From the Angry Chef (AKA Atlanta Chef Ron Eyester) taking to Twitter to share his fiery opinions on guest complaints to South Park episode You’re Not Yelping, which mocks Yelpers for their self-importance, it’s fair to say that the Yelp reviewer backlash is nowhere near its end. In fact, more recently, Mark Nery, owner and chef of Denver restaurant Onefold, got some attention for his snarky response to Yelp reviews.
So with the fire obviously still burning hot, DiningOut.com decided to ask their Chef Panel how they respond to Yelp reviews. Here’s a look at they said.
“At Vesta, we like to take a proactive approach to both good and bad reviews. With different online forums, we have different abilities to respond, depending on if they leave contact information or not. Any time there is something great or poor, we try to take the time to respond directly to the guests. Especially when we feel that someone has truly had an unpleasant time, was disappointed with something, or even just not thrilled with the entire experience, we reach out to address the concerns specifically”
“I prefer the sport of trying to turn them around. It doesn’t always work, but it’s more enjoyable than getting all fired up and hitting them back. I look at that as dropping to their level of emotional IQ, and why dumb yourself down on purpose?”
“Edible Beats has a simple philosophy: all Yelp reviews (or any online reviews for that matter) should be responded to—good, bad, and indifferent. To be able to connect with Yelpers … allows us to communicate hospitality after the guest has left the restaurant. Even if we messed up their experience when they were at one of the restaurants, we’re hungry to win them back and exceed their expectations—sometimes a simple email to a Yelp reviewer does just that.”
“You should respond to a bad Yelp review with class. They already showed their hand by talking on Yelp. Therefore, there is no need to be defensive or lash out with backhanded compliments and gratitude.”
“It would be better and more productive if customers voiced their displeasure at the time of service and not waited to get home and send ranting emails filled with bad grammar at two in the morning. We have empowered our staff to deal with issues as they come up.”
Check out what the rest of the DO Chef Panel has to say about responding to Yelpers on DiningOut.com→
To even have a chance at getting a restaurant or hospitality job, acing the interview is a must, and that requires at least some preparation. While you can’t anticipate answers to every question asked, there are some interview questions that nearly every restaurant and hospitality job seeker will face. These are also some of the most difficult questions to answer, and that’s why planning strong responses can drastically increase your chances of nailing the interview and ultimately landing the job.
What is your biggest strength?
A good place to start when planning your answer to this question is by asking yourself: in which aspect of the job am I most confident and which do I enjoy the most? The skill or responsibility that answers both questions makes for a great response because it’s genuine.
A general rule of thumb that applies to this question in particular is that the interview is not the time to be modest. A manager can only have as much confidence in an applicant as the applicant has in his or herself.
Selling oneself by emphasizing strengths as strongly as possible is key here.
Remember, though, that while embellishment is to be expected and perhaps even recommended in situations where experience is lacking, telling outright lies is ill-advised. Not only will getting caught cause others to question your moral compass, but it will likely land you in a position for which you are unprepared.
What is your biggest weakness?
Do not answer this question without careful thought; the person asking is a potential employer, not a therapist. Plus, a wise candidate will turn this into yet another opportunity to highlight his or her strengths.
A good example would be something like taking on more shifts than desired in a past position because it describes a person who will work to the point of exhaustion in order to avoid letting down his or her team. A good quality in the end.
Again, be as genuine as possible when answering this question because chances are your interviewer has heard it all, or said it all. So, if you’re lying your pants off, it will most definitely show. PRO-TIP: if you can’t think of anything, ask a coworker what they think you could work on and take it from there.
What is your favorite part of the job?
When answering this question, take the opportunity to illustrate to the interviewer that you know the ins and outs of the job and the industry culture. An easy way to do this is by using the jargon and slang that you would typically here around the workplace.
