Staff meals: feeding the restaurant family
It's a tradition that gives chefs a breather from the kitchen pressure cooker, fuels them through busy services and brings whole teams together – and it's more important than ever in modern kitchens. We join two top restaurants for a taste of the family meal ritual.
Staff meals: feeding the restaurant family
It's a tradition that gives chefs a breather from the kitchen pressure cooker, fuels them through busy services and brings whole teams together – and it's more important than ever in modern kitchens. We join two top restaurants for a taste of the family meal ritual.
‘You need ketchup as well as vinegar,’ James Knappett says firmly, as he dollops some on the plate in front of me. A generous helping of fish, chips and mushy peas might not be typical of a visit to the chef’s two Michelin-starred restaurant Kitchen Table in Fitzrovia, but it’s hearty fuel for a busy team, who have – as they do every day at 3pm on the dot – left the kitchen to load up a plate and grab a seat at the counter for half an hour, before it's back to prep and pace hits full tilt during service. It's Friday afternoon and it's time for Kitchen Table's staff meal – or family dinner – a restaurant ritual which sees everyone down tools to share a family-style feast. It's not a new phenomenon, but it is one that, by its nature, has gone largely unseen – or it had, until social media savvy chefs and the recent flurry of restaurant TV dramas like The Bear and Boiling Point started bringing us further into the professional kitchen.
At the same time that our interest in the drama of cooking has blossomed, shifts in restaurant kitchen culture have also made traditions like the staff dinner more of a priority. After all, when it’s done right, the family meal does what it says on the tin; brings the restaurant together, providing respite from the rush, sustenance and a chance to build camaraderie. ‘It’s very rare that a restaurant comes together to sit down,’ James says. ‘I have worked in restaurants where, if you wanted to, they’d let you work all day without eating, because everyone is too busy. Here, everyone stops at 3pm to sit and chat.’ Battered fish, heaps of chunky chips, a vat of mushy peas, tartare sauce and gherkins are set down, plates are piled high and everyone tucks in. Amid the chatter is a family meal tradition; Fun Fact Friday. They've come armed with trivia about everything from historic feasts to how much goats can eat (a lot). Ants only rest for eight minutes every twelve hours, if you didn't know (even chefs get longer than that).
Every restaurant with a family meal does it differently; at some, the responsibility belongs to the most junior chefs, while at others chefs take it in turns. Some staff menus are influenced by sentimentality (at Farringdon one-star Italian restaurant Luca, head sommelier Enzo Russomanno recently cooked his favourite carbonara mezzi paccheri for the team) or sustainability, making use of surplus produce. Often, what chefs fashion is far less, well, cheffy, than we might expect. At Kitchen Table, everyone mucks in to cook a different dish every day of the month, and contribute to seasonal specials – think black spaghetti and meatballs with eyes for Halloween, and Thanksgiving turkey feasts (often driven by Kitchen Table co-owner and James’ wife Sandia Chang). ‘They are big events and you make an effort at home with your own family – well these guys,’ James says, gesturing to the chefs behind him, ‘are a family. Everyone sees everyone here more than anyone else on the planet.’
Bringing the whole team together is a unique chance to bridge divides between chefs and front of house, relationships which can, during the rush of service, become fraught, says chef Jun Tanaka. ‘It’s a time for them all to chat and catch up on the day and what they’ve been doing on their days off,’ he nods. ‘You really do need that because there is this natural divide, and that comes from having a lack of time to spend with each other and get to know each other.’ At his one-star restaurant The Ninth, just a few doors down from Kitchen Table, the team pauses twice – once at 11am for a lighter lunch of soups or sandwiches, and again at 4.30pm for a more substantial affair. Menus are planned ahead of time and elements are shared out between chefs – today, it’s pork carnitas, loaded into tortillas with pickled red onions, guacamole, corn and sour cream (and carrot cake to finish), but it could be anything from pork Milanese to garlic chilli oil pasta and roast chicken with chips. And the family favourite? Pizza.
