NYT catches up on the Brigade topic:
The Brigade System Helps Restaurants Succeed. Does It Also Lead to Abuse?
Free link here.
“The brigade system pushes abuse down the line and pushes credit up the line,” said Saqib Keval, an owner and a chef of Masala y Maiz, a restaurant in Mexico City that aims for a less top-down approach. “The chef-leaders become these fearless martyrs who get all the credit for the labor of the team. And the team is the one always at fault and most at risk.”
At times, abuse travels down the line in an appallingly literal way. Robin Burrow, an associate professor of organization studies at the University of York, in England, who has written several studies of kitchen behavior and misbehavior, recalled interviewing a veteran of one restaurant where there was a set ritual of punishment for errors.
“What do we do when someone makes a mistake?” the chef would ask. The crew would sing out, in unison, “Punch them in the face!” At this point, the chef would point to one person who had to deliver the punch to the unfortunate cook who had erred.
Escoffier had been an army chef during the Franco-Prussian War. His military service gave him a chance to make several innovations in the preparation of horse meat; more lastingly, it shaped Escoffier’s views on how large groups could be made to work efficiently and harmoniously toward a single goal.
Because Escoffier’s system is so widely used, though, it can be hard to separate it from other elements of fine-dining kitchens. When a chef stabs a cook in the leg with a barbecue fork, as Mr. Redzepi has been accused of doing, is he perverting the purpose of the brigade? Or is he following it to its logical conclusion?
“I can’t sit here and tell you that brigade systems aren’t effective in certain ways,” said the chef Eric Huang, who has cooked in big New York City kitchens that follow the Escoffier model. “The problem is that they’re so effective that they deprioritize compassion, empathy and emotionally intelligent leadership.”
The leadership ethos in many kitchens is largely unchanged from Escoffier’s day.
Of course, a strict top-down brigade is not the only way to structure a kitchen. … At Masala y Maiz, Mr. Keval and his partner, Norma Listman, avoid keeping people in specialized jobs. Everyone in the kitchen takes turns working at every station over the course of a month… “We’re constantly rotating so there’s not this hierarchy of one station is more important than another, or being a line cook is more important than being a prep cook,” Ms. Listman said.
Top-down leadership structures are common in many businesses, yet chefs seem to be far more prone to slapping and kicking their underlings than, say, doctors or head librarians. Dr. Burrow said his research suggests that abuse in the restaurant industry has less to do with organizational charts than with other factors, like the physical isolation of kitchens and a culture in which an ability to absorb suffering is rewarded.
“There’s no requirement that to run a restaurant you need to be an abusive jerk"
My coworker really wanted a strudel but was denied.
