Home »
News & Trends »
Featured Articles

A Vision for Kitchen Greatness

Stas’ Kazmierski is one of the managing partners of ZingTrain, the training and consulting business at Zingerman’s. One of the best concepts I’ve ever learned from Stas’ is what he calls “a belated glimpse of the obvious, or as we sometimes refer to it as a “BGO. What’s a “belated glimpse of the obvious? It’s when one of those light bulbs goes off and you realize something that suddenly seems so clear that you can’t believe you haven’t seen “it—and been doing it—all along.

I had a BGO a year ago when it dawned on me that we didn’t have a documented vision for how a great Zingerman’s kitchen would run.

The Importance of Vision
One of the most frequently asked management questions I hear is, “How do you motivate people to work so hard? If I had to pick one place to begin motivational efforts, it would be to write down an inspiring, strategically achievable vision of greatness that the folks in your business can rally round and use to guide themselves toward a successful future.

A vision—as we define it—is an answer to the simple, yet radical, question, “When we're successful, what will our organization look like? Visioning works for an organization overall, or for any element of it. Imagine that you were looking through a camera, filming your organization’s activity a year from today. Describe what scenes you would want to see on the screen. Write them down—that’s your vision.

So, how could we have failed to write down a vision for our culinary work? As with all belated glimpses of the obvious, my first reaction was embarrassment. My second reaction was to start writing one. Which we’ve done, and have begun to put in place across the entire organization.

Even without a written vision, we were doing many of the things listed here. The difference is that we’ve now made an overt commitment to pursuing these across our entire organization. We are able to be clear to new staff that this is what we expect when working with us. We can hold ourselves accountable and measure against clear standards. And, most importantly, the more we work with and use this vision, the better our food gets. That results in a better experience being delivered to staff and to customers.

An Affirmative Kitchen Vision
Zingerman’s does an enormous amount of cooking from scratch. Everything from homemade chicken soup, chopped liver, and corned beef at the Deli, to breads, baked goods, and savory little quiches at the Bakehouse, to a whole range of traditional American dishes at the restaurant, Zingerman’s Roadhouse. So being clear—first to ourselves and then to new staff—about how a successful kitchen operates is essential.

As per our guidelines for writing an effective vision, this one is written in the affirmative, as if we’d already accomplished it. But don’t let that fool you into thinking that we’ve figured out how to make this happen perfectly every single day; to the contrary, we’re far from being able to say that we live this flawlessly. But the vision does lay out a clear and positive picture of the future that we’re pushing ourselves to make more of a reality every day. It’s helping us to move forward toward the future we desire.

Let me share the vision of our kitchens. I communicate it in the hope that you will create a vision that will work for your foodservice activities. As Stas’ often says, the key is to “adapt, not adopt.

1. We live our mission and get great results.
The back-of-the-house kitchen staff and front-of-the-house service staff work effectively and seamlessly to ensure that each customer has a great experience. We exceed expectations through timely delivery of great-tasting and great-looking food.

Staff members and managers know that listing Zingerman’s on their resume will provide an effective entry into good restaurant kitchens around the country. The key people in our kitchens are recognized internally as being amongst the best palates and best leaders around. They’re also recognized by the trade on a national level for innovative and effective work.

The results can be seen in tangible and positive results being delivered by every kitchen to benefit all three of our bottom lines—food, service and finance. People feel good about their work, and their work is good. The results show in customer service ratings, surveys we do with the staff about the quality of the workplace, and in the feeling that you get when you walk around the kitchen. Staff know where they stand—where we’re doing well, where we want to improve—and they participate actively in setting those targets, then meeting or beating them.

2. We’re high energy and professional.
You know you are in one of our kitchens as soon as you walk through the door. Staff are energized and enthusiastic; they’re having fun but are also very focused; down-to-earth and friendly but still professional. The food is treated with great respect; attention to detail is incredible. The craft of cooking is king. People understand that it combines elements of science in the form of time-tested techniques, but also the art of understanding the natural variability that comes from using traditionally made seasonal foods, as well as the importance of tasting everything as often as possible to ensure quality.

3. We’re service oriented.
As you walk around the kitchen, you notice the quality of the cooks’ interactions with service staff, with each other and with suppliers making deliveries. Everyone is living our recipe for great service with those they deal with. They actively find out what each other’s needs are (smiling and greeting people enthusiastically throughout), they fill those needs with high accuracy, politeness and enthusiasm, and they consistently go the extra mile for service staff, guests and each other.

4. We pay high attention to detail.
The culinary staff pays enormous attention to accuracy. Everyone who finishes prepping a recipe has someone else taste it and then sign off on its quality. Recipes are followed professionally and persistently. We have written recipes for all regular items and we write them for specials to help future staff members and managers succeed. All food is tasted before each shift for quality. And then all dishes going out are visually re-checked before delivery to the guest.

