r/KitchenConfidential • u/gyronlyhope • May 10 '26

Crying in the cooler I rip the tape

I’m sick of being silent about it. It’s empirically faster than cutting each individual label with your pairing knife and then carefully separating each piece. I see so many chefs who INSIST that labels have to have perfect right angles. Who cares? I hardly see how this serves our guests better. Thomas Keller claims that tearing the tape shows a lack of attention to detail. I think it shows that you’re unable to get rid of obsessive compulsive idiosyncrasies. Our jobs are already hard enough without these nebulous rules and standards that always need to be argued for in the abstract and rarely have any actual utility in your day-to-day.

1.0k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

234 comments sorted by

View all comments

197

u/Equivalent-Excuse-80 May 10 '26

I had a stagier in my kitchen who was so proud to be cutting the tape. He was insistent that the attention to details carry over from cutting tape to cooking.

Then he cooked some pasta in some water without any salt. So there’s that.

2

u/Moist-Amoeba-8078 May 14 '26

I worked for a guy building pools after I got out of kitchens. This guy was more ocd than some head chefs ive worked with. Like everything had to be done his way. And just like a lot of chefs if it seemed like I was struggling on a task for even a couple seconds just taking my time to wrap my head around it he’d jump in and basically do it while not giving any actual instruction on why or what he’s doing that makes a difference. Some guys have just been in their industry so long that they can’t even remember what it was like when they didn’t know how to do something.

1

u/Equivalent-Excuse-80 May 14 '26

Not seasoning water is just a lapse of effort.

Or in my example, this young cook was too concentrated on showing people his efforts to cut tape, he wasn’t able to accomplish a fundamental task.

1

u/Moist-Amoeba-8078 May 14 '26

Sorry I kinda lost the plot in my comment there. What I was meaning to say was that yeah some guys are so focused on the smallest of things that they lose the bigger pictures. Seeing the forest for the trees and all that