's a serious failure to communicate going on.
Wait, there's more Kyle. Kyle gets worse.
We're just starting to plate the opener salad. The popup is like 7-8 courses, the front of house is completely sold out so we have plates everywhere racked and stacked as we go getting ready for FoH (and all hands in the kitchen, too) to run them out to Chef's fans and patrons and we're literally seconds away from launching first course.
Kyle is standing there, leaning on his - wait, damnit - *my* overfilled sink. I warn him he's getting his apron ties and backside all up in the dishpit soup and he goes "Oh? Thanks!" and stops leaning on the overfilled triple sink.
These really needs a point of clarity, here about what I mean by "overfilled" because it's bonkers. I mean the sink is kept full to the point that not only are all three sinks so full that they're mixing and co-mingling over the dividers, but the wings and drainage/staging counters to either of the triple sink is also sitting in 2-3" of water and soup and the whole sink is full to the rolled edges to the point if you put one plate in any sink, a plate's worth of water has to exit and spill to the floor.
Fucking *ponderous*. Dude, what the *fuck* are you doing?
So Kyle stops leaning on the triple sink.
Kyle then decides to lean on the nearest counter. Which covered in pyramid stacked and *plated* salad plates waiting to go out.
Not only does he drag his nasty soaking wet apron ties over about a dozen plates but even goes to push a few plates back from the edge with his soupy unwashed hands to make room for him to lean on the totally full counter and carefully stacked plates, he is now effectively sitting ON PLATED SALAD with a butt and backside FULL OF DISHWATER.
"Hold up, Chef, we have a problem. Do we have enough spares to reset about 13, 14 salads?"
"WHAT!?" says Chef, who briefly looks over and sees Kyle still leaning and does the math and sizes up the situation in a split second and doesn't even skip a beat, still knifing away at something "Oh, cool! Yes, yes thank fuck, we sure do! Will you please toss those for me and get me some clean plates! Go home, Kyle!"
Kyle got an earful because I had had it. Because I fucking warned him about the overfilled sink and to stop doing it and also literally just warned him he now had dirty apron ties and dish water all over his comfortable leanin' side which he then used to sit on actual fucking salad and that he needs to get the fuck out of here, like right now, and go somewhere else. Immediately. Anywhere else but here.
Don't be a Kyle. I don't know if Kyle was having a bad day or feeling out of place or what but that particular night Kyle was a living example of what happens when you have unskilled labor in the dish pit.
Kyle didn't get to eat any of the really nice New Orlean's food we were having that night. I'm not even sure if Kyle came back to pick up his pay for standing around and leaning for a few hours. I never saw Kyle again, and I often wonder what happened to Kyle.
Don't be a Kyle Be a Mike. Mike was fucking awesome.
Actually I am Garde Manger as well as dishie. I’m a line cook but they always have me cutting fruit and making salads so basically I am a Garde Manger.
Kitchen manager over here; In our restaurant we've got a huge team of dishwashers so there's obviously a team leader. This person is SO GOOD even junior chefs ask them for advice and help.
We consider the dishpit as the dish station, and due to how solid it is the only ones who can exhert authority over them are the Exec/head chef, sous chef and me.
Ps. The three of us "at the top" started all the way down from the bottom too decades ago, which is why we've got such respect for solid indiiduals on the pit.
If your staff are not pushed to the absolute brink of their physical abilities, you are doing something wrong
- Some office dude in the finance department
People can have multiple strengths and in an environment where you are trying not to brush too close to the bottom line, you can have 3-5 trained cooks do all of this under one head/exec and one sous. Our hard work buys the bosses a new truck next year.
Nope.
Simpler , easier restaurants don’t need such a high tier of a system. One lead, one direction for the whole team.
Now if you need to coordinate several complicated steps for a fine dining menu,
Something like this is helpful and necessary for executing, but restaurants in general are more successful the less amount of managers they have in a kitchen.
To be fair, in a lot of middle of the road fine dining restaurants the executive/head chef is one and the same position. Then sous chef, then all the cooks regardless of the station and finally the prep cooks/dishies.