This question also provides an opportunity to express what it is about working in a restaurant or service establishment that makes it where you want to be, rather than where you have to be. Whether it’s getting to work with all types of people, facing a different challenge every day or something that’s unique to you, it’s worth sharing.
Go a step further by relating your answer to the business for which you’re interviewing.
For example, if you’re interviewing for server position and your favorite part of the job is giving customers recommendations, add that this job in particular is exciting because of the variety of dishes on the menu. This shows motivation and dedication.
What is your least favorite?
While this is not the time to air grievances, either about past employers or the industry itself, a successful candidate must not fall into the trap of saying that there is nothing that he or she does not like about the job.
While this would be ideal if true, in a perfect world, it is simply not possible and will sound as disingenuous as it is. Answering with an aspect of the job that everyone universally dislikes is a better move. It will ring true and serve the additional purpose of making you relatable to the interviewer.
One possibility? Griping about bad tips. Just be sure to express the understanding that it comes with the territory and be sure to mention that you wouldn’t let it affect your performance.
Why would you make a good addition to the team?
Working in the restaurant and hospitality business is always a team effort, no matter how you slice it because, in the end, all that matters is the experience of the customer or guest. Making this experience a positive one depends not only on your performance but also on the performance of your coworkers.
That said, being a good addition to a team ultimately means that you’re doing what you can to support it.
With this in mind, a winning answer doesn’t have to be overly complicated, it just has to emphasize the fact that you’re willing to be helpful. A wise way to express this is by stressing your readiness to help co-workers without no need of extra incentives; that it’s part of the job to do whatever you can to help the team.
Planning is just half of the battle, though; you also need practice…
Have a friend or family member conduct a mock interview that includes the above questions in the days leading up to the real interview. This will help to work out any kinks in responses and to avoid awkward pauses or excessive use of filler words. Plus, it will boost your confidence, giving you a leg up on the competition!
LOOKING FOR A JOB IN THE RESTAURANT INDUSTRY?
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When it comes to finding jobs in the restaurant industry, the grass is always greener in the next city over. However, the places you think of as restaurant meccas may not be the ones you want to pack up and move to.
We’ve compiled a list of cities that we think are the best places for various career paths, factoring in the local restaurant scene, job market, rent, regional economy, state minimum wage for tipped workers, and the average resident’s spending habits. The results included some unexpected winners…
Best city for Servers: Seattle, WA.
Minimum wage for tipped workers in Washington is a staggering $9.47. That’s more than you would earn in California or New York, and, unlike both cities, in Seattle you might find a decent apartment for under $1000 a month! Seattle also has a vibrant restaurant and bar scene; it’s famous for its seafood, but every kind of cuisine is represented.
Best city for Bartenders: Las Vegas, NV.
This one is probably less of a surprise. Minimum wage in Nevada is above average – $7.25 for those who claim health benefits, $8.25 for those who don’t- and in the tourist haven of Las Vegas, you can expect generous tips.
The median amount a Bartender takes home $22 an hour in Sin City.
That goes pretty far in a town where a fair-sized one-bedroom apartment might cost $700 a month. Between its thriving bar scene and its famous casinos, Las Vegas always needs Bartenders, so landing a job, at least, isn’t much of a gamble.
Best city for Cooks and Chefs: Boston, MA.
Minimum wage is only $3.00 in Massachusetts, but the job market favors Chefs and Cooks in the foodie hub of Boston. The median cook can expect to take home $14.40 an hour. In Boston, as in most cities, Cooks make less than a dollar an hour in tips.
Boston’s rent, more than that of most cities, varies wildly by neighborhood, but generally stays under $1000 for a one-bedroom apartment.
Best city to find your first restaurant job: Austin, TX.
It’s true that Texas’ minimum wage is a measly $2.80. However, with unemployment at 3%, Austin’s job market couldn’t be much tighter, driving wages up along with beginning workers’ prospects.
In fact, Austin’s restaurant industry is the fastest-growing in the city.
