Bad Bosses Kill

by Ray Colvin, Location Director and Management Program architect

Studies conducted in Sweden and France have shown evidence that this statement is true. Steven Reinberg, a reporter for HealthDay, in his article Bad Bosses Are Hard on the Heart quotes Anna Nyberg of the Karolinska Institute, and Stress Research Institute at Stockholm University regarding a study involving 3,100 Swedish workers, "This study is the first to provide evidence of a prospective, dose-response relationship between concrete managerial behaviors and objectively assessed heart disease among employees...Enhancing managers' skills -- regarding providing employees with information, support, power in relation to responsibilities, clarity in expectations, and feedback -- could have important stress-reducing effects on employees and enhance the health at workplaces."

The study found a strong correlation between good bosses and good health. “Nyberg's group found that the more competent the men thought their bosses were, the lower their risk of developing heart disease. In contrast, the poorer men rated their boss's leadership ability, the higher the risk for heart disease. In fact, the risk increased the longer someone worked in the same stressful environment.”

It sounds so simple, doesn't it? Treat people with care and respect...maybe treat them how we would like to be treated...train them effectively, support them in their efforts by giving them the tools they need and the environment where they can feel appreciated and safe, and company success will follow.

Leadership is a consistent topic in the Business Management programs I have helped develop at OCI. Leadership skills are the basis for success in any organization, even more so in restaurants and hotels where employees are the frontline of interaction with the customer. To the customer, the company is the employee. After all, it takes a lot of people to get a plate of food in front of a guest.

I am constantly reminded, when discussing with students and associates their experiences with leadership in the workplace, how much influence bosses have on the personal lives of their employees. Sadly, more often than not, the experiences are not good. Almost everyone has numerous examples of experiences with bosses who are ill-prepared to lead, arrogant, or indifferent in their attitudes toward others, and incompetent and abusive by nature. What is it about our culture that embraces such people and defines them as leaders? Seemingly, this type of leader is everywhere. If every boss in America would take responsibility for the lives of their employees as they come under their influence and treat them with courtesy, decency, and respect I wonder what impact it would have on our economy, our culture, and the cost of our health care.

In our Business Management classes at OCI, we teach many principles in leadership. They follow simple and basic practices:

1. Communicate effectively – what are we doing, why are we doing it, who needs to know, what do they need to know, when do they need to know it, and what is in it for them?

2. Let others lead – if you want to be effective you need to hire competent people. Competent people want to lead, too…let them be leaders.

OCI Executive Chef Brian Wilke

3. Give credit where credit is due – don’t steal other people’s work and represent it as your own. Often this is done by omission. If I don’t give you credit, then by default credit falls to me because I am in the position of authority. So I can say I haven’t stolen your work, but in truth I have done it in a very destructive way.

4. Hire right…then train right – if you want to build a solid team, you have to focus on character and integrity during the hiring process. Then you need to front load your effort in people in the first few weeks with a comprehensive and effective training program that is administered by the management team, as well as the staff.

OCI President Eric Stromquist

5. Knowledge is power – but only if it is freely shared. People who withhold knowledge to build their power base are, in the long run, destructive. The organizational knowledge, that knowledge that is the collective experience and expertise of everyone in the organization, is the most important asset in any organization. Great organizations realize this and share knowledge everywhere throughout the organization.

6. Be a decent human being – leadership should provide discipline and organization. Every great organization whether it is a football team, a choir or a culinary school embraces discipline and organization. We call it Mise en Place. However, discipline and organization don’t need to be delivered with a whip. Whether you are a bully on the playground or a bully in the corporate boardroom, you are still a bully.

Ray Colvin, Article Author (see above)

We hope our graduates aspire to be leaders in the organizations they will join. We hope even more that they become leaders we can be proud of by representing these simple truths in leadership.

Ode to Coffee Grounds

by Lead Chef Instructor (2nd Term) Dan Brophy

Part of my daily routine involves coffee grounds. Although I am avowed tea drinker for life, coffee grounds have earned a place in my heart.

Oh, Coffee Grounds

How do I love thee?

Let me count the ways.