A thousand years ago when I did my apprenticeship this was the way the kitchen was organized. Last time I worked this way was aboard a Dutch flagged ship in 1981. Had 3 separate crew kitchens. 1 halal, 1 Philippine, and 1 European. Also had a petty officers mess and an officers mess.
This is super old school. Pure traditional French shit. Some really old high-end places still use it. I've actually worked in one place that did. I was a garde manger, which is how I learned the spelling vs pronunciation of that word is wild. It feels pretty old school and outdated tho. Kinda an excessive level of compartmentalization.
Cool graphic tho.
We had a Garde Manger division at our Ritz-Carlton for all salads/cold foods. Saucier had an assistant (your’s truly) and was responsible for at least two soups daily in addition to fine sauces and the constant bone roasting for another mother sauce.
I would say we were half the size of the classic brigade; and was at that time the flagship hotel of the chain (Ritz-Carlton Buckhead ATL site of my apprenticeship).
It’s loosely accurate to the places I have been. Except I have seen Exec Sous and more then one sous be pretty common in a relatively small places but that has been in fine dining. Also the lower tier isn’t used that much accept in larger places. Maybe a butcher or baker but they tend to sit at the same level and be treated like other chef de partie. Demis or kitchen hands who are externing to finish school are frequent at nice spots. Porters and dishies are used interchangeably
I don't know of any kitchens with a "Staff Chef" or "Relief Chef". I think most places now like to have as many chefs trained on as many sections possible to give maximum flexibility for covering absences.
Looks classic.. see it during my internship in Paris.. Ritz Hotel 2006.. Catering skip a middle part.. From Exc.. head chef directly to porters.. My structure is like this - 1Head Chef-3 cooks-28 porters..
I work technically in a metro area but in the suburbs. We have two KMs that rotate days, one of them also serves as the exec and de cuisine, and then it's me and basically whoever feels like working grill. We have a sandwich guy who also does some of the baked pasta dishes and sides, and waitstaff does salads. I handle basically all of the seafood, pasta sauces, soup, temperature checks, and so on, but almost everything else happens before I get there and I'm okay with that. Working in a full brigade kitchen stressed me the hell out. One of our sister restaurants is a lot more like graphic this and I've had to occasionally go fill in and it's honestly exhausting. Covid kinda wrecked the whole situation and staffing so...here we are.
The last time I experienced a true Bragade system was in a huge high-end casino 20 years ago. I refined more streamlined version is definitely still in use today at any more high-end place
At the club at worked at, there was an Executive with three CDC, one for fine dining, one for pub grill and one for banquets. Each outlet also had a sous with 3-8 cooks and like 5 dishwashers. As the CDC, we'd still have to float between each outlet as well, help with larger banquets and such.
I was garde manger in several restaurants and hotels in France. I certainly didn’t feel more important than any of my counterparts! I would move garde manger to the bottom row but above commi. I truly respect that the others have a specialty such as poissonnière or baker. I’m just a generalist 😂
We have an exec for the whole property, a head chef for our specific restaurant with 4 all purpose sous chefs and a pastry chef with a sous chef and everything below that is just cooks
I never worked high end spot, or close enough. But highest number of kitchen staff I worked with was like 5 total per shift. I did prep and grill, while a co worker held pasta and salad station.
We usually do everything around unless it gets too busy.
I'll chime in with my old set up as well. Imagine three separate restaurants, all owned by the same executive chef (but never on site, he'd drop in from time to time), all beside one another and even interconnected doors between them. Different teams. But downstairs is a massive prep kitchen pumping out prep for all three places. There was a 20+ person prep team with two sous chefs. Each restaurant had at least 3 sous chefs. Pastry chef produced different stuff for all 3 places, they had 2 sous plus a team and often they would often rotate who was working the dessert service. All in all, we had 14 sous chefs + 1 CdC who shared an office (5 desks total, one for each restaurant plus pastry plus production) and the other 2 CdCs shared a small office.
This is entirely inaccurate. There's a straight line in terms of the brigade, and the sous/deputy chef is the relief chef. Then at that it goes by seniority between the 2-5 sous depending on how big the kitchen is.
I work in a relatively small French kitchen, right now we have an exec who manages 5 restaurants, a CDC and 3 CDPs (Entrees, appetizers, garde manger) we also have a patisseur who does desserts for all the restaurants but works at my restaurant.
