Hacker News Reader

> For example, one of my favorite Majordomo dishes is a whole boiled chicken. We present the bird to the table in a big pot, bring it back to the kitchen to carve it, and then return with a beautiful platter of rice topped with the sliced breasts and two different sauces spooned over the top. Once guests are finished with that, we bring out a soup made from the carcass. It’s so good.

The point is that the diner gets to see the chicken they will eat and understand the process.

The efficient way described in the blog is to instead use a stunt chicken which'll be paraded around the dining room instead of being cooked.

That's not a process improvement when the entire point of the dish is to show the diners what they will eat before they eat it and flex the restaurant's ability to coordinate.

Purposeful inefficiency is beautiful when it's about retro video game console programming or mechanical watches, because that's about spotlighting the process. Both of these are inefficient---modern computers are more powerful and quartz watch keep time better---but are fascinating because the difficulty of programming in assembly or an intricate series of tiny gears have inherent value to some people, far beyond the result of a video game or getting the current time.

It's a complicated finely tuned process to get a chicken from your table to the kitchen and back again. The chef wants employees that value the process itself, which is a fair ask when the process is the product.

And yet, he says "... I didn’t care about fooling the diners."

I agree with you, that the diner seeing what they are about to eat is an important part of the experience. But Chang seems to be saying that even that is not the point! The results (including diner experience, and the honesty of that experience) don't matter. It is purely about instilling and maintaining a culture.

I don't really buy it, myself. Should they also forge all their knives from iron ore, the long slow way, before being allowed to use them in the kitchen? As other people commented, I think this is more about weaving a story and casting a glamour than anything else.

I think a charitable interpretation of his point is "I didn't care about fooling the diners about this specific thing."

But if he allows that to happen and the staff internalizes a culture of corner-cutting and misdirection, then eventually they'll start lying to customers and taking shortcuts on things that do matter.

I would describe it as "founder mode". If he lets the restaurant morph its process while he is outside the kitchen the vision is lost.

Obviously young and hungry with nothing to lose but your standards one can make certain decisions that build the story and the quality.

Once the weekly payroll is $140k a week plus all the other expenses selling one's name seems justified to keep the balls in the air.

The problem is the idea of the billionaire chef.

So, the idea is the long, hard, stupid and disrespectful way.

Basically, the idea is you don't want smart people who can decide what corners make sense to cut, what process to use to etc.

And this is because you don't want to have to rely on their intelligence. You want to rely on only your process, so you hire those without sense or intelligence as you expand.

I have mixed feelings about this sort of thing.

It's saying you don't trust your people to make the right decisions. That you don't trust them to understand the difference between a shortcut that does and doesn't matter. The fact that Chang's staff emailed them to say "hey, we've started taking this shortcut" is a reason to trust them. Any deviation from the plan, and they let him know? Great! But he thinks that if he allows good shortcuts, sometime later, they'll start taking bad shortcuts, but he'll never find out, or won't find out until it's too late? It's profoundly insulting.

But at the same time, fighting human nature is hard. Judgment will suffer while under stress, and working in a kitchen is certainly a poster child for "stressful situation". Even with the best intentions, bad decisions will be made, even if they seem like good decisions in the moment.

I still think we should strive for that trust, though. Making people stick to an inefficient process where they can't see the reason for it is how you get detached, uncreative employees.

> I think a charitable interpretation of his point is "I didn't care about fooling the diners about this specific thing."

The funny thing is I actually do think he should be caring about this. Bringing out a chicken to show customers, and either explicitly saying or even implying that they're going to take that chicken back to the kitchen, carve it up, plate it, and bring it back out is a statement of intent. If you don't do it that way, then that's dishonest in a way I'd consider really bad. If I found out that parading the chicken out to my table was just a gimmick, and that's not the chicken I ended up eating, I'd feel lied to (or at least very much misled), and that would affect my enjoyment of the experience and my desire to go back.

Yes, this is nuts. It's performative micromanagement for the sake of maintaining status.

If the end product is indistinguishable, and the user experience is inferior (because it takes so much longer, and customers are just sitting there, waiting, hungry...) literally the only difference is the assertion of management/owner status for the sake of it.

That might have some marketing leverage for a restaurant, but "We write everything in machine code with a biro before hand-assembling it" isn't going to win any hearts and minds in software dev.

"Once guests are finished with that, we bring out a soup made from the carcass."

Soup from the carcass is delicious, but there isn't time to do that during the meal. Even with a pressure cooker it's going to take at least an hour. (And if several tables order the same dish, you're gonna have a bunch of pressure cookers in your kitchen.)

So... the idea is sound, but I'm doubtful that they actually do it the way they claim. Which would make sense with the "hero chicken" story they admit to.

Yeah, I'm totally with you on this one. I think they make a stock from the carcasses of previous day's chickens. What Chang is claiming doesn't make sense.

Sounds like they bring the chicken out after simmering it the first time, then take it back to the kitchen and carve it up and serve it. So you've probably got another 30 minutes or so while the guests are eating that to chuck the carcass back in the pot with the cooking liquid. Assuming you already simmered the chicken in stock the first time that would be plenty flavourful.

30 minutes is not a lot of time to boil out the bones. That process takes upwards of 10 hours, no?

You can do it in less, with a pressure cooker. Even so, 30 minutes is not going to get maximum flavor and collagen out of the bones.

If they're also using the original poaching stock I could imagine you'll get a pretty stock even in 30 minutes. You'd still need to cook anything else you wanted in your soup -- vegetables, pasta -- though there are tricks for par-cooking these.

