Burnt Hands Perspective
This is a raw and unfiltered look into the state of the restaurant industry as a whole, powered by longtime friends Chef/Owner Antonio Caruana and former bartender turned News Anchor/TV Host Kristen Crowley.
Representing all aspects of the industry from the front to the back of the house we will dig into the juiciest stories and pull from decades of experience in one of the sexiest and most exciting industries in the world...the food and beverage industry.
From international chefs, sommeliers, industry pros, and so much more, this show will cover all of it without a filter. You turn up the volume; we'll turn up the heat.
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Burnt Hands Perspective
What Makes A Chef: The Business Behind the Kitchen w/ Chef Brian Duffy - Restaurant Consulting and Success
What truly separates a cook from a chef? According to industry veteran and acclaimed Chef Brian Duffy, it's far more than culinary skill—it's understanding the business of restaurants from the ground up.
Chef Duffy took time to talk with us in Las Vegas about his remarkable journey from culinary school graduate to opening restaurants and building a diverse empire of food-related businesses. With ownership stakes in everything from a German spice company to a multimedia firm with over 100 billion content views, Duffy represents the real grit of the multifaceted modern culinary entrepreneur.
At the heart of this convo lies a critical message for restaurant owners and aspiring chefs alike: profitability matters as much as passion. Duffy recounts how most executive chef candidates fail his first interview question about understanding restaurant budgets. "If you don't know what your sales are, how are you budgeting for your purchasing, how are you budgeting for your scheduling, and how are you going to make money off that product?" This fundamental knowledge gap explains why talented cooks often struggle when given management responsibilities.
Being at the Bar & Restaurant Expo we talked about the technological revolution reshaping kitchens post-COVID. From self-cleaning hood systems to induction cooking innovations, these advancements remain unknown to many operators in smaller markets—exactly why Duffy champions the Food and Beverage Innovation Center to showcase possibilities beyond traditional vendor offerings. While acknowledging that robots might handle some repetitive kitchen tasks, both Chefs maintain that "a robot can't replace a chef's mind and hands."
Through his consulting firm, Duffified Experience Group, Chef Duffy helps bridge the knowledge gap between culinary creativity and business sense. Want to transform your restaurant's performance? Connect with Chef Brian Duffy on all social platforms @ChefBriDuff and discover how an upfront investment in expertise could save your business from costly long-term mistakes.
Thanks agian for taking the time Brian, you are an incredible talent, host, and champion for the growth in the restuarnt industry!
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Listen up here. The restaurant industry is grueling and unpredictable, just like this show. From the front of the house to the back of the house and all in between, we will turn up the heat, you turn up the volume. I'm Chef Antonio Caruana. Welcome to the Tell All Podcast at Burnt Hands for the Mecca. Alright, sitting here right now with Chef Brian Duffy Classic, classic, classic. My man over here, you're involved with all kinds of stuff, bro, with the culinary world.
Speaker 1:Tell them if they don't know. Where did you get your start and how did you come up? And what are you doing here? Why am I talking to you? Why? Why am I attracted to you? You are a handsome guy. I am a very handsome right I feel confident in that no one tell you different, bro, I'm telling you right now my name is brian defy.
Speaker 2:I'm a chef. I grew up in philadelphia. I graduated from culinary school in 1995, really having no idea what I wanted to do in the industry. I just knew at that point maybe I'll try cooking. That's kind of the way it played out. From there I just kind of moved into becoming a chef of a bunch of different restaurants and owning and operating different restaurants. Since then I've opened 116 restaurants.
Speaker 2:I am a part owner of a spice company called Wurzpot W-U-R-Z-P-O-T-T out of Germany. I am an advisor on a company called Molly B's Cookies out of Alaska. I'm also one of the owners of a company called Yum Crunch, which is a multimedia firm that we handle all culinary content across the board. We've got over 100 billion views on our stuff. I'm also on the board for the Bar and Restaurant Expo, also known used to be known as the Bar, the Nightclub and Bar Show, and in right after pandemic we rebranded it as the Bar and Restaurant Expo, really focusing as much as we could on things that smaller mom and pop restaurants need, as well as chains and whatnot. But from there we came into the Food and Beverage Innovation Center, which was an idea to give smaller restaurants an opportunity to see what can be done without being locked into a purveyor or something to that effect. Right now a lot of our purveyors are really kind of gearing what happens on our menus and what we do, and this whole center is all about thinking outside of the box. So we bring seven different chefs in, we have 20 culinary students from Johnson and Wales, we have 10 different volunteers that help us plate. We're going to feed over 10,000 people over the next two days.