1) A magic ingredient once recycled as coffee grounds. In maintaining five compost bins and two worm boxes, there is an unending call for another layer of coffee grounds. A layer is 4 to 6 five-gallon buckets. My compost is typically a rotating layer of coffee grounds, chicken manure, crushed eggshells, leaves or straw, and any seasonal specialties I can drum up.


2) Acid-loving plants can be mulched directly with coffee grounds. The blueberries, huckleberries, currants, azaleas, rhododendrons, and lingonberries all get regularly buried with coffee grounds. Potatoes and peas seem to enjoy 8-10 inches every few weeks.

3) Coffee grounds, the unlikely work out aid. A five gallon bucket of coffee grounds weighs about 36 pounds. Load them into the truck, unload the truck, load onto the cart or hand truck, roll across the yard. Empty. Wash. Repeat as necessary. Typically 8-10 buckets a week. Although at the height of my coffee ground madness, I was recycling 20-25 five gallon buckets a week. It’s aerobic, working all the major muscle groups.

4) Coffee grounds will provide the matrix for a variety of oyster mushrooms. Past experiments have yielded a small-scale project. But a break through in habitat control may result in a larger, more consistent year-round harvest. Stay tuned for future details.

Start With the Basics

by Lead Chef Instructor George Thompson

As one of the first term culinary instructors, my job is to develop for each student a framework for learning. Our focus in the first term is to teach proper cooking methods, proper technique, the basics of understanding flavor, safety and sanitation, and culinary math.

In terms of cooking methods as they apply to a protein, a starch, and a vegetable, I try to illustrate to the students the common ground within each thing, for example the properties that chicken shares with pork when heat, or an acid such as lemon or vinegar is applied to that item. How does that action affect the protein – how does it change? In terms of starches, generally speaking (VERY generally), when you convert a starch to make it edible, you have to gelatinize it. For the most part, vegetables are made up of structured cellulose. That’s really at the core of the texture and structure of vegetables. It’s just different arrangements of the same stuff that react to what change agents you subject your vegetables to.

All basic and proper skills are relevant to the equipment utilized to deal with the product. Knife skills, in particular, are probably the number one thing any person will be judged on in the industry. So we practice as much as we can. The use of the knife is primarily how things are still done in a professional kitchen, in terms of breakdown and production for even cooking, as well as both visual and consumable purposes. It’s one thing to chop something up, but another thing to understand variations of “chop,” “fine chop,” or “mince.” There are many details involved with deconstructing materials. We start them at a basic level, and teach knife safety along with proper technique in developing these skills.

Understanding flavor is critical. When you get into things like wine tasting, you’ll talk in great detail about a variety of subtle tastes and aromatics. But in the first term, we have to be real simple when it comes out to starting with flavor. We start with the tastes – sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and umami. We will address aromatics, but not too in depth in the beginning. Our goal at first is to make students understand the difference between the two. The only two sensory areas people have that relate to interpreting chemistry are the taste receptors in the mouth and the olfactory receptors via the nose. Having people be able to discern between these two regions is the first step. If we can get students to then intellectualize that understanding and communicate it back to us, and then control it, that is when we know a student is well on their way to understanding flavor. For some students it comes very naturally to understand it on a cerebral or intellectual level. For others it poses more of a challenge. People are talented in different areas. My mother was amazing at balancing flavors. She couldn’t explain it to you, but could she ever do it. And then there are others who can explain it, but they can’t do it. I knew that, to be a good cook, I had to understand this.

Safety and sanitation starts with us. They have to walk out of our kitchen to the next term with a solid foundation. Our goal is to have them Serv Safe certified with the National Restaurant Association when they go on to the second term.

Culinary math is extremely important for anyone working in a professional kitchen. First term students have to know basic arithmetic, and we’ll work with anyone who doesn’t. We get into equivalents and measurements, mainly. Then we move on to how to convert measurements from one form of measurement to another, like cups to tablespoons, then converting a recipe from one size to another.

