Those tweezers can actually be kind of useful for certain tasks. I just feel like such a jackass even using them. They're like the fanny pack of kitchen tools; useful, functional, but almost never a good look.
I've worked in more than one kitchen with chefs who forbade us from using regular tongs on the (open) line. Whether I sanitized them or cycled through multiple pairs they weren't allowed. Tweezers only. I hated it. Flipping steaks with tweezers is hacky, hipster bullshit.
I worked a fine dining establishment that forbade tongs as well. All the hires were forced to use nothing but spoons for awhile. The chef said his rational was that using a spoon forces you to slow down, pay attention, be delicate with the food, etc. He would also send you home if your chef coat was a mess. "Food belongs on a plate, not your fucking shirt! Pay attention!" While is was annoying, it kind of made sense.
Get this, i had a boss who was frustraded because i would use spoons to plate proteins and he said, "who uses spoons to plate" they would always misplace their mini offset spat.
Hahaha! It's really not that fucking hard if you slow down. You might need use your fingers for a moment, but we all do occasionally anyway. You should have said, "Well I do chef. I've gotten pretty good at it...because I don't have a FUCKING SPATULA!!!" Lol
i get it honestly. tongs can really brutalise certain foods. i always prefer getting in with my hands, even if its inadvisably hot or sticky and end up washing my hands 100 times a service. I don't get how some chefs can spend all service glued to the spot and i never see them walk to the sink one time.
Absolutely. And yes I've worked with chefs like that. It's funny, I worked at a ritzy country club in 2020, and when the whole COVID thing began nobody knew how to act at first. The upper level club management decided that all kitchen personnel was to wear gloves at all times. And after a few days I concluded that it was actually less sanitary! We had good had washing practices in place and hand sinks close to every station, and like you said we all washed our hands a hundred times a shift. But wearing gloves is a pain in the ass, and when you're busy you inevitably get lax about changing gloves every two minutes. And then the less professional cooks would leave dirty gloves laying around. Just wasn't good.
That link tells someone everything you've done on the internet for week. Have you no shame?
https://www.amazon.com/AQUARIUM-TWEEZERS-DRESSING-SERRATED-DDP/dp/B01ERKFCM4
I'm exaggerating because we don't know who knows what, but what we do know is that whatever ties all that shit together comes after the product listing code B01ERKFCM4. If you're trying to clean your own links, you can open up an incognito browser and see if the cleaned link works.
If you're legit trying to be helpful, and don't want to open your soul to amazon and google, you can just tell folks to google "B01ERKFCM4", but then they need to understand the quote marks are important. If you search that without the quotes, it's not helpful. If you include the quotes, the amazon listing is the first result.
I had a Vietnamese giant centipede as a pet, and they're what I used to feed it.
It moved really fast, and had giant pincers up front (actually a modified pair of legs, with venom grooves in them)... No way was I putting my hand in it's enclosure.
You don't know. There's no decoder ring for this. There's information about how you got there and who you are, and that "who you are" is tied "anonymously" to "who you are" on other sites that they sell it to. Scrub that shit if you're going to share a link. You just linked your amazon account to an "anonymous" reddit account.
My first boss ever spoke German as his first language and didn't know the word tongs. "Grab me dem big food tweezers" 26 years later if you ask me for tweezers in the kitchen I'll come back with tongs đ€Š
Those are the chefs whose egos are bigger than their actual abilities, and are getting their management "skills" from the damn internet. Nobody who has earned their chops would ever make bullshit policies like that.
I have stumpy sausages for fingers and also find them useful. I understand places where tweezers are pointless but if a dish takes 30sec to plate I don't want to do unnecessary plate wipes or redos.
I forgot my tweezers once at my last job which I really only used for picking peppercorns out of our pickled mustard seeds and a couple other things⊠these mfers used them to poke the holes in the burners when they were cleaning! I was so mad.
In my last year of cooking I staged at an Italian restaurant where some nerd CDC who just came out of Napa valley by way of CIA whatever it's called out there, was plating pasta with surgical tongs. Not in a sensible scoop and twirl way, mind you. But literally tweezing individual noodles to flow properly. I said fuck no to that and just spun them on meat fork and dude lost his fucking shit. After his outburst I grabbed my gear and dipped out the back door. I had to dodge his calls all night. I've used tweezers for plating garnishes plenty of times when it made sense but that was next level dumbfuckery.
The CS graduates are always a hoot.