5. We make expectations clear to all.
Kitchen staff know their products well—where the food comes from, how it’s been prepared, how it needs to be stored, cooked and cared for, etc. We have training resources to help staff learn what they need to know to do a great job; these help everybody improve their skills and palates as individuals and also our ability as a group to taste and assess food quality effectively. We pay close attention to the way the food looks, noticing the nuances of color, shape, size, thickness, etc., as it cooks. The kitchen staff smells the food often, understanding the importance of aroma. And they’re constantly tasting: alone, in small groups informally and also in formal, scheduled taste-test sessions to check quality and compare notes.serving great food. They know the key details of our current financial performance. Recipes are always costed using up-to-date information and menu items are re-priced regularly to keep food costs in line. We regularly check portions to make sure they’re accurate. We courteously renegotiate costs with suppliers to get the best possible prices. In doing all of that, we give staff the tools they need to help shape their financial future in a way that works for them both personally and professionally by hitting bonuses and winning departmental games.

6. We’re actively teaching and learning.
An enormous amount of information is shared. Our “scoreboards (we call them DORs or “departmental operating reports) are in use in every area and supply all the key performance numbers for that department. Bulletin boards list the latest updates on food sources (telling things such as the current source of our potatoes, cautionary notes on cooking the wild West Coast salmon, etc.); staff are talking about classes they’ve recently taken and sharing thoughts from books and magazines they’ve read. There’s a real passion for great, full-flavored traditional food and for effective, professional cooking techniques.

7. We use our recipe for Bottom Line Training.
Everyone who works in the kitchen has a clear sense of how the entire kitchen runs and how their job makes a difference in creating the bottom line results we target. Effective communication skills are practiced and the team operates at a high level of cohesiveness. A small nod of the head or quiet eye contact can send meaningful messages across the kitchen. All kitchen employees know:
• their role and job responsibilities, as well as those of peers
• where to get the resources they need to perform well
• how their work performance will be measured
• what the rewards of good performance (and also the consequences of poor performance) will be.

8. We taste constantly.
Active tasting and input are encouraged from all levels of the organization. The kitchens have clear guidelines and processes for developing new products. But they also understand that the final decision-making on food quality and recipe approval comes from the partners, whose palates have successfully led us to where we are today.

9. We live the 3 Steps to Great Finance.
Everyone in the kitchens shares the responsibility for delivering effective financial results as much as they do for serving great food. They know the key details of our current financial performance. Recipes are always costed using up-to-date information and menu items are re-priced regularly to keep food costs in line. We regularly check portions to make sure they’re accurate. We courteously renegotiate costs with suppliers to get the best possible prices. In doing all of that, we give staff the tools they need to help shape their financial future in a way that works for them both personally and professionally by hitting bonuses and winning departmental games.

10. We have clean and safe work spaces.
Our kitchen spaces are consistently clean; we exceed state-mandated standards of sanitation and respect health codes at all times. Staff members are professionally dressed and meet the dress codes of their department and business. We regularly do self-inspections and then work to improve performance based on what we find. Each kitchen has at least one team member certified to teach (and is actively teaching) Knife Safety and Food Safety classes. Leaders in each kitchen consistently model these techniques.

Staff Input: Up, Down and Across
Since I wrote the first draft of the kitchen vision a few years ago, we’ve incorporated input from people up, down and across the organization. In the process, we’ve gained a great deal of buy-in from staff, managers and partners. And we’ve significantly improved the vision—what you’re reading above is far better than the first draft. Although we remain far from perfect, we do much of it well and are always pushing ourselves to be better.

Most importantly, the kitchen vision helps us to successfully live our mission, which is to bring a great Zingerman’s Experience to everyone we deal with. That includes customers, co-workers, suppliers and our community. A clear, inspiring vision for our culinary work helps us to live our values more effectively by producing better food, giving better service, encouraging education, being able to support small suppliers, being more profitable, building solid long-term relationships, etc.

This vision also helps us clarify everybody’s roles and responsibilities and, in the process, improve the quality of the workplace. Because we have eight different businesses within our organization, a consistent vision of kitchen greatness will make it easier for staff to move from one Zingerman’s kitchen to another, thus improving coordination and maximizing our training work. It helps us establish clarity on expectations around the product knowledge of people who do the cooking; this improves techniques, cooking skills, sanitation, safety and food handling procedures.

Having this vision in writing and in use will make sure that our food will consistently improve and that we will provide a better, more rewarding place for people to work.

Thank goodness for belated glimpses of the obvious.

Ari Weinzweig is the co-owner of Zingerman’s Delicatessen in Ann Arbor, Mich., and author of Zingerman’s Guide to Giving Good Service and other books. For information, call 734.930.1919.