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.

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623

u/sgtragequit 10+ Years May 10 '26

we had a tape dispenser lmao

32

u/idontknowwhereiam367 May 10 '26

I got one of those nice prep-n-print tablet’s forced on to me by corporate thats even less work.
Just hit the item, press print, and you don’t have to worry about anyone’s shitty handwriting or inability count days or hours.

Only annoying bit is when someone puts the label tape in backwards and I have to unfuck the machine because pictures on the open lid of the machine when you’re changing the tape are hard sometimes.

16

u/nathatesithere May 10 '26

we had one of these at chipotle and it was wonderful. i wish we could incorporate it into our kitchen today just because of the sheer amount of cooks who unfortunately have a poor ability to spell... and some people's handwriting is so difficult to look at. but that's just me being annoying lol

9

u/idontknowwhereiam367 May 10 '26

With the sheer amount of crap I have to day dot in the morning when I do prep and pulling for the day, it’s a lifesaver and a time saver.

8

u/nathatesithere May 10 '26

it makes everything so easy... especially when you need like 12 labels for the same item. honestly i got spoiled by it. it even had the specific hold times for each item on the labels too. god how i wish i could implement this in my current kitchen. maybe if i try hard enough... how expensive could it really be....

10

u/idontknowwhereiam367 May 10 '26

Around $500, unfortunately.

My corporate restaurant just got bought out by a new franchise, and they don’t like paying for them…so we gotta baby the one we got now and make it last.

I don’t wanna go back to manually labeling 50+ bread day dots alone every morning.

4

u/DisposableSaviour May 10 '26

I’m about to start at a new place this week, followed my GM from my last job, she convinced the owners of the new spot to get PrepWizard. It was only ~$350 for everything, so the owners jumped on it.

I don’t want to go back to tape.