Speaker 2:We have all sponsored stations throughout the whole thing. Middleby Equipment handles every single bit of our innovative equipment. That's a lot of induction based stuff, induction combi. We've got conveyor char broilers. I've got a hood system over there that cleans itself with UV light. Our stations over there. We've got a pizza zone put on by Parpan. I have a chef out of New Hampshire who runs that and does whatever he wants literally whatever he wants. He creates some of the greatest pizzas coming out of there. I've got a fry zone sponsored by Allied Potato, so we have three different cuts of fries. And then I have Heinz Kraft who handles all the sauces for it. So they have the new system, which is basically it's a million ways to sauce. So they have… Choose one.
Speaker 2:Choose one, but what you can do is you can mix and match and create any sauce you want to do. Then we have, like Maple Leaf Duck as a sponsor, lando Lakes Queso Bravo, which is a huge sauce that we're using in the show. Fresh Origin microgreens.
Speaker 1:So really just kind of getting some of these products in the show. The stuff you're talking about, the broadleaf duck, I use that, the microgreens Maple leaf Maple leaf, I'm sorry, no worries, broadleaf is where I get my board. Maple leaf duck Canada. Yeah, canadian duck Good stuff that is from there. Maple.
Speaker 2:Leaf is Indianapolis Things I learned yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, I didn't know either.
Speaker 2:I always thought it was a Canadian company as well. Then, when I started to dig in and find out more about their product and what they're doing for us is a sous vide duck breast and a duck confit, and then I'm frying all my fries in duck fat.
Speaker 1:Perfect. So as I confit my duck for my menu, I'm always recycling my duck fat and keep growing and growing and growing.
Speaker 2:So it's a great thing.
Speaker 1:But what you're saying now makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of things going on here, especially at this expo. You can probably agree with me Small town, usa, everywhere, usa, yeah, a lot of us are only subjected to what it is that we are subjected to, right? Yeah, so our reps, our vendors, our purveyors will bring us only what we see, and I'm talking about not the food way, I'm talking about the the new technology going on in the restaurant industry here at these events.
Speaker 1:I recommend all of you come and see what's here, because just walking through it one time, you're going to see so many innovative things that can help you get more inspired to cook, more methods of cooking, easier ways of cooking. Uh, monetarily, you know, saving you money to cook may cost you a little upfront, but what it saves you in the long run is is ridiculous. So technology has changed drastically since COVID. Yeah, I feel cooking, the technology to cook and bring things to the table, has gotten so much better, yeah, that we don't even get to see him until we come to big events like this. Well, we.
Speaker 2:Originally we had a robot that was going to work our fry bar, but he didn't show up for work. Yeah, so figures, we were close. We were so close to get them in there, trust them. But I heard Musk has a new culinary robot that is doing a whole bunch of stuff as well. Five grand for this system for him to do Right us never the case.
Speaker 1:A robot can't replace a chef's mind and hands absolutely, but it can assist in things on different levels of cooking. May it may replace something that's putting out french fries at a massive amount at a football game. Sure, possibly will it really just destroy cooking it already is correct.
Speaker 1:It already is so yes, I can see what they're talking about there. You're going to lose a little. You know the, the, the hands taking basket fries and put them up there at minimum wage. But it's going to be so much faster, more productive to get those fries to a customer, because that's really, you know, in a football game or a stadium setting people want their food now, right, so it really works there and monetarily works smartly all the way around.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, so, without people like you, and you and you are getting ready to go and do some speaking here, or, yeah, I'm actually doing a seminar coming up in a minute called chefs and owners.
Speaker 2:Who owns the kitchen? Yep, so so perfect.
Speaker 1:So when you go to these seminars, you're teaching, where you're basically reciting what you've learned, your experiences.
Speaker 2:Today's all about the fact that we have a lot of chefs and a lot of culinarians that are out there that are really not trained in the business of being in the restaurant industry. It's great, they put out unbelievable food, they're doing a great job with putting the cooks in line and getting everybody ready to go, but the finance behind it is something that's missing. So if you're an owner operator who just buys a bar and you've got a kitchen and you have a kitchen manager, what do you expect from that person? So I walk you through a daily, weekly and monthly situation of what you should be expecting from your chefs, from your kitchen managers, to help your kitchen not only run more efficiently, but to run much more as a business so that it's profitable instead of just putting food.
