Luxury Hospitality Kitchen Structure And Organizational System In Australia

Research an example from each of the following enterprises from within the hospitality sector to determine the most appropriate kitchen structure and system of organization for each:-

• A large International Hotel (300 + rooms, multiple restaurants, banqueting, room service)
• A French fine-dining restaurant (80 - 100 pax, à la carte French menu)
• A local ethnic restaurant in an Australian capital city (60 pax featuring Thai, Vietnamese, Indian or Chinese dishes)
• A convention centre (approx. 5,000 pax in various areas)

First, briefly describe each enterprise you have researched and the context in which it operates, for example; location, size, target market, perceived customer expectations, types of menus used, capacity or volume of meals and type of food production equipment likely to be used.

Note: Any restaurants you research must be from Australia.

Secondly, identify and describe the type of kitchen organisational structure you have chosen for each of the above enterprises. You should provide a detailed and referenced account explaining the various factors that you had to consider including:-

• The type of establishment, context and customer expectations
• The menu/s
• The size of the operation
• The physical facilities and equipment
• The available skills sets

Scenario: You are the kitchen manager of a restaurant in a hotel. You have received numerous customer complaints about long waits for meals, the inconsistent portions of food and dirty crockery. Briefly discuss, which sections and positions in the kitchen organisational structure you would meet with to resolve these issues. Explain reasons for your answer.

1. Explain the ‘Partie’ system including a brief overview of its historical development.
2. Describe the duties and responsibilities of the following positions in the kitchen organisational structure:

• Chef Poissonier
• Chef Entremètier
• Chef Garde-Manger
• Chef Tournant
• Demi-Chef
• Chef Boulanger
• Chef de Garde
• Commis de Cuisine

The report comes with a purpose of explaining kitchen structure according to the luxury setting of various organizations of hospitality sector. The report is divided into three parts. The first one deals with details of one of the luxury hotels, restaurants and convention centres across Australia. According to the system of those organizations, the best kitchen structure will be recommended to influence the production. Second part will acknowledge an issue of customer satisfaction as well as provide a solution from the perspective of a kitchen manager. The final one will talk about the historical context of the ‘Partie’ system and its development with the progression of time along with that a kitchen hierarchy will be presented to understand different roles of hospitality professionals working inside luxury kitchens. The entire report will assist to understand the process by which kitchen structure is followed and operated in high profile hospitality sector of Australia.

Grand Hyatt, Melbourne

It is located in Collins Street of Victoria, Australia, which is considered as magnificent. It comes with 550+ huge guestrooms, including 80+ clubrooms and 20+ luxurious suites. Entire hotel has been furnished with Italian marble. As it is a luxurious hotel by its structure, the system is designed according to the requirement of elite customers. Hospitality sector goes through a competitive business environment and to secure a competitive edge within that, they seek for opportunities to satisfy the customers by serving efficient service. They have their own signature restaurant named Collins Kitchen, which serves authentic dining experience of Melbourne. Ru-co serves signature cocktails and beverages, Bistro bar offers strong flavours of coffee and customized Tea bar by Christiana Re is for elite tea lovers. Apart from these, continental breakfast along with refreshments are ensured for all day.

French a-la-Carte restaurant: La Grillade, NSW

La Grillade is considered as one of the fine dining restaurants, which comes with A-La-Carte French menu for customers. The central feature of A-La-Carte menu is to serve dinner into three parts, entrée, main course and dessert. Based on this, they started to emphasize on French cuisines entirely. The feature of private dining rooms, bar and lounge, dining at courtyard have always been the centre of attraction. Corporate meetings or family gatherings need prior reservation. They offer different menus for different occasions, like if they are organising any party or wedding menu will be designed according to that (Jimenez 2014). Even they have customized food menu for kids. Although, La Grillade is famous for the ambience they provide and A-La-Carte lunch (Thery et al. 2017). Customers, who seek for authentic and a wide range of variety in French cuisine are the target market of this restaurant.

