"A STARTING POINT"-----------Toshi made staff meal last week, his first ever. The first thing I tasted for was seasoning, it was seasoned ok. He is originally from Japan and so, he made a pork "menchi" croquette, his own tonkatsu sauce and eggs with tomatoes and green onions. I told both him and Miya, our chef, that I enjoyed them both and thanked him. I then told Miya what I thought were the 'legs,' and that this is a starting point to use with him. The 'legs' are the ideas and possibilities that arise from this. When you feed off of someones energies, we both get better, and we all get better. The starting point is if you like something, you can always say to him, "you remember the tonkatsu sauce you made for the family?----make that again exactly the same way, and we will make a tomato and red onion relish with it together. We can take the egg dish and turn that into eggs with hot sour soup gravy, we can use the pork "mechi" and use it as a stuffing for a pork chop dish. He gains confidence and esteem, he gets into making a dish, everyone sees that, it makes others want to create something too, it's just a good vibe going throughout the kitchen---------all from one starting point.
"We don’t test someone's memory nor always give them an A,B,C,D or F, we test to see where we need to start from"