The city is known for Tex-Mex and southern barbecue, but fine dining and international cuisines are on the rise. Best of all, rent is fairly low, usually around $800 or $900 for a one-bedroom apartment.
Best city to start a restaurant: Buffalo, NY.
If you’ve never been to Buffalo, you might picture it as a crumbling ex-factory town under several feet of snow. You would be right about the snow, but in recent years the former shipping hub has been going through an economic boom, beginning with its restaurants.
One in seventeen Buffalonians works in a restaurant and the city boasts no fewer than five farmers markets, but wages and property values are still relatively low. So if you want the lowest possible starting cost with the largest possible clientele, perhaps you want to learn to make beef on weck.
The endless hours between lunch and dinner are painful enough as it is—made even worse when you’re traveling and away from your kitchen. Whether you’re actually hungry or just need something to munch on to pass the time, tap into the food-oriented brains of some top chefs for their best snacking practices.
Don’t pack lightly
For everything from road trips to air travel, Fung Tu’s Jonathan Wu packs his go-to breakfast sandwich: a toasted poppy seed bagel with a fried egg, avocado and pimentos.
Stella Barra chef Jeff Mahin brings individual nut butter-honey packets, citing the protein and sugar combo as the perfect pick-me-up. But remember that if you’re airport bound, you’ll have to keep liquids to a minimum, which is why he also brings snack packs of trail mix. What else will you find in his carry-on? Dried meat. “I have a soft spot for beef jerky.”
Try the DIY lifestyle
Granola bars are generally delicious, and there’s no beating the convenience, but boxes of granola bars can get expensive. So, be like Mahin and make your own. He purées a mixture of soaked oats, almond milk, almond butter, raisins, cinnamon and vanilla, then boils it before letting it set in a baking dish.
Like Mahin, chef Brian Landry of New Orleans restaurant Borgne is a fan of beef jerky on road trips, specifically, the kind that’s homemade by one of his sous chefs.
Miss Lily’s executive chef Adam Schop makes a mean Chex mix, using pick-a-pepper sauce over Worcestershire for a Jamaican twist.
Find your inner junkie
Rule number one of vacation: travel calories don’t count. Schop says when he’s on the road, he craves Samoas, the classic Girl Scout cookie. And though nowadays Wu travels with KIND bars and other granola snacks, that wasn’t always the case.
“As a kid when traveling with just my Dad, we had many ‘breakfasts’ on trains consisting solely of pizza-flavored Combos!”
Mahin totes around snack-size packets of Nutella, a trick that “makes it easier to justify than eating an entire regular-size jar.”
Landry feels the same way, saying his guilty pleasure is a quality bar of chocolate. “Preferably with almonds or sea salt.”
Embrace the surroundings
While it’s tempting to try and bring all your favorite snacks from home, traveling is the perfect time to try new foods.
Though Landry always tries gulf seafood (“I love seeing what people in other parts of the country are doing with the product caught right at my back door”), he also likes to try different flavored potato chips like jamon, crab and octopus.
“I try my best to eat like the locals,” Wu says. That’s how he discovered—and fell in love with—Sino-Indian food while traveling in India.
Mahin agrees: “I like finding honest food in cities.” The roadside shack could end up being a hidden gem—maybe even your next travel destination itself.
“Oh man, last night’s service… we were so weeded! Food’s dying on the pass. The rail is jammed up with dupes. The salamander stopped working. My porter no-showed. I really thought we might go down.”
If you’ve never worked in a restaurant, this little snippet might as well be written in Sanskrit. Like all occupations, the professional kitchen has developed its own vernacular—one that is at once clever, efficient, and sometimes a little crude. While each kitchen will have its own unique patois, the basics are the same.
Here’s your guide to common kitchen slang:
ON THE LINE
The “line” is the kitchen space where the cooking is done, often set up in a horizontal line. Being “on the line” means you are a “line cook”—an essential foot soldier in any functioning restaurant.