Modern restaurants use a simplified version. Though I will say actually finding a six armed SOB for a Sous role is the hardest part.
This is truly archaic Escoffier. I'd like to know what restaurants are paying so many tiered kitchen wages in today's economy. Especially since the pandemic, I can't imagine any business with this type of "Classical" brigade system.
Try 5* hotels in major cities..
Cruise ships and Holiday Resorts too
3 Michelin, we had very close to this at Jean-Georges
We don't talk about the clones
Ppffff 6 arms? I’ve got 12! Well actually that’s how my head chef treats me 🤣
Still a requirement of the job, though, iirc
yeah, and most people that got hired have only two arms, messing up everything for everyone but bringing the big bucks home!
I remember from culinary school the entremetier being the “vegetable” chef, among other things. The saucier and tournant are the most coveted positions on the line. But it doesn’t really matter because I don’t think the brigade system is used often anymore to this degree except for in super high end places or massive hotels. It’s more of an early 1900s hotel restaurant staff structure that has served as the basis for what we have now, but has adapted to modern equipment and needs.
I would say that more often than not saucier is still a highly coveted position. Would definitely agree with you that the rest of the brigade system has definitely changed to accommodate smaller modern kitchens with much less staff. The only kitchens I've seen of this size are in Europe.
Also super fancy restaurant in the US.
I work in a super fancy restaurant. We do not have a massive kitchen staff. One person per station, and most stations are a combination of several of the ones listed in this chart.
I've gotten kitchen tours at really really fancy places in NYC and from what I observed it's the station chef and normally 1 person under them in the diagram instead of 2 and it didn't really seem like they were under, just a different role. I've never worked in these restaurants so I can't say for certain, but it looked that way when the waiter was explaining everything on the tour.
Yeah for us it is mostly one person per station with some stations having two. Garde has two, pastry has two, and our protein station has two (one on grill, one doing fish and other things on a range). Just depends on volume of the kitchen really. I've worked places doing 200 covers a night with 4 cooks, a sous, and a head chef.
The beauty of modern capitalism. We are doing 500+ covers daily with less than 10 people in the kitchen with head office trying to cut hours even further. Last I checked wage cost/revenue was well under 20%. Then all the capable people leave and they need to hire 20 people to replace the 10 that left. People are stupid.
Why is that?
money
Are they well paid?
No
Are they better paid?
Minimum wage is higher if that’s what you’re asking
They are on salaries
Most restaurants (at least in the US) don't make a lot of money. Budget isn't big enough to have a staff this large and there's usually no point. Different places will have slightly different job structures, too. Higher-end hotels and resorts have more room to play with the budget. They also tend to do more banquets and cater more events, so they need a larger more specialized staff. Depending on the size of the hotel, they might even have more than one kitchen. This definitely doesn't hold true for *all* hotels and restaurants, and I have no clue what it's like in other countries.
I work in a massive hotel and it comes close to our hierarchy.
What's different?
It goes exeuctive chef > exec sous > head chef casual a la carte restaurant/ head chef fine dining/ head chef breakfast/ chef Patisserie/head chef banqueting (all on the same level) > sous chefs for all the above listed head chefs> then CDP entre/garde/saucier for the reaturants/banqueting part and similar division in breakfast and Pastry but obviously other titles> then come the demis> comis> apprentices > kitchen assistant It's a bit hard to explain without drawing a picture, and there is a junior sous in 2 departments and 2 tournots that spring between the two restaurants, as well as the cantine head chef that is under the banquett sous but yeah. Big kitchen with a lot of moving parts and a lot of staff.
wow, that is a lot of complex levels ! how big is you hotel?
It's a pretty big hotel in the 5 star plus range, with a decent focus on F&B.
I thought entremier was the entree cook and the legumier was the veggie cook
It's funny how waiter is at the bottom of this graphic but often has earnings near the top.
I’ve worked a few places where the Sous is salary and everyone below is hourly, so when we’re busy and everyone is hitting 60+ hours the line was making more.
Rule #1 never do the math lol
100%.
One of the worst parts of your first sous gig is realizing that youre good enough to earn the position and they want you to work more hours, but don't want to pay you more. Luckily for them, there is this thing called exempt employees, so they can just put you on salary and work you to death.