Those are the cornerstones of the first term, but we also mix in other important lessons and habits that anyone working in the industry is going to need -- teamwork and communication, personal and team time management, and demeanor. The last one is the most important in my book. The best cook in the world, if he or she has a crappy demeanor, I’m not interested in working with him. I really try to convey to people that you need to have good demeanor in relation to yourself and those around you. You have to find a center within your personality in terms of what is going on around you, and that’s the challenge. I’ve seen so many people who lack natural talent in the kitchen make it successfully through this experience and this industry based on their attitude and demeanor. It’s not just determination, but attitude towards one’s self and others. You have to say “I’m gonna keep trying,” and follow through on that without beating yourself up or taking out frustrations on others.

And that brings me to making mistakes. Mistakes are often very critical to the learning process. The way I think of it is that students are paying to make them here. Some of the best learning comes from a mistake that we can then identify. It makes no sense to me to make anyone feel the slightest bit inferior or embarrassed because of a mistake. In fact, if you’re afraid of making mistakes, you won’t learn nearly enough as you could. And we try to let students know, right up front, that it’s part of the game. In terms of peers harassing them, we try to manage that as well, but we always to relate what goes on in the first term to a real kitchen. And although our first term students are not cooking on a line or selling what they are making, certain things, like the prep work and the sense of urgency that we instill, are similar. By the third term, what our students are experiencing is pretty close to the real deal, but the first term is about learning the basics.

Italy -- An All Consuming Experience

by Chef Wednesday Wild Wilson

My husband and I decided to take a trip to Italy in the early fall of 2006. Our plan was to eat our way across the country. We flew into Rome, where we spent a couple days, then took the train to Sorrento. Part of the ride was on a local train, which was a crazy experience. It went extremely fast and was very rickety with no place to sit. To make matters worse, we had too many packs, no place to stand, and jetlag had overcome us. But we finally arrived in Sorrento and eventually found our accommodations. My husband loves gelato, so we’d stop at every gelateria and get all these different flavors, each of us walking out with at least three flavors each. We always checked out the bakeries, too. At one in particular, in Sorrento, an Italian lady came out to ask if she could help us. My husband told her (he always tells people) that I’m a pastry chef. They got excited and pulled us in the backroom, where we got to watch them making some kind of traditional cookies all by hand, folding it all together in dramatic sweeping motions like they’d been doing it for a thousand years. A lot of the bakery items are fancy and traditional (I want to compare it to Chef Hall’s part of the baking program – mine is more of the foundation while his is more creative. I like to tease him that his part of the program is where the food color gets used). But it was surprising to me that all of the items in the bakeries were very classical and nothing modern.

As we visited different regions, I would see the same kind of regional cookies and cakes within each region. In Tuscany, riciarelli cookies. Cinque Terra is famous for focaccia bread. In Sorrento, the lemons are used for for limoncello. I knew that in Tuscany they don’t use salt in their bread, and I wanted to check this out. Salt acts as a dough conditioner and makes the bread more manageable. It also inhibits and regulates yeast fermentation, not to mention salt is a natural flavor enhancer. Sure enough, I found that the bread in Tuscany lacked flavor.

Throughout our travels, I was pleased to see how much my 12 one-hour Italian classes paid off. I did not want to be the naïve tourist, and I was determined to be able to speak with the locals. You can just see it in their faces -- “c’mon, just try, make an effort.” I was surprised at how much I understood and I think they generally understood me. It made a big difference in how we were treated, I think.

As we toured the country, we would rent places where you could cook, then shop for our ingredients. The shops there are dedicated to different food items, like pasta, bread, or produce (note: they don’t like you to touch the produce, they get really offended). Then we’d go back to our place with our salami or prosciutto and cheeses and breads and olives (see - pictures of these spreads) and have a little feast. At one point, we stayed at winery just outside of Alba. The wine crush was happening just below our suite, and everything smelled like grapes. We would walk into town along roads flanked by vineyards, and we would eat the huge, deep purple grapes from the old vines that had recently fallen off. It was also the first time I’d ever seen a quince growing. It looked like a big, bulky pear. Sometimes you see quince on a dessert platter, but in their raw form, even though they are very fragrant, they have so much pectin that you pucker up. You have to poach them to eat them. They turn a beautiful rose color naturally.

In summary, I have to agree with Chef Hobson’s post. There really is no substitute for travel when your goal is to experience authentic regional and international cuisine.