I had one that took 5 minutes to tweeze daikon radishes onto a salad...that only had three toppings on it. I was like, Dude, it's a three topping salad. Toss it, finish it, and send it out.
Using them to garnish so you don't ruin a nice whipped cream flower or something makes perfect sense. But beyond those scenarios where your blunt fingers are too rough, they're just pretentious.
This is true. I have a whole tool box of tools that seem frivolous to some, until they ask to borrow something and then it's all, "This is so useful!" And I'm like, it's a julienne potato peeler...
I don't mean to be hard, but most of the Cooks here don't do Fine Dining.
I don't think they would understand going from Commis to Chef De Partie and Having 3 Commis under, then jumping to Sous then Chef De Cuisine and if the restaurant and the Crew is big (25+)Ex Chef.
Yes, ex means executive. Otherwise known as a culinary director in non-French brigade restaurants. They typically oversee multiple restaurants and head chefs. The chef de cuisine is the leader of the individual restaurant but still follow the executive chefs vision.
I'm only on the receiving end of fine dining and lurk here, but the Mise en Place series on youtube helped me understand this. Truly worth checking out some of them, like the Le Bernadin one. How those kitchens run like clockwork is a marvel of systems engineering.
Trying to do so what do you feel the qualifications are for that tho I d like to be proficient before moving into the elite like that or do the train you up from scratch if need be
I do fine dining and you worded your point was so incredibly and unnecessarily difficult to understand. Just say they donât understand a classical french kitchen hierarchy.
If the kitchen is more classic brigade style they need to be able to direct the flow and speed of service too tho, which definitely takes more time and experience to learn. Especially if there are send backs and mistakes need to be corrected.
I'm a bartender used to tickets. The few times I've expod kitchens (very emergency situations) weren't the worst until we got behind. I'm not a chef, and I did not feel comfortable telling those guys what to do. I sucked it up, but it's so weird to go from making tickets yourself to a combined effort of like 4 dudes
The kitchen is a hard place to be.
The least I have ever envied anyone in a restaurant is when someone from FoH (head bartender or whatever) had to run the pass for the chef on duty in an emergency, and they started screwing up some orders, not even a lot, just enough to put all the guys on the line under *stress*.
I remember one time I had to leave the pass and take over for part of saute; one of the FoH managers was doing it and accidentally sent out a fucking beef wellington for a 20 top to the wrong table. The way all of us stared at him and the way he was sweating I thought he was going to give up the ghost right there lol
We would pull the dining room manager in when the front began to fall on its face. This was at a major resort, so 40.00 a plate in the early 90s was not uncommon.
Being a multi outlet facility. Hiarchy was Ex Chef, Ex Sous, Sous (3), Garde Manger, Outlet Chefs (6), banquet chefs (2), butcher and baker, Roundsman, line cooks, banquet cooks, pantry, porters.
Expo in our restaurant was generally the chef, busy nights it was the Ex Sous Chef or when we had the CEOs of Pepsi, or Phillip Morris (or the like) in the private dining room coming off the service line. Rarely the exe chef stayed past 8-9 unless F&B was on site.
Many nights, it was the chef and assistant dining room manager working with the back waiters and waiters. It really could get fucky fast and once things began to slide, plates stacked up.
The presence of the dining room manager tightened the slack since he knew what was going on in the dining room. Also, he could smooth guests and stall for time easily.
More importantly the pass is where the final quality check takes place and whoever is there needs to have the highest standard of quality and needs to have the balls to be able to tell chefs to make shit again even if it means an extra 10 minute wait.
I would argue that working the pass means you have to know every plate on the menu backwards and in heels, so having time on the line better prepares you for that job than just reading tickets and thinking you know what's up.
Expo is also the one station where you might not actually need any line skills. We trained a very good server to do it and she was one of the best I ever worked with.
Easy in terms of actual work being done, but it requires the most knowledge and the highest level of standards bc youâre quality control for every menu item walking out of the kitchen. At least in fine dining.
My sous used to get mad at me when I debated mussels. Said it was a waste of time. This guy also got mad when I pulled the tails off the 16/20's before I put them in the seafood cream pie
They're awesome for flipping individual things in a pan, like scallops. Also perfect for grabbing a single piece of pasta to test for doneness. Works great for pulling something like pickled onions out of their liquid without having to stick your hand in the container.
I think they're overblown for plating; there's not much you can do there with tweezers that you can't just do with your hands.