Rama’s Fiji Indian Restaurants

An Indian family who used to live in Fiji runs this restaurant in Canberra, Australia. It has been operating business within restaurant industry since 1991. The mystery behind serving for so long is the perfect understanding of customers’ choice and friendly ambience. However, if customers are expecting authentic Indian food then they might be disappointed because the chef loves to create new dishes and blends up Fijian recipes with Indian. This innovative approach makes them sustainable in the market for so long. A cosy place, spacious enough to throw private parties. Here, customers can have a satisfying experience of family dinner or be it with friends.

Grand Hyatt, Melbourne

National Convention Centre, Canberra

It is situated at Constitution Avenue, in Canberra, Australia. It is largest centre to provide accommodations for business meetings and functions and venue space for special events. There are 10+ rooms to organise conferences according to the space requirements of the event. As it is located 7 km distant from the airport, it can be considered as the first choice of the global firms who explore Australia with the purpose of business. It can be venue for cultural events as well. In order to organise events catering foods plays a crucial part to make the event memorable. Under the supervision of the head chef Nikhil Jain, food has been served using fresh and seasonal ingredients (Allen and Mac Con Iomaire 2017). The organisation is capable of providing pleasant dining experience to 1400 guests at a time.

• Grand Hyatt, Melbourne is structured as one of the largest luxurious hotel, which needs Brigade system to separate the kitchen structure into different departments according to various genre of food (Madichie 2013). As five star hotels deals with heavy volume of foods, station chef has several assistants to manage the entire operation. Executive chef is the head of kitchen operation and in the charge of supervision. Following that designation, there are chef de cuisine, sous chef, station chef and so on.
• La Grillade, NSW presents French cuisines at its best in A-La-Carte manner. 75% of restaurant experience revolves around the quality of food they serve. Core values of restaurants is to provide best experience to guests by serving them efficiently. Therefore, managers have to frame the kitchen structure by doing some serious brainwork (Ruth et al. 2013). Again, the traditional brigade system can be applied for the A-La-Carte French restaurant as well.
• A local ethnic family has been operating Rama’s Fiji Indian Restaurant since last 25 years. It serves fusion dishes blending Indian and Fijian spices. The reason behind its success of course clear understands of the market and customer preferences. It is somewhat difficult to get efficient professionals to execute the services, which were proposed in the first place. Restaurants, which are run by families, recipes and procedures are generally discussed and developed in the presence of family members. Even if they have to recruit, they can pass on their legacy to them.
• In national convention centre, people come for several reasons like business meetings or gatherings or it can be some cultural function. Food is the main component, which makes any event memorable. The head chef, Nikhil Jain supervises a culinary team of ten professional to provide an amazing and innovative dining experience (Cullen 2014). As the volume of the guest can be estimated before any event, it is comparatively easy to give instructions. Therefore, kitchen structure is simple and easy to operate. However, in the case of emergency, the number of guests may increase or decrease.

As described in, Magnusson Sporre and Jonsson (2015), Hotel, restaurant and event management are associated with hospitality sector, which is actually serving the customers as per their requirement. It is not possible to make customers happy every time, as their preferences are varied and this hospitality industry consistently faces changing trend among the consumers due to the dynamic nature of the business environment. Agenda of hospitality industry revolves around the idea of customer satisfaction (Lu et al. 2015). Kitchen managers confront with customers’ complains very often. It is considered as managerial efficiency to handle and retain customers with strategies. CARES model is what managers can apply in the cases of recovering service related issues (Mohammed et al. 2017).

• Communication is important with the customers. In the cases of late arrival of food, managers can take proactive initiative to update them about the preparation or inform them at the time of ordering food.
• Accountability is another aspect while recovering issues, according to Zhu et al. (2013), blaming the slow pace of kitchen operations will not make the brand image strong. Instead of that, it is managers’ duty to acknowledge the fault on behalf of the system.
• Make the customers feel valued by being responsive to queries or complains. Practice of giving away gifts or complementary beverage may soften the intensity of dissatisfaction (Segoro 2013).
• Showing empathy, understanding the genre of customer is essential before serving. The objective will be to make their experience memorable.
• While working on the solution, customer retention should be the priority. Offering them discounts or if possible, make it cost free, if the fault is in the kitchen. Otherwise, it is better to instruct kitchen operational executives to deliver food as fast as possible according to preferences.