Serve with Excellence

by Lance Mayhew

I was recently reading an online piece by Michael Bauer about what waiters hate about their customers. 118 replies later, its pretty clear that both guests and waiters have strong feelings about the service that is given and received in a restaurant. A number of complaints by the waiters were issues that a good professional house should have no problem avoiding simply by being organized and focusing on training. For instance, one server complains of customers seating themselves at dirty tables and then complaining that the table is dirty. A well run host stand will keep patrons from seating themselves, and good communication between servers, bussers and the host stand can help ensure that tables are reset efficiently.

A common complaint in this piece is the issue of "plate stacking," the practice by which a guest stacks multiple plates together and places them on the edge of the table in an attempt to help the server. In my experience, guests generally do this out of a genuine desire to help the waiter, and a good server should recognize this. Is it actually helpful to the waiter? Most likely not, and it may actually create a bit more work for the waiter. Can a good waiter prevent this issue? Most of the time they can by effectively managing their tables and clearing plates when the guests have finished. Is it worth complaining about in a public forum? If I were a waiter who felt this way I'd honestly assess what I'm doing at my tables and how I can do it better.

Another issue raised by waiters was tables "under ordering," that is, guests taking a table during lunch or dinner rush and perhaps splitting a salad and drinking tap water rather than having multiple courses and wine which can raise a servers tip considerably. While I can understand a waiters frustration at this occurring (they do have bills to pay), ultimately, great service must come from within. The difference between a good server and a great server is that a great server will always provide the highest level of service to their guests, no matter what situation, because they refuse to compromise their own personal standards. Just as great actors give a command performance every time they stride onto the stage, great servers leave their personal troubles behind and ignore petty issues to ensure that each and every guest, including the ones splitting a salad and drinking water get the finest service possible.

So is it OK to under order in a restaurant? I personally think restaurants should never turn away revenue. While I personally would rather sit at the bar than take a table during the middle of lunch rush, a good server who tempts me with his description of the menu specials may entice me to eat more and perhaps complement that with a glass of wine. My advice to any professional server is simple. Look at every situation as an opportunity and do your best. If you do that, the money will come. It always does.

The Last Cup of Joe

by Tony Hall, Dining Room Manager

Rob Fogarty from Kobos performs an espresso demo for OCI management students

Imagine going out for a nice dinner. Your appetizer consists of thinly sliced prosciutto and fresh melon salad with a minted melon vinaigrette. The saltiness of the prosciutto, blending with the cantaloupe and honeydew melon, helps accentuate the natural sweetness and flavor of the melon, while the mint in the vinaigrette pulls it all together to finish it off. Like a world-class symphony warming up, your palate is piqued and you know you will be in for a treat of beautiful music, or flavors, throughout the rest of the night. You move into your salad course. Song number two consists of local Hood River cherries, so fresh you can still taste the sunlight that brought them to the matured state that they’ve reached. Sweet, juicy, and bursting with flavor. Accompanying them are shaved almonds and goat cheese with honey vanilla vinaigrette. The numerous different flavors and textures, working together like the woodwinds and string instruments, make beautiful music on your taste buds. Moving into song three, you decide to mix it up a bit. You get the Grilled Lamb Chops and pair it with a soft, velvety Bordeaux with tamed acidity and tannins, as if it were hand-picked from the right banks of France on the monocultural plateau of Pomerol. The wine and food, working together as though Paul Potts himself made a guest appearance to sing the words to the symphonic tunes of a perfectly collaborated rendition of Nessun Dorma. You move into dessert. Song four brings you a piece of chocolate torte. Soft and smooth, almost the consistency of warm fudge, melting in your mouth -- death by chocolate, as some would say. A nice teaser leaving the audience thinking the music is done for the night. And then the encore comes. The last song of the night. The way to cap it off, pulling everything together for one amazing experience. For the last song of the evening, you get a warm cup of coffee. Instant coffee crystals that you just add hot water to.

Not the ending you expected, right?

One of the things we teach our students is the importance of the last cup of coffee. It’s one of the most forgotten and overlooked items in a dining experience. You can do everything perfect throughout the night -- the food, the service, everything. You can exceed the customer’s expectations in every aspect of the night, but if you give them a cup of coffee that has been sitting since the lunch shift, then the last taste in the customer’s mouth is bitter and burnt, and that will linger in their mouth the whole way home. That’s what they remember. All of the hard work that went into the rest of the perfectly orchestrated meal is forgotten.

