We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ali A. Gonzalez a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Ali A. , thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?
My entire family has this passed on from generation to generation. We have a Doctor, Artist (with a masters), over four law enforcement, and my sister a straight A student from elementary until collage. All my children are collage grads. We all believe that it starts from home and we pass it along by what we do and how we inspire and teach.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I am a Chef with over 35 years of experience working in Culinary Arts.
Currently, I am building a restaurant in Chicago called Noto66. Keep an eye out for the opening date, aiming for January 2025.
Also I own my own food service consulting business called Sustainable Culinary Solutions. I specialize in helping food service businesses implement sustainable practices, while still being profitable.
I have experience developing food service programs for hotels, restaurants, bakeries, movie studios, IT companies, and a Culinary school.
Although my main background is working as a chef with extensive knowledge on cooking and baking, I am also a manager.
The higher up you move as a chef the less you get to see inside a kitchen. Instead you see everything that helps build and maintain the kitchen from the outside. This ranges from accounting, HR, procurement, designing menus, obtaining catering deals, and training staff.
Never a dull day.
But what really drives me everyday is my passion for the culinary arts and seeing it realized in my customer’s appetite.
What I really strive for is a meal that gets people excited. Something that gathers groups of people talking about the experience they just had. Thus bringing over friends, family, coworkers, and business partners.
What is great about food is that it brings people together. I always say that great Ideas start at the table. People just love to talk and talk after having a great meal. Then leading them to having a light bulb moment of inspiration right after.
Another thing I love about food is that it’s cultural. Everything you eat was created from someone who created a dish using ingredients that were available from the surrounding area. Then the dish became popular in the region. Developing a shared interest with that one food item within that community’s culture.
Food is not political nor does it discriminate. So even if people have differences in opinion they can still have a shared interest in the type of food they eat.
I love to create menus with items from different cultures. Each dish has its own story and heritage. I especially love to create the dishes in a way that they were supposed to be made.
I heard countless stories of people saying “This is made just like the way my grandmother used to cook this”
I love hearing that. Then seeing them come back again and knowing my entire staff’s names.
If you feel at home you want to come back to sit back, relax, talk to a friend, and laugh at a joke.
This is what makes all the effort, hard work, and stress worth it.
I am a facilitator of great ideas.
Want to inspire your staff to cook creativity while reliably serving homemade cuisines that customers will talk about for months? Don’t hesitate to contact me through my website at sustainableculinarysolutions.com
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Anyone working the line working in food service knows how stressful it is to maintain quality and efficiency. To become the best in this field you should have these three qualities. You must learn to be a fast decision maker, treat your staff like teammates, and always focus on the customer experience.
Imagine cooking on the grill with 20 orders coming in almost at the same time. Where do you start? How can I get my team organized on the orders? Each ticket is printed on a tiny piece of paper and somehow your team has to work under the pressure of time. Also anticipating the feeling of failure when a customer complains how you forget to put sauce on the side. The prep cook could have forgotten to place your cut lettuce properly in the fridge below your feet.
The answer to the questions is you have to do something. You don’t have time to complain. You need to clearly communicate to your staff to get everything done as fast as possible while still reviewing the quality of each product. To the average person, the stress of working the line can be overwhelming. To me that’s just the surface.
Imagine managing multiple food service locations with the corporate office constantly scrutinizing everything you are doing, even though you locations perform far above your peers. Then you have to send in reports after reports to justify some of your decisions. Then the corporate office wants a powerpoint presentation. Plus you have to deal with the HR drama that we so commonly see in the kitchens, while you are in a different part of the country.
Real leaders lead.
They make it work out. At the end of the day the work will get done. If I had taken the time to complain I would have probably failed. From the thrill of working the line to working off a phone at an airport. Decisions need to be made from the leader. Most of the decisions come from confidence based from past experience. If you didn’t have the experience to make those decisions you need to go and get that experience
Next, you need to treat your employees like teammates. As if you are the quarterback of the football team. You need to properly explain the mission and how you can complete that mission with your team. This means training your staff, making jokes, asking about their day, treating them with respect. These people are the bread and butter to the operation and give them credit when credit is due.
I have stories of chefs yelling and cursing at staff for the simplest mistakes to some of the nicest people I met. You would protest the restaurant I once worked for if I recorded the 40 year old chef yelling at my 20 year old female pastry chef coworker. Doesn’t feel right. Nor does anyone feel comfortable in that environment. People need a leader they can talk to and trust that if they do a great job nothing wrong will happen to them. A leader who is understanding when mistakes are also made.
Lastly, food service managers need to focus on the customer experience. So many times I have been to restaurants where the staff is rude or forgetful. Even though I am an accomplished chef I still go and eat out at common places like Applebee’s and Chilis. I know the food isn’t the greatest but I like to sit and just eat appetizers. The reason I do this is because places like Chilis and Applebee’s are still open. Customers still come here!
My job is to see what the customer sees from all directions. I observe what the wait staff does correctly and incorrectly. I am doing research on the customer experience in the field. Luckily I work in food.
Your goal in any business is to never lose sight of your customer. Constantly ask questions about your customer. The best part is the research can be done on your feel time buying things you enjoy or what your customers enjoy. Don’t ever think you are better than anyone else’s business, especially if the business next to you still has customers.
Okay, so before we go, is there anyone you’d like to shoutout for the role they’ve played in helping you develop the essential skills or overcome challenges along the way?
There has not been one single person who has been the most impactful to my career. I found being a great listener is the most powerful ability that I have. Listening to thousands of people who have worked for me helped make me extremely aware of the business. Not only do my employees teach me shortcuts but they also talk to me about their culture. The great thing I love about food is it gives me an excuse to talk to anyone. Everyone loves food and I am very fluent in speaking food as a language. I learn about people through the way they identify with food and the culture that is associated with it.
I have learned to develop my skills as both an executive and as a chef by an old school method of research. Listening to both my customer and my staff in real life. Listening is a skill that needs to be developed everyday. Mind you it’s not as easy as most people think.
Even listening to vendors and corporate clients. I actually learned the importance of Microsoft Excel after building food service programs for IT companies. The clients loved my food programs I built that showed me how to advance my skills as an executive. Suggesting computer software and mechanisms I can use with my work to improve myself. I listened and found some of their ideas actually worked. I believe most managers would just ignore the great suggestions they get from the brilliant people they encounter. Creating missed opportunities to improve themselves.
Testing ideas you learn from your staff and clients can lead them to respect you more, thus giving you better and better ideas about your business skills. For example, I learned more for the language of business from my IT clients after I used some of the tools and strategies they suggested to me.
From listening to people managers will be able to understand the inefficiencies in the business you are working in. Either in the operation or in the market. Staring at data charts all day can only teach you so much. Honestly it can be overrated. Hearing data raw is from listening to act people.
Some of the inefficiencies I learned in the business is why I created the company Sustainable Culinary Solutions. I found that restaurants found it difficult to implement fresh and healthy food products in their business and still be profitable. I also found the businesses didn’t know how to eliminate unnecessary costs in their operations. There is a notion that if you want to create an environmentally stable business in food you have to pay a premium on it. Creating an environmental sustainable food service operation using fresh ingredients is indeed feasible. You just need to search for the simple everyday solutions.
Listen to your staff, treat them well, and use what they tell you.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://sustainableculinarysolutions.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sustainableculinarysolutions/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SustainableCulinarySolutions
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aligonzalez/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/SustainableCul1
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy32V-owwrtQw2KsRnCpAew
- Other: https://www.pinterest.com/sustainableculinarysolutions12/