Towards the end of the 19^th century, Auguste Escoffier introduced ‘partie’ system to organise and operate greater kitchen structure efficiently. The system divides workforce according to different categories of jobs the kitchen (Namasivayam, Guchait and Lei 2014). It can associated with preparing non-vegetarian dishes, chopping vegetables or making curry. This theory is still relevant in the context of operating kitchens of large hotels where guest volume fluctuates consistently (Orfin, Sidorkiewicz and Tokarz-Kocik 2015). Small and medium organizations practice improvisation of this theory by dividing responsibilities among less number of workers.

Kitchen organizational structure has different duties to maintain. Different job roles among chefs can be found (Woodhouse 2016). Those are as follows.

• Chef Poissonier deals with dishes of fish and seafood. In smaller structure, Boucher does the role of a Poissoneir.
• Chef Entremètier cooks vegetables, makes soups, starch and preparation of eggs.
• Chef Garde-Mange has the responsibility of preparing salads and is recognised as pantry chef.
• Chef Tournant can be called all-rounder as he/she fills the gap in whenever any of the department run out of enough workers. The role is to provide back up in any job related to kitchen.
• Demi-Chef plays multiple roles within the brigade system. Their job is to balance requirements with performance along with that maintaining effective coordination between customers and restaurant.
• Chef Boulanger handles the bakery section.
• Commis de Cuisine works as a junior chef, basically a trainee, who is learning several aspect of operation from chef de partie.

Conclusion

This report delivers an insight of kitchen structure and the process of managing different tasks with the purpose of satisfying the customers. It can be concluded that although, there is satisfaction issues of the customers, proper distribution of responsibility and understanding of requirements is what make a kitchen structure successful.

References

Allen, H. and Mac Con Iomaire, M., 2017. Secrets of a head chef: Exploring factors influencing success in Irish kitchens. Journal of Culinary Science & Technology, 15(3), pp.187-222.

Cullen, F., 2014. Culinary Internship and the European Mobility Action Plan Part Two: Towards an Understanding of the Culinary Life and Internship.

Jimenez, B.R., 2014. Multi-unit condominium structure with configurable space designs. U.S. Patent 8,745,940.

Lu, C., Berchoux, C., Marek, M.W. and Chen, B., 2015. Service quality and customer satisfaction: qualitative research implications for luxury hotels. International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, 9(2), pp.168-182.

Madichie, N.O., 2013. Sex in the kitchen: changing gender roles in a female-dominated occupation. International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, 18(1), pp.90-102.

Magnusson Sporre, C. and Jonsson, I.M., 2015. Swedish chefs' reflections on how to create, cook and present a conscius meal. In International Conference on Culinary Arts and Sciences IX (ICCAS), Montclair State University, USA, June 3-5, 2015 (pp. 100-107). The College of Education and Human Services.

Mohammed, S., Alipour, K.K., Martinez, P., Livert, D. and Fitzgerald, D., 2017. Conflict in the kitchen: Temporal diversity and temporal disagreements in chef teams. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 21(1), p.1.

Namasivayam, K., Guchait, P. and Lei, P., 2014. The influence of leader empowering behaviors and employee psychological empowerment on customer satisfaction. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 26(1), pp.69-84.

Orfin, K., Sidorkiewicz, M. and Tokarz-Kocik, A., 2015. Human resource management in chain hotels on the example of Radisson Blu hotel in Szczecin. Scientific Journal, 31, pp.287-302.

Ruth, M., Maggio, J., Whelan, K., DeYoung, M., May, J., Peterson, A. and Paterson, K., 2013. Kitchen 2.0: Design guidance for healthier cooking environments. International Journal for Service Learning in Engineering, Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship, pp.151-169.

Segoro, W., 2013. The influence of perceived service quality, mooring factor, and relationship quality on customer satisfaction and loyalty. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 81, pp.306-310.

Thery, A., Le Bail, H. and Buchanan, D., 2017. The migration of experts and savoir-faire: The case of French cuisine professionals in Shanghai. China Perspectives, (4), p.49.

Woodhouse, A., 2016. Critical Self-Reflection: a Means to Instigate a Culinary Education Revolution.

Zhu, Z., Nakata, C., Sivakumar, K. and Grewal, D., 2013. Fix it or leave it? Customer recovery from self-service technology failures. Journal of Retailing, 89(1), pp.15-29.