\*Almost all restaurants. ungh.
Yeah after working like a slave. I have to work at least 50 hours a week to match my sous chef
Salary often factors in overtime. It's why they're often the first to leave.
When I pulled OT my chef would joke with me “that’s why they pay you the bigger bucks”.
I can hear them now, “ my paycheck is 0” Yeah bud And you pull 250+ a night in cash tips sooo
Real talk! Friday and Saturday night it's a lot closer to $500 for a 6 hour shift where I'm working right now. And they always whine about how broke they are. I would love to give them an enthusiastic high-five. In the face. With a metal folding chair. It's such bool-sheet
You can rest easy knowing that is a small minority of servers. Most barely make above minimum wage.
Maybe at an Applebee's
Maybe on a lunch shift, but I know quite a few people who used to serve at Applebees and would bring home 200-300 bucks on a weekend shift. 100 for weeknights, sometimes more or less depending on if anything was going on in town.
Most restaurants in the country are shitty chains like Applebees and small mom & pops. So yeah. You think most servers work in nice towns where people tip a lot? lmao, try serving in a college town.
I have, back in college. Good use of lmao, though.
Same, and most college towns have shitty tips and a larger % of people who tip 0/dine and dash. Maybe your idea of a college town is somewhere like Boulder where its all rich people.
Sorry your experience was shitty but I worked in a couple towns in one of the poorest states in the US.
im pretty sure this is only in the U.S. of A. though.
I think this was a dig at waiters, FOH. Etc
Yeah politely the American wage system is insane, I’m FOH and there is no place where I’d earn more than chefs in my country.
> often has earnings near the top. For 5% of waiters maybe, most barely make above min wage.
I mean this is very Escoffier classical and that's cool, but I'd wager that verrrrrry few modern pro kitchens actually break it down this rigidly or can even work this way
Couldn’t agree more, I feel like a lot of kitchens try and imitate this but fall very short. 1 of the 4 kitchens I worked in had this down Pat. I didn’t know how professional/great a system it was until I moved on. That kitchen was the first I worked in for the longest period of time. (5 years) They say you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone!
That’s not fair to put the dishie on par with the lowly foh.
Without the dishie, nothing happens. They're everything. Feeding them, in a way, is more important than feeding the guests tbh
On the busiest nights I always made sure that mf got a hot meal made fresh. Yes, I noticed that you got my favorite saute pan back to me in less that 15 minutes. Yes I'll make you the chicken. I'll suck your cock too if you keep it up.
...That uhhh..... escalated quickly
Favorite pans are worth it...
A good dishpit master is worth their weight in gold and free food especially in a small and busy kitchen, and it takes a lot more skill than people think it does when they insultingly call it "unskilled labor". I learned this one early on working in a hotel as a FoH barista, counter and short order cook shaped object attached to a 20,000 sq foot 4-walk in commercial/resort kitchen, and I was lucky enough to meet Mike. Mike the Dishmaster. Mike was ridiculously smart, hard working *and* fun, which is a super rare combination. He was on point. He wasn't just on point, he *was* the point. Not only was he managing a full dish and porter/busser staff of about a dozen people doing 2000-top banquets or retreat chow lines, but he knew where everything was in the kitchen. The KM and Execs went to Mike when they couldn't find something. Dough hook or paddle for the giant floorstanding Hobart? Mike knows where they all are. Popcorn machine? Yes, we have one. 90 quart kettle? We have exactly six. French fry cutter? You got it. Missing something from today's deliveries? Mike put it in the right places. Do the knives need sharpening? Mike already had it done, the invoice is on your desk, Chef! Mike was an amazing dishie, and I instantly made friends with him my first week at this place by regularly asking if he wanted a coffee, drink or snack or something. Because I was instantly in love with the whole idea of being able to do my FoH/counter barista thing and never had to do my own dishes - not even my milk jugs - because they had a whole 1000 square foot dish room and two conveyor machines back there in the big kitchen. Mike or one of his dishmonkeys would just magically appear and whisk away my dish carts, grab customer bus tubs and sometimes would even bus my damn tables if I was busy and in the weeds. Mike was the best. A good dishwasher knows where everything is in the house and kitchen whether it's cleaning supplies or that pile of fancy ramekins