The person has arrived, felt welcome, and had a first day with a shape. Now they have to learn to actually do the work, and this is where most restaurants quietly waste their effort. Teaching a task in a kitchen usually means one busy person saying "watch me" once and then "you do it" — and being surprised, a week later, that it did not hold. There is a better way, it is not slower, and it is the same method professionals have used for a hundred years.
🪜 Break the task into steps first
You cannot teach a task you have not broken down, and the people best at a job are often the worst at breaking it down, because they no longer see the steps — their hands just do it. Before teaching anything, write out what it actually takes, in order, small enough that each step is a single clear action.
Take something as ordinary as closing a station. In one expert's head it is "clean up and close." To a new person it is fifteen invisible decisions: what gets wiped with what, what goes in the walk-in and what stays out, which things get labelled, what the last check is before the lights go off. Every one of those is a step, and every step you leave unspoken is a step they will get wrong and you will blame them for.
👣 Tell, show, do, review
The method has four moves, always in this order. Skipping any one of them is where training breaks.
| Move | What you do | The mistake |
| Tell | Say what the task is and why it matters, briefly, before touching anything | Launching into hands without a word, so they never learn the point of it |
| Show | Do it yourself at teaching speed, naming each step out loud as your hands move | Doing it at real speed, silent, so they see a blur and not a sequence |
| Do | They do it while you watch, saying the steps back if it helps | Watching them once and then walking away mid-task |
| Review | Tell them what went right first, then the one thing to fix, then have them do it again | Only naming what went wrong, or "fixing" ten things at once |
The order matters. People remember the point before they can remember the steps, and they can copy a slow narrated demonstration in a way they never can copy a fast silent one. And "do" has to actually happen under your eye — the most common failure is stopping after "show," when the person has watched but never moved their own hands while someone could catch a mistake.
🎯 One thing at a time, and let them fail small
The instinct with a fast learner is to pile it on: teach the station, the modifiers, the closing routine and the wine list on day two. It backfires. A person can hold one new task at a time; give them a second before the first is solid and you get two half-learned tasks and a stressed person. Solid first, then next.
And they have to be allowed to make small, safe mistakes while you are standing there, because the mistake and the fix are how it sticks. A new cook who slightly over-seasons a family meal, is shown the fix, and does it again has learned something they will keep. The same cook, never allowed to touch anything until a live rush, learns it in front of paying guests instead — which is more expensive and worse. Pick the moments where a mistake is cheap, and let them happen on purpose.
🧑🏫 Not everyone should train
Being the best at a job does not make someone good at teaching it, and putting your fastest cook on training duty by default can go badly: the ones who find a task easy are often the least patient with someone who does not, and the least able to explain something their hands do without thinking. The best trainer is usually someone a rung or two up who remembers learning it, can slow down, and does not treat questions as an interruption. Choose your trainers on purpose, tell them the four moves in this topic, and you have turned training from an accident into something you can count on — which is exactly what topic 4 makes permanent, by writing it down.