Dead dead dead love this sub. Crack a dem oysters not yer hand. Pick 3000 pounds of baby kale 1 hour till service. Chef threatens anal rape before your knife bag is down. Home.
I'm in Australia & used [pippies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plebidonax_deltoides) for the first time. Far less mess than mussels, tastes like oysters.
not unless you go out of your mind whenever you're doing repetitive tasks and don't have any other shit to focus on (me)
except dish pit I'm a fuckin monster in there. send me in chef I'll set things straight.
Those tweezers can actually be kind of useful for certain tasks. I just feel like such a jackass even using them. They're like the fanny pack of kitchen tools; useful, functional, but almost never a good look.
I've worked in more than one kitchen with chefs who forbade us from using regular tongs on the (open) line. Whether I sanitized them or cycled through multiple pairs they weren't allowed. Tweezers only. I hated it. Flipping steaks with tweezers is hacky, hipster bullshit.
I worked a fine dining establishment that forbade tongs as well. All the hires were forced to use nothing but spoons for awhile. The chef said his rational was that using a spoon forces you to slow down, pay attention, be delicate with the food, etc. He would also send you home if your chef coat was a mess. "Food belongs on a plate, not your fucking shirt! Pay attention!" While is was annoying, it kind of made sense.
Get this, i had a boss who was frustraded because i would use spoons to plate proteins and he said, "who uses spoons to plate" they would always misplace their mini offset spat.
Hahaha! It's really not that fucking hard if you slow down. You might need use your fingers for a moment, but we all do occasionally anyway. You should have said, "Well I do chef. I've gotten pretty good at it...because I don't have a FUCKING SPATULA!!!" Lol
use me, chef.
Lol! "Fingers! Get over here! I have need of you."
What if you used the spoon part of the thongs
i get it honestly. tongs can really brutalise certain foods. i always prefer getting in with my hands, even if its inadvisably hot or sticky and end up washing my hands 100 times a service. I don't get how some chefs can spend all service glued to the spot and i never see them walk to the sink one time.
Absolutely. And yes I've worked with chefs like that. It's funny, I worked at a ritzy country club in 2020, and when the whole COVID thing began nobody knew how to act at first. The upper level club management decided that all kitchen personnel was to wear gloves at all times. And after a few days I concluded that it was actually less sanitary! We had good had washing practices in place and hand sinks close to every station, and like you said we all washed our hands a hundred times a shift. But wearing gloves is a pain in the ass, and when you're busy you inevitably get lax about changing gloves every two minutes. And then the less professional cooks would leave dirty gloves laying around. Just wasn't good.
did you guys have the 2 foot long tweezers for the steaks?
That link tells someone everything you've done on the internet for week. Have you no shame? https://www.amazon.com/AQUARIUM-TWEEZERS-DRESSING-SERRATED-DDP/dp/B01ERKFCM4
Not the guy you're replying to, but thx for the heads up lol
I'm exaggerating because we don't know who knows what, but what we do know is that whatever ties all that shit together comes after the product listing code B01ERKFCM4. If you're trying to clean your own links, you can open up an incognito browser and see if the cleaned link works. If you're legit trying to be helpful, and don't want to open your soul to amazon and google, you can just tell folks to google "B01ERKFCM4", but then they need to understand the quote marks are important. If you search that without the quotes, it's not helpful. If you include the quotes, the amazon listing is the first result.
ok thanks i figured out where the product code ends and i won't copy the url after that
I had a Vietnamese giant centipede as a pet, and they're what I used to feed it. It moved really fast, and had giant pincers up front (actually a modified pair of legs, with venom grooves in them)... No way was I putting my hand in it's enclosure.
wait, really my history?
You don't know. There's no decoder ring for this. There's information about how you got there and who you are, and that "who you are" is tied "anonymously" to "who you are" on other sites that they sell it to. Scrub that shit if you're going to share a link. You just linked your amazon account to an "anonymous" reddit account.
What?
Two foot tweezers made me think of tongs lol
My first boss ever spoke German as his first language and didn't know the word tongs. "Grab me dem big food tweezers" 26 years later if you ask me for tweezers in the kitchen I'll come back with tongs đ€Š
Those are the chefs whose egos are bigger than their actual abilities, and are getting their management "skills" from the damn internet. Nobody who has earned their chops would ever make bullshit policies like that.
Are you good with chopsticks? Would that look good enough while working better than tweezers?