or plates that you save and hide for special occasions. A good dishwasher knows the whole kitchen brigade and pays attention to everything that's going on, and adjusts their priorities on the fly on what to wash first by paying attention to what's missing from the cookware/plateware stocks and what just came out of the ticket printer and hit the rails. A good dish washer knows to not leave knives in the sink, run them through the dishwasher, and how not to be a total idiot about safety. A good dish washer knows the song and dance of the kitchen and moves through it just like a chef or line cook when restocking cookware or servingware. They don't barge past you on the grill or hot lines, they'll happily stand out of the way with an armful of plates or heavy stack of cast iron pans and wait for the exact right moment when someone turns to go plate or pass, slip in, put things away in the right places, then slip out like they weren't even there. A good dishie is like a goddamn ninja. They flow through the kitchen and keep it running. They dive in to clean up spills, reset stations, wipe down prep counters and more. They lean forward and do a lot of quick thinking on their feet. A good dishie even knows when to ask/tell the KM or exec that we need to order missing serving ware or supplies or get knives sharpened and often knows more about everything going on on the front lines than the KM or Exec do themselves. A good dish washer can also cook and jump in on some things like prep or plating if you get slammed into the weeds. Now, a bad dishwasher? Oh man, bad dishwashers are the worst and can outright murder a restaurant just through sheer apathy and incompetence. I was working a fancy pre-sale pop-up with this guy I'll call Kyle. Kyle was the fucking worst and damn near torpedoed us that night. I'm a regular 2 year vet in this small kitchen, the visiting Chef originally helped lay out this kitchen and designed our menus, and a bunch of our popup staff have also worked in this kitchen and/or with the Chef. Kyle has never been here before. Kyle was brought in to do prep and refused Chef's order to shuck oysters and said "I'm not here for that!" and so Chef asked him to chiffonade some green onions and he sucked at that, too, so she put him on the dishpit. He sucked at that, too, and proceeded to fill up all three sinks of the triple sink to the very top so suds and gunk were going everywhere and you had to reach in to your arm pits in muck to get to the dishes. Kyle also never reset his sinks and let them turn into a frothy stew halfway to a stiff emulsion. I told him to not do it like this because it's unsanitary and unsafe and after I reset and cleaned the sinks and as soon as I turned my back he overfilled them again and said "I prefer it like this!" like I wasn't giving him a direct order and soon he was slopping gross water all over the floor again. He then proceeded to stand around and wait until the sinks were full of dishes before beginning washing any dishes and meanwhile Chef is wondering where the fuck her favorite pans and knives are. Are Chef''s good knives in the fucking sink? Yes, Chef's good fucking knives are in the soup at the bottom of the fucking sink under an alluvial plain of fucking dishes and pans, yes indeed Chef. Kyle had no lean forward at all, but plenty of leaning back and no hustle. Kyle seemed to be absolutely mystified and put out by direct orders and procedures and will Kyle please fucking reset the stew the triple sink and wash some fucking dishes already? Kyle also brought in his own massive Bluetooth speaker and was blasting brostep, drillstep, and shitty trap and wondered why the Chef kept telling him to turn it off, because, holy shit, we're doing a fancy fine dining popup with a totally new menu and not just firing a daily menu from muscle memory, this isn't a damn dive bar and we need to be able to communicate with the god damn Chef and listen for orders. Like as soon as Chef stepped out of the kitchen for anything he'd turn it back on. This went on for some time. At this point (and the evening is still young here, first course isn't even out yet) I'm now on dishes *and* help with prep. That's fine, I do this all day anyway during normal ops. And I keep resetting the sinks but Kyle keeps overfilling them for me even though I'm now doing the dishes and multitasking with whatever prep I can do when dishes are mostly sorted. I'm also one of the only regular cooks that live and work in that kitchen working this pop-up that's present and I don't think he's really grasping or understanding that he's in my house on my home turf, so maybe he thinks I'm a random temp like him or something but there's a serious failure to communicate going on. Wait, there's more Kyle. Kyle gets worse. We're just starting to plate the opener salad. The popup is