A restaurant kitchen manualstandard recipes and station guides new cooks read on their phones

Method

1. 1

   Give your assistant the binder, a station at a time

   Make a shelf for the kitchen. Photograph the binder pages for one station, add any recipes you keep in files or notes, and give them to your assistant. Ask it to make a document for the station on your shelf and a finding per recipe, titled by the name on the menu or the prep label, with the same parts every time:

   • Yield, and the portion: “Makes 12 portions of 6 oz (170 g).”
   • Ingredients by weight, in grams, not cups.
   • Method, numbered, with times and temperatures.
   • Plating, in words: plate, placement, garnish, sauce last.
   • Holding: how it is held on the line, and for how long.
   • Contains, listing the major allergens.

   Tell it to copy your quantities exactly and to mark any it cannot read, rather than guess.

2. 2

   Fix it up in the editor

   Open each station and press Edit. Correct every recipe against how the station really cooks it, and fill in what the binder never said. Write each station’s overview yourself, as the page a cook reads first: what the station cooks, its opening and closing checklist, and the one rule you repeat most. “Sauté fires on the call, never before.”

   Write a sixth document, House rules: food safety and allergens, yourself too: holding and cooling temperatures from your local code, handwashing, the allergen procedure, and who to tell when something goes wrong.

3. 3

   Add the prep lists and the critical steps

   For each station, ask your assistant to file its prep list from your prep sheet as a table, with the par for each item on a weekday and on a Friday. Cooks check it at 2 p.m. and prep to par.

   Then, in the editor, give the steps that can make someone ill their own findings, filed as Risk and marked Key: cooling the veal stock, holding the aioli, the separate fryer for anything tree-nut or crustacean. On the link, cooks see the type and importance of every finding, so a high-importance Risk reads as what it is.

4. 4

   Ask your assistant to check the manual

   When a station is in, ask your assistant to read that station’s document for recipes still in cups and spoons, missing yields or portions, methods without a temperature, missing holding instructions, and Contains lines that disagree with the ingredients. Ask for a list in a new finding, not changes to the recipes.

   Your assistant can also scale a recipe for a forty-cover private dinner. Check its maths against your own before anyone cooks from it, and check every Contains line yourself; an assistant can miss the anchovy in a dressing as easily as a new cook can.

5. 5

   Give each cook a password link

   Press Share on each station document, set a password, and leave it with no expiry (the default) or set a date at the end of the season. Copy the link as soon as it appears; know.sh shows it only once. From each finding’s own page, leave out what cooks do not need, such as food cost and supplier prices. Door codes, alarm codes and supplier account numbers never go in the manual at all.

   Text the link and password to a new cook before their first shift, with one request: read the overview and the Key findings. The read count shows whether anyone did. When someone leaves, Replace the link and send the new one to the crew; replacing resets the expiry and the findings you left out, so set them again.

6. 6

   Change a recipe once, and say so

   When a recipe changes, edit its finding and add a first line cooks will see: “Changed 12 October: portion 6 oz, was 7 oz.” Cooks reading the link see the new version but not the revision history, so that line is how they know. Say it again at pre-shift.

   The revisions keep every earlier version with its date. If the new portion does not hold up on a Saturday, open Revisions on the finding and Restore the old one.

7. 7

   Plan a spoken check-off with the quiz

   Cooks cannot take quizzes in know.sh; only you can. So use them for yourself. Ask your assistant for a quiz on a station document, by name; it writes five to ten questions with know.sh’s quiz tools, each citing the recipe or rule it came from. Take it in know.sh or the iOS app: if you cannot answer from the document, the document is missing something.

   Then pick the questions that matter and ask them out loud at the end of a cook’s first week, at the pass, with the station in front of you. Keep sign-offs and anything about a cook’s performance in your own training records, not in the station documents.