One of the criteria I had when looking for the right coffee for the OCI restaurant was sticking to our aim of using as much local product and supporting as many local businesses as we can. That brought me to Kobos. David and Susan Kobos founded The Kobos Company in October of 1973. They began in a small 1200 square foot retail space in the Water Tower at Johns Landing in Portland, Oregon. David purchased a Probat drum-style coffee roaster directly from Germany and began roasting coffee in the front of the store.

In 1995 they moved their headquarters from the Johns Landing area to a 42,000 square foot office, warehouse, roasting plant and retail space on the edge of Portland's trendy Northwest neighborhood. The ability to buy in larger quantities helped them to become a more efficient coffee roaster and to create greater consistency in the quality of their coffee.

At Kobos Coffee, they drum roast all of their coffee beans in small batches. This not only ensures the coffee they sell will be as fresh as possible, it also allows them to focus on the unique characteristics of each varietal bean.

Kobos Coffee is still owned and operated by David and Susan along with Brian Dibble, who became a partner in 2001. Brian is a Master Coffee Roaster with over 25 years experience in specialty coffee.

I ultimately choose Kobos as the coffee we would serve in the restaurant. I went with them because the quality of product, attention to detail, and respect for the product shows with every cup. When I place an order with them, the beans are roasted the day before they are delivered to us. This ensures that I’m getting as fresh a product as possible. It’s the perfect finish to the meal the students work so hard in preparing. It’s our last opportunity to make a final impression...the last flavor of the night…our final song -- our “Pièce de résistance.”

The Waiting is the Hardest Part

by OCI Restaurant Management Instructor Tom Bethel

I tell my students, “You have to bring your ‘A’ game every single day because people are counting on you. Don’t tell me you’re tired, you’re hungover, or your in-laws are in town. In my experience in Portland, I’ve dealt with political candidates, secret service, professional athletes, and movie stars. You always have to be prepared.”

My advice for waiting on someone famous:

1. Have their table ready the moment they walk in.
“When they walk in the door, they keep walking – no stopping. It’s good to have someone in front of them. Often they’ll come in the back door, if possible."

2. Have a quiet, out of the way table, preferably not facing the restaurant.
“Feng shui, in this instance, is not important.”

3. Intercept autograph seekers?
"That’s a case by case deal. You want to keep other guests from disturbing them during the meal. When they’re coming and going, they are probably fair game, unless your restaurant has a policy.”

4. Treat them like a regular person, of course being polite and gracious.
“In my experience, they want to be treated like everyone else. It’s the people around the celebrities that want the special treatment…”

Noteworthy experiences in various chapters of my career as a server and manager in the industry:

@ Lawry’s Westside Broiler, Los Angeles, mid-80’s
• Meeting and serving Muhammad Ali

@ Spago, Los Angeles, late 80’s
• Waiting on Jodie Foster the night she won an Oscar
• Walking Gene Kelly to the car in the rain with an umbrella
• Trampled by paparazzi walking Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell to their car
• Jesse Jackson Fundraiser 
• Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty - "They came in together through the back door one night and just hung out in back talking to the waiters because there was a party going on in the main dining room. They were really cool."
• Serving Don Rickles, Larry King, Bob Newhart, Tom Poston and Suzanne Pleshette - “They were all exchanging on-liners and laughing when I walked to the table. As soon as he saw me standing there, Mr. Rickles stopped everybody and asked me my name, then started the ordering process, which I really appreciated.”
• Lucille Ball at her last public appearance in ’89
• Johnny Carson - “A teenage kid approached table and Wolfgang Puck told me to stop him, Mr. Carson told me to tell the kid to come back, Mr. Carson had his entrée in front of him and stood up and introduced himself to the kid and asked him about himself.”
• Neil Young - “He came in when we weren’t open and I waited on him in an empty restaurant.”
• The entire Lakers “showtime” team
• Also served: Sydney Poitier, Michael Caine, Roger Moore, Arnold Schwarzenneger, Harry Caray