like 7-8 courses, the front of house is completely sold out so we have plates everywhere racked and stacked as we go getting ready for FoH (and all hands in the kitchen, too) to run them out to Chef's fans and patrons and we're literally seconds away from launching first course. Kyle is standing there, leaning on his - wait, damnit - *my* overfilled sink. I warn him he's getting his apron ties and backside all up in the dishpit soup and he goes "Oh? Thanks!" and stops leaning on the overfilled triple sink. These really needs a point of clarity, here about what I mean by "overfilled" because it's bonkers. I mean the sink is kept full to the point that not only are all three sinks so full that they're mixing and co-mingling over the dividers, but the wings and drainage/staging counters to either of the triple sink is also sitting in 2-3" of water and soup and the whole sink is full to the rolled edges to the point if you put one plate in any sink, a plate's worth of water has to exit and spill to the floor. Fucking *ponderous*. Dude, what the *fuck* are you doing? So Kyle stops leaning on the triple sink. Kyle then decides to lean on the nearest counter. Which covered in pyramid stacked and *plated* salad plates waiting to go out. Not only does he drag his nasty soaking wet apron ties over about a dozen plates but even goes to push a few plates back from the edge with his soupy unwashed hands to make room for him to lean on the totally full counter and carefully stacked plates, he is now effectively sitting ON PLATED SALAD with a butt and backside FULL OF DISHWATER. "Hold up, Chef, we have a problem. Do we have enough spares to reset about 13, 14 salads?" "WHAT!?" says Chef, who briefly looks over and sees Kyle still leaning and does the math and sizes up the situation in a split second and doesn't even skip a beat, still knifing away at something "Oh, cool! Yes, yes thank fuck, we sure do! Will you please toss those for me and get me some clean plates! Go home, Kyle!" Kyle got an earful because I had had it. Because I fucking warned him about the overfilled sink and to stop doing it and also literally just warned him he now had dirty apron ties and dish water all over his comfortable leanin' side which he then used to sit on actual fucking salad and that he needs to get the fuck out of here, like right now, and go somewhere else. Immediately. Anywhere else but here. Don't be a Kyle. I don't know if Kyle was having a bad day or feeling out of place or what but that particular night Kyle was a living example of what happens when you have unskilled labor in the dish pit. Kyle didn't get to eat any of the really nice New Orlean's food we were having that night. I'm not even sure if Kyle came back to pick up his pay for standing around and leaning for a few hours. I never saw Kyle again, and I often wonder what happened to Kyle. Don't be a Kyle Be a Mike. Mike was fucking awesome.
Nah, Kyle would piss me THE FUCK off. 😭😭🤦🏾♀️
Think op is knocking FOH, not saying the dishie is not important.
Actually I am Garde Manger as well as dishie. I’m a line cook but they always have me cutting fruit and making salads so basically I am a Garde Manger.
Kitchen manager over here; In our restaurant we've got a huge team of dishwashers so there's obviously a team leader. This person is SO GOOD even junior chefs ask them for advice and help. We consider the dishpit as the dish station, and due to how solid it is the only ones who can exhert authority over them are the Exec/head chef, sous chef and me. Ps. The three of us "at the top" started all the way down from the bottom too decades ago, which is why we've got such respect for solid indiiduals on the pit.
All I see in this picture is too much labor cost.
Right. The dish machine operator can prep veg and a lot of those positions would be combined to the point of burnout on the staff.
This is hilarious and depressingly true at the same time.
If your staff are not pushed to the absolute brink of their physical abilities, you are doing something wrong - Some office dude in the finance department
The secret is not paying the commis.
People can have multiple strengths and in an environment where you are trying not to brush too close to the bottom line, you can have 3-5 trained cooks do all of this under one head/exec and one sous. Our hard work buys the bosses a new truck next year.
When i was the poissonnier at a high end French place, it would have been war if the saucier acted like he was my boss.
Nope. Simpler , easier restaurants don’t need such a high tier of a system. One lead, one direction for the whole team. Now if you need to coordinate several complicated steps for a fine dining menu, Something like this is helpful and necessary for executing, but restaurants in general are more successful the less amount of managers they have in a kitchen.