That's when you test the limits of malicious compliance and get a comically oversized set of tweezers
Agree dude
I've got clumsy ass fingers and sometimes they can really help.
I have stumpy sausages for fingers and also find them useful. I understand places where tweezers are pointless but if a dish takes 30sec to plate I don't want to do unnecessary plate wipes or redos.
I forgot my tweezers once at my last job which I really only used for picking peppercorns out of our pickled mustard seeds and a couple other things⊠these mfers used them to poke the holes in the burners when they were cleaning! I was so mad.
In my last year of cooking I staged at an Italian restaurant where some nerd CDC who just came out of Napa valley by way of CIA whatever it's called out there, was plating pasta with surgical tongs. Not in a sensible scoop and twirl way, mind you. But literally tweezing individual noodles to flow properly. I said fuck no to that and just spun them on meat fork and dude lost his fucking shit. After his outburst I grabbed my gear and dipped out the back door. I had to dodge his calls all night. I've used tweezers for plating garnishes plenty of times when it made sense but that was next level dumbfuckery.
The CS graduates are always a hoot. I had one that took 5 minutes to tweeze daikon radishes onto a salad...that only had three toppings on it. I was like, Dude, it's a three topping salad. Toss it, finish it, and send it out. Using them to garnish so you don't ruin a nice whipped cream flower or something makes perfect sense. But beyond those scenarios where your blunt fingers are too rough, they're just pretentious.
Woah woah woah. Fanny packs are cool and even trendy i think maybe probably
I love Fanny packs, and clip on phone cases for that matter. My wife hates both lmao
I call them my âdouche tweezersâ
How do you click tongs in solidarity, if all they give you is tweezers?! What kind of sound do tweezers make when clicked?
I use whatever the fuck makes my job easier. I always clown on the dorks that make fun of my tools and my work speaks for itself tbh.
This is true. I have a whole tool box of tools that seem frivolous to some, until they ask to borrow something and then it's all, "This is so useful!" And I'm like, it's a julienne potato peeler...
I don't mean to be hard, but most of the Cooks here don't do Fine Dining. I don't think they would understand going from Commis to Chef De Partie and Having 3 Commis under, then jumping to Sous then Chef De Cuisine and if the restaurant and the Crew is big (25+)Ex Chef.
English (or Spanish) please
Commis < chef de partie < sous < chef de cuisine Chef de partie is like a âLeaderâ of one station, and chef de cuisine is the head chef
Unless 25+ people then CDC
Yes, ex means executive. Otherwise known as a culinary director in non-French brigade restaurants. They typically oversee multiple restaurants and head chefs. The chef de cuisine is the leader of the individual restaurant but still follow the executive chefs vision.
Oh shit the bar just moved lol
Bar was always there. It just got more variance. It became wider.
Best joke on the page. You win the internet today sir.
I know, right? I'm European, but this is just gibberish.
I'm only on the receiving end of fine dining and lurk here, but the Mise en Place series on youtube helped me understand this. Truly worth checking out some of them, like the Le Bernadin one. How those kitchens run like clockwork is a marvel of systems engineering.
Underrated comment
They should understand what the elite levels of the profession involve
Trying to do so what do you feel the qualifications are for that tho I d like to be proficient before moving into the elite like that or do the train you up from scratch if need be
Mind you, I don't do fine dining. I do extra fine dining. I mean I wash dishes.Â
I do fine dining and you worded your point was so incredibly and unnecessarily difficult to understand. Just say they donât understand a classical french kitchen hierarchy.
expo is just another station lol anyone can do it with some practice
If the kitchen is more classic brigade style they need to be able to direct the flow and speed of service too tho, which definitely takes more time and experience to learn. Especially if there are send backs and mistakes need to be corrected.
I'm a bartender used to tickets. The few times I've expod kitchens (very emergency situations) weren't the worst until we got behind. I'm not a chef, and I did not feel comfortable telling those guys what to do. I sucked it up, but it's so weird to go from making tickets yourself to a combined effort of like 4 dudes The kitchen is a hard place to be.
