Repertoire Tickets

We help build your Repertoire, so you can do your best work

💼 Career

Recipe vs Repertoire

It's really exciting to get a new recipe.

Especially one that works.

Guests enjoy it, you can replicate the results, you get to flip your Moleskine notebook page and have that oh-so-satisfying feeling of "boom, just added another one to the collection".

Collecting recipes compounds (which is also a great feeling), but after you've reached a level of mastery on your station, it's not about the Recipes anymore.

Personally, I found myself wanting to:

• Make more money
• Move to a new city
• Step outside of my comfort zone from the place I was working at

A collection of recipes, no matter how large, wasn't going to save me.

I call this a difference between a Chef with a Recipe vs a Chef with a Repertoire.

To make sure I'm clearly defining terms, I'm talking about "Repertoire" in the sense of the set of available, usable skills.

I use skills intentionally because I truly believe each of these can be taught, as long as you break them down into their component parts.

• Talking to guests = (public speaking + emotional intelligence + vocabulary)
• Calculating costs from an event = (algebra + awareness + inventory)
• Hiring for a role = (delegation + leadership + process creation)

Notice the language people use as a cop-out adding these to their Repertoire:

"I'm just not confident presenting a dish to guests"

"Don't ask me about food cost, I'm not really a numbers guy"

"No one can make the bread like I can"

These beliefs are incredibly limiting, and they're standing in the way of your progress.

Here's why it's frustrating: you aren't going to be handed a Recipe for "how to build a Repertoire".

Because unlike a Recipe, there isn't one clear "right answer", and high performers often build their Repertoire in different orders.

On top of that, a Repertoire is also incredibly hard to visualize.

If you sign up for Gronda or ChefSteps or Masterclass or buy 18 new Phaidon cookbooks, you can confidently say: "look at all these Recipes I have!!"

Below the surface, you might add a skill to your Repertoire and not use it for 6 years.

But when leveraged, that skill might actually become 3x more valuable when combined with another skill you just learned last week (example: I used to write + print the tasting menu every night for service, which was finally leveraged when I started hosting pop-ups...but I also had to learn how to set up a ticket page on my website!)

I know the empty feeling of being aware of the gap between the role you're in and the chefs you look up to.

I just don't think what's going to bridge the gap is more Recipes.

“Why do hospitality workers choose you?”

Flexibility isn’t just a perk—it’s a priority. Over 56% of restaurant employees say flexible scheduling is the #1 reason they work in hospitality.

Our Take: We don’t think this means you need to switch to a 4-day work week or switch half your team to part-time.

It DOES mean that the cookie-cutter advice around hiring 9-5 employees might not give you the best results.

Hold strong to what the business needs first, but also understand that a nuanced understanding of what makes your team tick can lead to impressive levels of loyalty, higher retention and a straight-up happier workplace.

👉 We also dig that they asked folks to pick up to 3 answers for this set of questions. If you're into a broad data set to learn more about what 7shifts learned...

See the breakdown across all 7 factors inside the report →