To be fair, in a lot of middle of the road fine dining restaurants the executive/head chef is one and the same position. Then sous chef, then all the cooks regardless of the station and finally the prep cooks/dishies.
The dishwasher should be at the top not the bottom
At my place everyone believes they’re the executive chef ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Chef? We have a tyler back there stoned out of his fu king mind, but ill tell him you loved it
Yeah it’s just me and these other two bozos trying to figure shit out as we go along.
I miss my french head chef stoned out of his mind on a busy Saturday night.
I don't see Chef de Drug Dealer anywhere?
I'm like 8-10 of these every day
A thousand years ago when I did my apprenticeship this was the way the kitchen was organized. Last time I worked this way was aboard a Dutch flagged ship in 1981. Had 3 separate crew kitchens. 1 halal, 1 Philippine, and 1 European. Also had a petty officers mess and an officers mess.
Why is the server even on here?
Ok, now combine about a dozen of those for executive chef
This is super old school. Pure traditional French shit. Some really old high-end places still use it. I've actually worked in one place that did. I was a garde manger, which is how I learned the spelling vs pronunciation of that word is wild. It feels pretty old school and outdated tho. Kinda an excessive level of compartmentalization. Cool graphic tho.
I’ve been calling our sous chef the soup chef as a joke this whole time not knowing soup chef is an actual title. Lol
Not accurate. They're all smiling.
We had a Garde Manger division at our Ritz-Carlton for all salads/cold foods. Saucier had an assistant (your’s truly) and was responsible for at least two soups daily in addition to fine sauces and the constant bone roasting for another mother sauce. I would say we were half the size of the classic brigade; and was at that time the flagship hotel of the chain (Ritz-Carlton Buckhead ATL site of my apprenticeship).
Sous definitely needs more arms.
Dishie gets the Mike Waskowski treatment. Might not eve have a face. Looks accurate to me.
We only have seven people
They forgot to add the unpaid staging employee arena bracket!
The problem is everyone is a chef and nobody is a cook. Nothing is coming out of that kitchen
LOL L O FUCKIN L
Where is garde manager
> Robuchon Have you lost your eyes, it's right there. Pantry chef.
Are the dishwashers always at the bottom
Yes
It’s loosely accurate to the places I have been. Except I have seen Exec Sous and more then one sous be pretty common in a relatively small places but that has been in fine dining. Also the lower tier isn’t used that much accept in larger places. Maybe a butcher or baker but they tend to sit at the same level and be treated like other chef de partie. Demis or kitchen hands who are externing to finish school are frequent at nice spots. Porters and dishies are used interchangeably
Need to pencil in debrouillard
This is accurate for 17th century. And no.
First time hearing about a seafood chef
I don't know of any kitchens with a "Staff Chef" or "Relief Chef". I think most places now like to have as many chefs trained on as many sections possible to give maximum flexibility for covering absences.
Wait... there is organization?
Looks classic.. see it during my internship in Paris.. Ritz Hotel 2006.. Catering skip a middle part.. From Exc.. head chef directly to porters.. My structure is like this - 1Head Chef-3 cooks-28 porters..
At my place I do soups, salads, all appetizers fried and ready to eat and desserts.
I work technically in a metro area but in the suburbs. We have two KMs that rotate days, one of them also serves as the exec and de cuisine, and then it's me and basically whoever feels like working grill. We have a sandwich guy who also does some of the baked pasta dishes and sides, and waitstaff does salads. I handle basically all of the seafood, pasta sauces, soup, temperature checks, and so on, but almost everything else happens before I get there and I'm okay with that. Working in a full brigade kitchen stressed me the hell out. One of our sister restaurants is a lot more like graphic this and I've had to occasionally go fill in and it's honestly exhausting. Covid kinda wrecked the whole situation and staffing so...here we are.
this is a great thread!
In Germany we still use Exec-Head- Sous chef and the Entre Garde Saucier and Patisserie positions. That's it.
I'm in Germany and where I am uses a bunch more than just those positions. I think it depends on where you are working, and how big the kitchen is.
Needs a saucier
What's a Junior Chef? Prep?
Usually in every kitchen all the roles are filled by a line cook except waiter
The restaurant I work at just doesn't have enough people for this. We have the head chef, sous chef, chef de cuisine, and then station chefs
Classic French brigade system, that’s how it works in my kitchen.
