13.2023 Edition

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Editor: Justin Khanna​

Hey Reader,

Apologies in advance, but we’re gonna get a bit morbid today.

This one goes out to the real worry-warts. The folks that lose sleep over potential hypotheticals, unforeseen issues and the endless list of “what-if’s”.

Lucky for us, there are people who manage way more risk than we do (billions of dollars, geopolitical threats, natural disasters) and they’ve come up with a pretty handy practice that you can use in your own work life: it’s called the pre-mortem.

This is in contrast to a post-mortem: the list of things that caused a death to happen.

As the word implies, a “post” mortem is done after the fact, but what if you did the same style of evaluation before the event happens?

A pre-mortem is an exercise where team members meet before a project to discuss risks that could cause the project to fail.

Try this next time you have a project coming up that you’re nervous about:

• Maybe the restaurant’s investor is hosting a buy-out and you’ve never done an event this big before
• A big off-site catering contract you’re getting ready to execute
• You have an important job interview that’s about to happen
• A critic is coming into the restaurant
• You’re about to host your first pop up in a new space

Ask yourself: what would cause this to proverbially “die” (AKA: fail)? What are the potential causes?

If it’s helpful to frame this…picture you from the future coming back and telling the story about why the project failed. What might they say?

We can combine this with the mental model of: Avoiding Stupidity is Easier than Seeking Brilliance and you’ve got a pretty potent plan for how to make sure things go your way.

If it’s a job interview, your pre-mortem might look like:

• I showed up 10 minutes late to the interview
• They asked me a question about what I was excited about in the restaurant and I couldn’t come up with anything on-the-fly
• My knives were dull when they gave me a prep project to do

For our buy-out example:

• We ran out of serving vessels for the snacks and everyone had to wait for things to be re-washed
• Our investor wanted Chef to be able to talk to guests, but she was bogged down in plating the first course
• We went down when it came time to do the desserts because our signature dessert doesn’t scale to that many guests in the space that we have

Listen, this might feel really negative in the moment 😰

It’s not fun to put this kind of list together. But neither is losing sleep over this type of rumination.

I let out a sigh of relief after doing this type of exercise, because now that it’s all out in the open, we can invert each of these dot points.

Let’s try this inverted thinking with our buy-out example so that we can do the opposite of our potential problems:

• We’ll get compostable vessels to serve snacks on - I can order a case of 500, and that’ll make us super comfortable for the number of guests that are coming
• Chef can give a demo to Corey and Amanda on the first course plate up this week, so that they know exactly what to do for the buy-out next week. That way, if chef gets called away during the event, service can still keep moving and our investor will be happy to have guests get face-time with chef.
• We’ll take 3 components from our signature dessert and make it into a pre-dessert. This way, we can serve a mini version of it, where all guests can taste it, but we can do an easier-to-execute plated dessert for the actual menu.

Just so we’re clear, notice that none of these are “new” ideas or “boundary pushing” plans.

When there are risks to avoid, I find it drastically more valuable to do a pre-mortem rather than try to increase complexity. Moments like these are not the time to try something new.

Also...notice that I presented action items with each of the inversions - this isn’t just the “duh” advice of “just don’t let that happen”. How can you virtually guarantee that it won’t happen?

Here’s how you can use this:

1. Frame the pre-mortem. How can you ask the right questions so that you land on responses that you can use productively? This might be a “you from the future” conversation, pretending to write a disheartening email/text to your co-worker (hey Corey…this didn’t go well, and here’s why…), or a note in your phone with prompts for yourself.
2. Play out the scenario and add different perspectives. What are realistic issues that might happen? If you do this with your team, maybe each team member gets to contribute 2 reasons. This helps avoid the “unrealistic ones” like “the restaurant burns down”. Of course that could happen, but it’s not really that actionable for the project we have coming up.
3. Invert the dot points. If we KNEW the contents of this list happened, how would we prevent it, given the position we’re in now?

I wish we all had the capacity to do this type of work for every project in our lives, but for more everyday scenarios, your mileage may vary.

However, for new & novel initiatives, this can be an incredibly valuable tool behind the glass for you to break into and use. Hope this helps!

​If you improved by 1% every day, how far would you have come after 365 days? *

The answer may surprise you ⤵️

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You'd be 37x better than where you started. So how do you actually measure that, and where do you start?
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Justin Khanna will be sharing his key strategies and practices that you can try immediately to feel growth again. This session is specifically tailored for folks that are working in hospitality organizations 🔥

Join us on Tuesday, April 4 at 1pm EST – grab your (free) spot, because the session completely sold out last time!