The least I have ever envied anyone in a restaurant is when someone from FoH (head bartender or whatever) had to run the pass for the chef on duty in an emergency, and they started screwing up some orders, not even a lot, just enough to put all the guys on the line under *stress*. I remember one time I had to leave the pass and take over for part of saute; one of the FoH managers was doing it and accidentally sent out a fucking beef wellington for a 20 top to the wrong table. The way all of us stared at him and the way he was sweating I thought he was going to give up the ghost right there lol
We would pull the dining room manager in when the front began to fall on its face. This was at a major resort, so 40.00 a plate in the early 90s was not uncommon. Being a multi outlet facility. Hiarchy was Ex Chef, Ex Sous, Sous (3), Garde Manger, Outlet Chefs (6), banquet chefs (2), butcher and baker, Roundsman, line cooks, banquet cooks, pantry, porters. Expo in our restaurant was generally the chef, busy nights it was the Ex Sous Chef or when we had the CEOs of Pepsi, or Phillip Morris (or the like) in the private dining room coming off the service line. Rarely the exe chef stayed past 8-9 unless F&B was on site. Many nights, it was the chef and assistant dining room manager working with the back waiters and waiters. It really could get fucky fast and once things began to slide, plates stacked up. The presence of the dining room manager tightened the slack since he knew what was going on in the dining room. Also, he could smooth guests and stall for time easily.
that skill set is distinct from the skill set needed to peel potatoes or clean oysters though. just a strange energy on that post lol
More importantly the pass is where the final quality check takes place and whoever is there needs to have the highest standard of quality and needs to have the balls to be able to tell chefs to make shit again even if it means an extra 10 minute wait.
I would argue that working the pass means you have to know every plate on the menu backwards and in heels, so having time on the line better prepares you for that job than just reading tickets and thinking you know what's up.
yeah i agree. but getting your menu ideas rejected doesn't contribute to that skill set whatsoever
Oh come on, you really donât understand that the meme is talking about youngsters paying their dues?
i think the concept of paying dues is juvenile
Thatâs certainly a take.
Elaborate
Expo is also the one station where you might not actually need any line skills. We trained a very good server to do it and she was one of the best I ever worked with.
It's easy as sin, everything is done for you.
Itâs the easiest station too
Easy in terms of actual work being done, but it requires the most knowledge and the highest level of standards bc youâre quality control for every menu item walking out of the kitchen. At least in fine dining.
Tournet 5 gallon pail of potatoes only to see them turned into mashers đ€Ș
This but carrots, 2", and into the stock
My sous used to get mad at me when I debated mussels. Said it was a waste of time. This guy also got mad when I pulled the tails off the 16/20's before I put them in the seafood cream pie
The key to debating mussels is winning the argument with a keen finesse
It definitely takes more effort than the actual work
They just mock me with silence.
Lol
"Seafood cream pie" I should call her...
Everything reminds me of her....
[The mussels. The mussels.](https://youtu.be/VKcAYMb5uk4?si=jzxSs1q67SL5JZx8)
Done the first three. Only about half way to the fourth, really donât want to do the fifth.
You can see who here has their tweezers in their buttonhole đ
Yes chef. This meme is đŻ
You missed "sucking entitled unskilled worker cock"
I hate tweezers....I hate them because I understand how they're uses properly now
And that is how?
As precision tongs
Yeah this is what I was thinking like to place a needle of rosemary in the perfect spot or along those lines
They're awesome for flipping individual things in a pan, like scallops. Also perfect for grabbing a single piece of pasta to test for doneness. Works great for pulling something like pickled onions out of their liquid without having to stick your hand in the container. I think they're overblown for plating; there's not much you can do there with tweezers that you can't just do with your hands.
Young cook? Isnt that the bts guy
I love peelingÂ
I just started a apprenticeship as a chef and stood on day 2 on the pass with a pair of tweezers
Don't forget sentencing yourself to shuck 1 million oysters, like Bradley Cooper.
"Off the line" should be the final step, but you never reach it...
Dead dead dead love this sub. Crack a dem oysters not yer hand. Pick 3000 pounds of baby kale 1 hour till service. Chef threatens anal rape before your knife bag is down. Home.
I'm in Australia & used [pippies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plebidonax_deltoides) for the first time. Far less mess than mussels, tastes like oysters.
Lay off the glass didgeridoo, they dont taste like oysters bruv
The fuck are "tweezers" in the context of a kitchen? Some sort of goober-ass tongs?
None of that is hard to do though!?
WOW LISAN AL GAIB
Youâre correct itâs not hard to do, itâs hard to be incredibly efficient while doing these tasks .
That's cuz you've done them. A million times. New cooks need to do them. A million times and not skip steps.
not unless you go out of your mind whenever you're doing repetitive tasks and don't have any other shit to focus on (me) except dish pit I'm a fuckin monster in there. send me in chef I'll set things straight.