@ Higgins, Portland, '97 – ‘10
• Meeting and serving Julia Child and Graham Kerr
• Tommy Lee Jones during the filming of “The Hunted”
• Dealing with Secret Service as General Manager when John Kerry and Howard Dean were on the campaign trail - “Senator Kerry was very kind and friendly to everyone.  He insisted on saying hello to everyone before leaving, even though it was almost midnight and they’d been up since the crack of dawn.”
• Every Oregon Governor and Senator in the last 15 years
• Emily Deschanel, from the TV show “Bones” - “She was very nice to my daughters.”
• Also served: Robert DeNiro, Harrison Ford, Phil Jackson

Cuts Like a Knife

by Woody Bailey, OCI Chef Instructor, Purchasing Director and owner of Zen Blades

I grew up a Gerber baby. That is to say, I grew up with Pete Gerber, of Gerber Blades, as a close family friend.  My first cuts and scars came from the only knives allowed in our house – Gerber knives. Pete is a bit of a character and a clever business man.  He believed that to truly enjoy a knife it had to be sharp -- wicked sharp. I never learned nor asked how he sharpened his knives, but I was always present when he critiqued someone else's efforts. It was usually pretty harsh. His blunt honesty sometimes made me cringe, at least until I grew older and witnessed how many ego maniacs there were out there with generally dull knives while insisting that their sharpening method was the best or "only way." How many of us have watched in awe as some family member steels his carving knife over the Thanksgiving turkey? You probably have witnessed a ballet of the wrist and arm (or, in my uncle’s case, a swagger of the hips brought on by way too much golf) made to look very accurate and practiced. Thank God for him the turkey cooperated in making his full press look like an honest carving. Once compressed to becoming nearly flat, the bird would eventually relent and dinner would be served. Most of us grow up believing that this is how a knife is properly sharpened -- right?

Once I finally attended culinary school, I realized the real significance and importance of a sharp knife. I also discovered the variety of sharpening methods offered by my instructors. My “inner Gerber” made me a bit of a skeptic. One of the truths of a culinary education is the realization that there are many ways to cut up a chicken. The skeptic in me ultimately gave way to the realization that the same is true of sharpening. One trick is to find the right teacher, or at least, the path to the right teacher. In my case, the path led to OCI Executive Chef Brian Wilke. His passion for the knife showed in his eyes. Chef Wilke can dice an onion behind his back. He loves testing the students knives for sharpness, never giving any warning first.

At the end of the day, a quality knife, properly sharpened, is a prerequisite to developing proper technique and skills in the kitchen. NOTHING is more rewarding than a sharp knife. This begs the question -- what exactly is a sharp knife? In my world, there are only two really great tests (for a chef’s knife). The first is drawing the knife through a tomato from tip to bolster (see image). A sharp knife will pass through the tomato, reaching the cutting board with no pressure applied by the user. The most common test, however, is to rest the bevel edge on your thumb nail at about an 18 degree angle. If the knife is sharp, it should hold. No pushing or carving of the thumb nail is required. Just rest the knife at multiple locations along the bevel. If this makes you cringe, a pastry brush can be substituted for the thumbnail. If it slides easily, your edge is either rolled or blunt and in need of sharpening.

A quality chef’s knife is usually pretty expensive, so removing precious steel by sharpening should be done only when necessary (aggressive stroking on a steel or diamond steel, just like dear old Dad’s performance at turkey time, does exactly that). But, after a knife has been professionally sharpened, or properly sharpened on a stone, usually all that is required is a realigning. The most clever trick I've found for doing that (which doubles as a great parlor trick) is to turn a ceramic plate upside-down on a non-skid surface (a wet dish towel will do the trick). Be certain the raised rim of the bottom of the plate is smooth and not chipped or damaged. Next, draw your knife (the sharp part) across the rim at about a 22 degree angle (90 degrees is straight up, 45 degrees is half of that, 22 degrees is half of that) applying about one pound of downward pressure (push on a scale to get a feel for that). Perform two or three strokes per side, then test again for sharpness. 99% of the time your sharp edge is brought right back where you want it.

I love sharpening knives as much as I love using a sharp knife. With just a little practice and a reasonable amount of confidence anyone can take the work out of preparing food for friends and family.