*Sponsored by 7shifts​

Top Hits 💥

​Using Chat GPT to generate recipes​

Artificial intelligence is coming for all our jobs, or so the media would have us believe. That may be true for those in the media, funnily enough, but Chat GPT cannot run a kitchen and feed hundreds of people every day. So is there a useful way to use Open AI’s scarily competent AI model as a tool in the kitchen?

After a few failed attempts and dud prompts, it seems that the AI model is quite adept at generating recipe ideas based on the ingredients you might have in the fridge. For chefs that means an easy way to prompt ideas for what to do with unexpected excess ingredients. For home cooks, it might remove the need for scrolling through recipe blogs before you decide what to cook that evening.

Our Take: Ok ok ok, we get it! AI is taking over, but maybe we should let AI rest for recipe-creation.

It MAY be a good starting point for recipes but don’t count on a 100% success rate. This reminds us of Joshua Weissman’s recent video where he competes against recipes from ChatGPT.

AI, in it’s current iteration, works off of a data set after all. It pulls from recipes that already exist and might actually be inaccurately combining two into one without applying any adjustments!

We see 2 current massive benefits for anyone in charge of recipes:

1. Going from 0 to 1 - Students that have taken The DTO Framework know this well. Sometimes the hardest part is overcoming the “blinking cursor” syndrome when you’re coming up with a new dish. Prompting ChatGPT in the right way can allow you to break that seal, giving you a version that you might actually disagree with! Use your background and experience to take that “scrappy version 1” and turn it into something that feels more like yours. Going from 1 to 10 is where you can take the ball and run with it
2. Assisting with the “busy work” - Check out this recipe for Potato Latkes from my recipe book I prompted ChatGPT with. Instead of typing out every line, I just gave it a comma-separated list of ingredients. It obviously added a few lines that I’d delete, but if you’re R&D’ing a recipe and have just left a long day in the kitchen with a list of ingredients this can be a game changer. Again, if you’re creating new and novel ideas, your mileage may vary, but for sauces, baking projects and other commonly done tasks, it’s pretty good!

​Uber Eats is shutting down thousands of virtual restaurants to make the app less spammy​

But since some of these ghost kitchens are often run by the same company — and sometimes out of the same location — that can lead to repetitive listings, where one restaurant may have different branding but the same exact menu. Those are the type of redundant listings that Uber Eats is cracking down on, as it now requires virtual locations to have menu items that “are at least 60% different” from any other virtual restaurants “operating from that same physical location.” The same goes for the brand’s “parent restaurant,” or the kitchen that houses the virtual brands.

Additionally, Uber will now require the ghost kitchen and its parent restaurant to maintain a 4.3-star rating or higher on the app, have 5 percent or fewer orders that they have canceled, and have a 5 percent or lower inaccurate orders rate. Uber notes that it “reserves the right to remove VRs from the Uber Platforms that are not in compliance.”

Our Take: We were pretty torn on this story here at Repertoire...

Pranjal brings a perspective from living in a city where ghost kitchen concepts went wild during the pandemic...too many concepts, not enough quality, and the whole trend left a bad taste in her mouth.

Justin (with his relationship with the food-brand-creating company Popchew) brings another perspective, considering the growth opportunities were hugely beneficial for restaurant partners, and this change feels exactly the same as when a social media platform changes their algorithm and the content you were posting last month "doesn't work" anymore.

It’s not all doom-and-gloom, though. Having these more "focused" brands that are still run out of the same kitchen (think: one burger brand that's "traditional" and one that's serving plant-based burgers) can still allow savvy operators to do more with less.

ICYMI 🙌

The podcast was featured in Saveur Magazine's newsletter this week, courtesy of previous guest on the show, Chef Akshay Bhardwaj!

📱 We are on Instagram too! In case you are short on time, we recommend you follow us there to get snippets of the newsletter for a quick peek during your commute or while you wait in the line for your coffee.

🍽️ INSTANTLY Improve your Plating Speed with these tips - we'd also love for you to subscribe to the Repertoire channel...if just 11% of this email list subscribed, we'd hit 1,000 YouTube subscribers!

This Week, We Learned… 🧠

• How to Read a Menu and Order Like a Food Critic​
• This Makes Your Steak 30% Juicier!
• A Power Struggle Threatens the Future of Hollywood’s Hottest Restaurants​
• Show Your Work and Don't Fear Criticism

Comment from you folks:

To Peep 👀

• Justin's doing a pop up in Seattle on 4/17! There are only 5 seats left - you coming?
• ​Hocho Knife’s Super Spring Sale, up to 25% OFF! Use code SS23T - Don't miss this opportunity before the annual price increase this spring, offer lasts till March 31st
• Get prepared for Easter with custom molds! Shop JB Prince now!

Quote I'm Pondering 💭

Thanks for reading, as always,

👊Justin​

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