I don't own a pressure cooker, so I'm only reporting what I've read. And they do say that a pressure cooker makes better stock in shorter time -- there are things that not even a 10 hour simmer will get since the temperature never gets high enough to dissolve some things. Still, 30 minutes sounds sub-optimal, and I wouldn't expect anything to be even the slighest bit sub-optimal when you're paying two-Michelin-star prices.

Right, I know a pressure cooker can reduce time. I seriously doubt it will drop it to 30, is all.

And yeah, best read is they already had fully done stock and just add these bones to that and drain off some for you to have. Leaving it in to continue to make more stock.

Pressure cookers are magic. I get similar results making chicken stock in a pressure cooker for ~45 minutes as I do in a regular pot for ~4-6 hours. And you can properly make stock from beef bones in a couple of hours, which normally takes > 12 hours.

It's a 2 michelin star restaurant. Insanity is the point.

It is not so much insane as "they either have people wait for an hour or are not telling the truth".

I'd go further, it is a common farcical joke that people want to see the animal they are about to eat. But part of the joke is that nobody knows or cares about this, in truth. I fail to see why I would care to see the ingredients that went specifically into the dish I'm about to eat. It can be neat to see the full process in parts, such that if you want to parade the food at different stages, have at it.

And entertainment is full of evidence that people don't need or want to see the full process. For example, good editing can make a movie. There is still a market for stage plays, of course. There is always a curtain, though.

Well... we're talking about a foodie restaurant. I don't think you're the target market. The target market is closer to this old Portlandia sketch:

https://youtu.be/ErRHJlE4PGI?si=gz1D7h45Kq0dtMHt

Right, that would be an example of the farcical joke I meant. I think I even had that one in my mind. :D

And fair that there could be a market for this. Dozens of people, even. My point is that the market is almost certainly as much a stated market as it is an actual one. People want to be somewhat entertained, sure. And they want a good meal. Seeing the exact chicken that they are about to eat as it makes its way through the kitchen feels unlikely to be a deciding factor.

The soup is from leftover carcass meat, different than people are imagining from the quote. https://www.majordomo.com/blogs/recipes/boiled-chicken-two-w...

Hmmm, that like the "inefficiency" of advertisements with lots of empty space, and fancy stores with sparse interiors.

In other words, it's not actual inefficiency so much as a hard-to-recognize spending on buying another asset, namely the marketing/advertising effect of conveying "luxury" or "successfulness".

Sort of like peacock feathers: They're "inefficient" from the perspective of abstract aerodynamics, but from a holistic and practical perspective...

"The point is that the diner gets to see the chicken they will eat and understand the process."

What do you mean by "understand the process"? You only get that if you are in the kitchen with the cooks. Only open restaurants where you can see the cooks cooking help with that. Seeing a dead chicken ahead of time doesn't teach a guest anything. It is merely a flex, a story the restaurant sells to increase the price of a meal.

> "That was what made it great. If they wanted to sandbag it, they needed to figure out how they would make up for the lost energy elsewhere."

This seems to be the key quote. As a restaurant owner, as with any other type of team leader, his job is managing how the team's attention and energy is spent. Reading charitably, he doesn't want to formalize slack time into the system, because he thinks that slack will be eaten up by something else with the next process change, making the whole operation more brittle (also specifically in a restaurant setting, maximizing kitchen throughput is _not_ the same as maximizing efficient operation)

I could of course be reading too much into this, but from my own experience, it's the same difference between a sensible ad hoc meeting culture and being forced to use "efficiency" tools that inevitably make meetings less productive.

He explains the point in the lines you omitted:

> I worried about the mindset of the server whose job it would be to parade a stunt chicken around the dining room. I was terrified of our culture stagnating.

It doesn't read to me like he would have any problem with a process improvement as long as the real chicken were still used.

Some things are better, but some are bad shortcuts that cost quality. A burger from a place that cooks it after you order will always be better than a burger where they start cooking before you walk in the door. Back when I worked fast food I sometimes made my own burgers, when it was fresh off the grill it was one of the best burgers I ever had, but that is a lot more individual labor and so not sustainable in a fast food model. Back then burgers were assembled before you walked in the door, but these days they have all backed off to assemble the burger after you order of ingredients cooked before - it is higher quality and they have managed to optimize assembly enough that it is now sustainable.

Where the fast food industry wants to be is a robot that sees you push the button and starts cooking your burger then before you get to paying for it. Robots could do all that, but they are too expensive for the price they need to hit at least so far. (there are also some fraud issues they have to work out) They have to start cooking before you finish the order to meet their fast goals which is one of the reasons people go to fast food.

He says he doesn't care about the integrity but I think he's wrong and he's misidentified the lesson from this.

Because you are absolutely right, doing things that are inefficient and stupid for the sake of it is absolutely dumb.

> I worried about the mindset of the server whose job it would be to parade a stunt chicken around the dining room. I was terrified of our culture stagnating.

This is where it makes sense. He does care about integrity. If you foster a culture of faking little things like this it can eventually grow into a culture of faking the big things that actually do matter.

>The quality of the food isn't the point either

quality is entirely the point, nowhere does he suggest quality is compromised; his staff's alternate idea was not reducing quality. he's making a different point.

It’s very simple actually. “The dish” is defined as a chicken you see before it is then taken away and carved. You see your chicken. That’s the promise. If they parade around with a display chicken then it is simply dishonest. Does it matter? That is a different question entirely. The point is there is a promise involved in “the dish”. If they want to use a parade chicken then they need a different promise.

> The inefficiency is the point. Doing it the long, hard and stupid way is the point.

Yes. This is what passes for "fine dining" today.

Starbucks used to make a thing of this. The process of making drinks was deliberately made manual and complicated to give customers the impression they were getting their money's worth for overpriced coffee. That was part of the Starbucks mystique, when they had one.