RUNNING THE PASS
The “pass” is the long, flat surface where dishes are plated and picked up by service staff. The chef or high-level cook who “runs the pass” each night is in charge of letting the cooks know what they will be cooking as orders come in. They are in control of the watching the order tickets, monitoring the speed and rhythm of the coursing, and making sure each dish looks good before it goes out to the customer.
5 OUT
Coordination is essential for any busy kitchen where there are multiple cooks in charge of different dishes, components, and garnishes for every plate. When a cook yells “5 out” or “3 out on sirloin,” it signals to the other cooks that they will be ready to plate in said amount of time.
SOIGNE
Mostly used by wannabe fine-dining douchebags, soigne (pronounced “SWAN-YAY”) means “elegant” in French. It’s used to describe an exceptionally sexy dish, or when you really nailed a plating presentation.
A LA MINUTE
A la minute is French for “in the minute,” and it refers to making a dish right then, from scratch. Instead of making a big batch of risotto during prep time and reheating portions of it hours later, a dish made “a la minute” is cooked from start to finish only when an order for it comes in.
MISE
Short for mise en place (French for “everything in its place”), this term refers to all of the prepped items and ingredients a cook will need for his specific station, for one night of service. E.g., Chef: “Did you get all of your mise done?” Cook: “I just need to slice shallots for the vin(aigrette), chef, then I’m ready.”
kitchenlingo_atala
12-TOP/4-TOP/DEUCE
A “12 Top” refers to a table with 12 diners. A “4 top” has four diners. A “deuce” just two.
NO SHOW
A “no-show” is a kitchen employee who doesn’t show up to work. No-shows are undeniable assholes.
ON DECK/ON ORDER
As tickets shoot out from the kitchen printer, the cook running the pass will let the cooks know what they have “on deck”—for example, “4 steak, 2 quail, 1 blue, on order”—so the cooks can mentally prepare and start setting up what they will be cooking throughout a diner’s meal.
FIRE
When a chef calls out “fire” or “pick-up,” a cook will start cooking that particular dish (e.g., “FIRE! 6 broco, 3 polenta side, 1 lamb”) “Order fire” means to immediately start cooking a certain dish because there is only one course on the ticket, much to the annoyance of the kitchen (because it forces them to restructure the entire pick-up). “Pick-up” can also be used as a noun, as in “I had to re-do my entire pick-up because some jabroni order-fired a porterhouse.”
RUN THE DISH When a dish of plated food that is ready to go out to the dining room, cooks will “run the dish.” Servers ask, “Can you run?”, when they are waiting to ferry the food out of the kitchen.
DYING ON THE PASS
Hot food that is ready to be run that has been sitting on the pass for an inordinate amount of time getting cold and losing its soigne character because waitstaff are either too slammed or too lazy to pick it up.
86’D
When the kitchen runs out of a dish, it’s “86’d.” Dishes can also be 86’d if the chef is unhappy with the preparation and temporarily wants it off the menu. Patrons can be 86’d, too.
One of the earliest documented usages of this term was at the bar Chumley’s in downtown Manhattan during Prohibition. The bar had an entrance on Pamela Court and an exit at 86 Bedford Street. Police would call ahead to warn the bartenders of a possible raid, telling them to “86” their customers out of the 86 exit door.
WEEDED / IN THE SHIT / IN THE WEEDS
Used when a cook is really fucking busy, overwhelmed by tickets, and frantically trying to cook and plate his dishes.
THE RAIL / THE BOARD
This refers to the metal contraption that holds all of the tickets the kitchen is working on. Once a ticket is printed, it’s stuck to “the rail” or “the board.” “Clearing the board” means the kitchen has just worked through a large set of tickets.
CHECK YOUR PLATES!
Every open kitchen where the cooks can actually see patrons will have a term that signals that an attractive man or woman is in the dining room. It might also be “Ace!” or “Yellowtail!” or whatever the kitchen comes up with.