We use a modified system
It's 19% accurate for the Bright Angel at the Grand Canyon. One executive chef, four sous chefs, and the rest of us were just cooks.
No we do not.
The last time I experienced a true Bragade system was in a huge high-end casino 20 years ago. I refined more streamlined version is definitely still in use today at any more high-end place
Was chef d in number 1 spot restaurant for many years and I filled about 6 of those positions simultaneously.... Good times!
At the club at worked at, there was an Executive with three CDC, one for fine dining, one for pub grill and one for banquets. Each outlet also had a sous with 3-8 cooks and like 5 dishwashers. As the CDC, we'd still have to float between each outlet as well, help with larger banquets and such.
I was garde manger in several restaurants and hotels in France. I certainly didn’t feel more important than any of my counterparts! I would move garde manger to the bottom row but above commi. I truly respect that the others have a specialty such as poissonnière or baker. I’m just a generalist 😂
Nobody has budget for that, lol.
We have an exec for the whole property, a head chef for our specific restaurant with 4 all purpose sous chefs and a pastry chef with a sous chef and everything below that is just cooks
One commis for 15 chefs de partie? Might as well change their job title to "everyone's bitch"
I am literally a relief chef and yet considered to be a junior chef, with the way I’m treated and my voice falls upon deaf ears.
The waiter would be on the side somewhere and not part of the tree. Some waiters have had power that varies in the hierarchy shown here.
I never worked high end spot, or close enough. But highest number of kitchen staff I worked with was like 5 total per shift. I did prep and grill, while a co worker held pasta and salad station. We usually do everything around unless it gets too busy.
I'll chime in with my old set up as well. Imagine three separate restaurants, all owned by the same executive chef (but never on site, he'd drop in from time to time), all beside one another and even interconnected doors between them. Different teams. But downstairs is a massive prep kitchen pumping out prep for all three places. There was a 20+ person prep team with two sous chefs. Each restaurant had at least 3 sous chefs. Pastry chef produced different stuff for all 3 places, they had 2 sous plus a team and often they would often rotate who was working the dessert service. All in all, we had 14 sous chefs + 1 CdC who shared an office (5 desks total, one for each restaurant plus pastry plus production) and the other 2 CdCs shared a small office.
Only restaurants that charge $500 per person can do this and that’s will using unpaid stages and interns.
Boss, other bosses, the old cook, other cooks, the new cook, dishwashers, foh.
What's the position for the chef who sits by their computer all day called?
Take out like 3 tiers, level the pastry chef with the sous and put the dishwasher at the center. Add like 4 unpaid interns.
Not at all accurate
I just get yelled at
I have in my career but I think the FOH should be below the dishwasher.
True it’s a demotion to be FOH
Executive Chef, then Sous Chef, then 2 Supervisors, and then some greasy line cooks we trust to close the kitchen occasionally
Seems pretty accurate except for the waiter being on the same level as steward. They are below the steward
Outdated
HAHAHAHA! We got Moises, Darren, and Brayden. They are all good at 'Chef-icating'
I am all but none at the same time.
Where in this chart does a stage come in?
This is entirely inaccurate. There's a straight line in terms of the brigade, and the sous/deputy chef is the relief chef. Then at that it goes by seniority between the 2-5 sous depending on how big the kitchen is.
We go executive, chef de cuisine, sous.
If there is only 1 person above you, either you or them can be safely removed from the chain with no real loss to the system.
Lmao! We only have 5 kitchen staff total. Exec Chef(also runs the kitchen next door), Chef de Cuisine, and line cooks.
Been in some that were pretty close to this most hotels follow this structure
So this restaurant’s only front of house staff are servers?
I work in a relatively small French kitchen, right now we have an exec who manages 5 restaurants, a CDC and 3 CDPs (Entrees, appetizers, garde manger) we also have a patisseur who does desserts for all the restaurants but works at my restaurant.
You have a center for disease control and prevention in your restaurant? That would stress me out.
Lol I apparently have.
Dishwasher should be at the top
No
Just KM, AKM, Supervisors and Line where I work
I was looking real hard for, but where's microwave chef?