Staff meals have existed in some form as long as restaurants have, but in 1999 American chef Thomas Keller made a once-hidden ritual less so when he celebrated its importance in his The French Laundry cookbook. Plenty of chefs have followed suit, perhaps most famously in The Family Meal by Ferran Adrià, of Spain’s now-closed el Bulli, which, in 2011, focused on staff recipes that were a far cry from the restaurant’s ultra-modernist style (gazpacho and Thai chicken curry among them). More recently, chef dramas like The Bear – which included a spaghetti family meal in its first episode – and chefs sharing more of their day-to-day on Instagram have increasingly taken us behind the scenes. In 2019, Birmingham chef Brad Carter released Staff, a collection of family meal recipes from his restaurant Carters of Moseley. In the build-up to its release, he shared what the team was eating with his thousands of followers every day; in many cases, the same as his diners, but perhaps with a different cut of meat. 'I strongly believe we should be eating the same thing as the guests; it's our lifestyle as well,' he's previously said.
Efforts to leave the historic toxic culture of restaurant kitchens behind gives moments like the family meal greater importance. When Jun joined London restaurant Les Saveurs in the early 1990s, it was the first time he'd been encouraged to take a break during work. ‘When I arrived there, the chef said ‘right it’s time for lunch’, and I didn’t know what was going on – everyone left the kitchen to go and sit down for lunch and I’d never experienced that,’ he laughs. ‘It makes such a difference, it really does – people think ‘I’m too busy’ but you just have to work it into your day and make it a priority. I started cooking a long time ago and it was a completely different era. Staff food was an afterthought, there wasn’t much effort put into it and, to be honest, you were so busy you didn’t have time to eat.’
But carving out the time has an impact. A new front of house team member says it's been a welcome culture change from previous jobs, while head chef Filippo Alessandri says the enforced break is a chance to take a load off. ‘Obviously it’s a very busy environment and this is the moment that everybody stops for five or ten minutes and feels a bit lighter,’ he says, as his colleagues delve into a tub of Celebrations (it's almost Christmas, after all). Liam Sweeney, head chef at Kitchen Table, agrees: ‘It’s a moment for everyone to stop – we are going at 1,000 miles an hour, we are go, go, go, but then we can relax.’
Team bonding is all well and good, but family meals have a practical role to play: even chefs need to eat. Stuart Ralston has also dedicated part of his cookbook to family meals, which, across his four Edinburgh restaurants, sees one chef each day whip up anything from Swedish meatballs with mash and gravy to special fried rice, chicken and leek pie, lamb belly flatbreads and ever-popular bacon rolls on a Saturday morning (Sunday roasts and lasagne days are also regular crowd-pleasers). ‘The staff meal, to me, represents quite a few things – it’s about care and consideration for ourselves and our colleagues,’ he explains. ‘We deserve to eat a well thought out, balanced and nutritious meal at least once a day. Most importantly, it’s probably the only thing most of us eat in a day. What we put in fuels us for the day, so if I expect a lot in terms of staff performance then I need to set a high bar for how we fuel that.’
It’s stating the obvious to say that in most cases staff meals are a world away from what’s being served on the main menu; James might need some convincing to add fish and chips to his refined tasting menu anytime soon, and pizza is probably not a natural fit for the sophisticated small plates of The Ninth. That doesn’t mean chefs can get away with cutting corners, though; both Jun and James say they expect effort to be made in staff meals, and will make it clear if they feel that’s not been the case. ‘It’s what we do – we cook for people,’ James says. ‘Sometimes I’ll get annoyed if it isn’t up to the mark.’ Standards are standards, or, as Stuart sums up: ‘It’s about teaching cooks to always cook well, whether it's a staff tea or a tasting menu. Our standards must be professional at all times, there’s no room for any bad food in our establishments.’
Every so often, staff meals make the leap onto the main menu – at Shuko Oda’s Koya Ko in Hackney, the monthly specials are often inspired by what’s been served at team dinners, including a Portuguese-inspired açorda udon (salt cod, onsen tamago and coriander soup) by head chef Dona Rita, and a Brazilian seafood curry udon from former chef Allain Virassamy. That sharing of cultures is one of the best parts of family dinner, Adriana Cavita, of Cavita in Marylebone, agrees. She put a green sauce first cooked by an Indian chef at a family meal on the Mexican restaurant's menu. ‘It was a collaboration,’ she smiles. ‘Because we are from different countries, it’s helpful to share a little bit of your culture.'
Whether it's a team-building exercise or a breather to rest weary legs, it's no wonder more emphasis is being put on the family meal, particularly by chefs who have come up through kitchens without it. There's no-one who understands the power food has in bringing people together better than those who spend their days cooking it – be it an elegant tasting menu or a mountain of cod and chips.
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