THE SALAMANDER / ROBOCOP / SIZZLE / COMBI Kitchen equipment names often get abbreviated or nick-named.
“salamander” is a high-temperature broiler
“robocop” is a food processor
“sizzle” is a flat, metal broiler plate
“combi” is an oven with a combination of heating functions
“fishspat” is a flat-angled metal spatula good for cooking fish
“spider” is a wire skimmer
“chinacap” is a cone-shaped colander
“low-boy” is a waist-high refrigerator
There’s a million of them…
VIPS / PPX / NPR “Very Important Person,” “Persone Txtrodinaire,” and “Nice People Get Rewarded” written on a ticket signals to all staff that their work should be top-notch for these diners. It can be industry, celebrities, friends, or family—they all get hooked up.
CUPCAKING
Mostly for bartenders, “cupcaking” is used when a barkeep is spending noticeably too much time and attention on an attractive patron sitting at the bar.
FLASH
If a piece of protein is slightly undercooked, a cook will “flash it” in the oven for a minute or two to raise the temperature.
SANCHO When a cook sneezes, a co-worker will announce “SANCHO.” This is in the Mexican tradition of pointing out that someone named “SANCHO” or “SANCHA” is in your house banging your wife or boyfriend while you are at work. It’s a funny dig. The proper response is, “No mames guey! I’m not worried about Sancho.”
SHORT
To be missing a component of a dish or an ingredient, as in, “Dammit, I’m one meatball short!”
DUPE Short for “duplicate.” When tickets are printed in the kitchen, they are usually printed on two- or three-ply color-coded paper which signify courses. This allows the person running the pass to keep track of and discard layers as courses leave the kitchen, as in, “Gimme that dupe, I gotta cross off the apps.”
BUKKAKE
Does your dish have a swipe of yogurt, a squiggle of cream, or a splash of creme fraiche on it? That’s “bukkake.”
⅛ PAN, ⅙ PAN, ⅓ PAN, HOTEL
The standardized, stackable metal pans that cooks use to braise meat, carry vegetables, and roast things in are called “hotel pans,” which can be deep or shallow. There are many pans of different sizes and shapes that relate in volume to the hotel pan: three ⅓ pans can fit into a hotel, six ⅙ pans make up one hotel, eight ⅛ pans, etc.
BEHIND / ATRAS
In the fast-paced ballet of cramped kitchen spaces, cooks let their co-workers know they are moving behind them so there are no unnecessary collisions. When carrying knives, heavy hotel pans, and pots of burning liquid, the usual call is, “HOT BEHIND!” Atrás is Spanish for “behind.”
LEFT-HANDED SPATULA / BACON STRETCHER
These items do not exist. But tell a green cook to grab a “left-handed spatula” for you and watch the frantic search begin. Hilarious!
GETTING A PUSH
During service, work on the line usually comes in waves. When the tickets start printing faster and the restaurant is getting busier, the kitchen is “getting a push.”
CROPDUSTING
Cropdusting is farting, intentionally or accidentally, while moving down the line. Also works for wait staff, as in, “Goddamn table 17 is the fucking worst! When I drop their check I’m going to try and cropdust them.”
BURN THE ICE Disposing of the ice in the ice machine under your mise, or at the bar by pouring hot water over it.
SOS
Sauce on the side.
ALL DAY
This refers to the total amount of dishes a cook is cooking in one specific pick-up. It works as a clarification system between the chef and cook. The cook might say, “Chef, how many linguine am I working?!” or “Can you give me an all-day, Chef.” The chef would reply, “You’ve got 4 linguine, 3 spaghetti, 2 cappelletti, and 2 kids pastas, all day”
WAXING A TABLE
Giving a table VIP treatment.
‘Kitchen slang strengthens workplace solidarity, confuses the uninitiated, and is often peppered with a shocking amount of expletives.’