Speaker 1:So you're right there. A lot of people think when they hire a sous chef or a kitchen manager or a chef de cuisine, whatever whatever you want to label it they're thinking that well, you're not doing what I hired you to do and they put a lot of pressure on that person to come in and recreate their vision.
Speaker 2:That's not fair.
Speaker 1:So what you do is you try and explain to the owners, or the restaurant owners or the chefs on how to utilize the people they are bringing in to follow a projected path.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Give these owners an idea of what they should really be looking for and tell chefs look, you know, just because you're putting the title of chef on your jacket, it doesn't just mean that we cook, it means that we have to run a financially sound business operation and that's where the translation gets lost.
Speaker 1:My friend, a lot of people call themselves chefs, especially now the way social media has done that stuff. It's so easy to get the chef title Because you can cook for all you in the back. Because you can cook for all you in the back because you can cook doesn't make you a chef. Stop, there's a whole bunch of stuff that goes into that. Run your crew, run a kitchen, run a productive menu, have your food costs, show the results and then, and then you're. You're on the way to being a chef. Just because you're cooking makes you a cook.
Speaker 2:Chef means head of the brigade. That's the idea behind that. You're the person that oversees everybody that works underneath of you and what happens with that, and it is. I mean, I interview people for clients and for restaurants and for my own places all the time, and I'm interviewing for executive chefs and usually they fail on the first question. First question being let's talk about the budget at your last restaurant, sure? Well, most of them don't understand what a budget is. They don't even know what the sales they were doing. Well, if you don't know what your sales are, how are you budgeting for your purchasing, how are you budgeting for your scheduling and how are you going to make money off of that product?
Speaker 1:right and a budget can go a couple ways.
Speaker 1:So when I, when I ask that same, question I'm looking for at least some sort of costed percentages, some court, some sort of how are you spending a budget? Because a budget could be a budget, could be a budget, but how are you going to go around it? If you have a $500,000 budget, which would be beautiful, it's going to be the same treatment as a $30,000 budget. So what is your parameters of what you're going to do with that budget? Where do you want to operate? Where are your numbers? Where are your percentage? Where are you staying? So these are all things in your speeches and lectures I spend a lot of time.
Speaker 2:I talk all over the country, all over the world, about hospitality and profitability, how you can make more money based off of what you're doing. While I'm here, I do two days of live menu reads where I have not seen any of the menus that are being presented to me. They get up on a screen. I read it for the first time, not only as a chef, but also as a guest, and I'm looking at that menu and menu. How you can make more money. What can work in this way? You've got spelling errors here. Your menu is not developed in the right way. You should move this over to here. You can use this product to go a different way. So I try to show owners and operators ways to make more money in the industry as well as be more creative, and number one beyond all that is to bring in unbelievable products.
Speaker 1:Sure, so with that I mean that's great, that's pretty much great.
Speaker 2:to close on, man, because go any further with that. Where can people find you as now, if you want to put yourself out there as what we're talking about now, or just you as a chef in a culinary and what you've done for the community? Absolutely. My consulting firm is called Duffified Experience Group, but you can find me on all socials at Chef Bride Duff, and that's the best way to go through me. Schedule a call. We can sit and talk about your project, see what's going on and determine whether or not you're going to be a fit for me, because I don't work with jackasses. Yeah, jackasses suck. Nobody likes to work with them. Probably why you don't have people working for you or with you because you're a jackass. Don, look at your inventory on a weekly basis. We talk about what's happening, what you guys are doing, what your marketing plan is and how you're going to move forward and what we can do on a food level to make that happen, not only match the concept but also make sure that it's coming out in a profitable and creative manner.
Speaker 1:So it's an upfront cost for you, but money well spent is better money saved in the end.
Speaker 1:So in this instance, sometimes you have to bite the bullet. Realize how much you're losing over the course of time. Rip the Band-Aid off. Spend it at the beginning, so that way you could make it up in time instead of losing it. So hiring a consultant like you or your firm is something that most people who are even troubled with the question we asked where are you operating If you can't answer that right now? Calling someone like you or you is something that should be in everybody's repertoire.
Speaker 2:That's what makes a good chef. I come into your restaurant, I do a kind of behind the scenes evaluation. I watch the operation up front. The next day I come back in I hop into your kitchen, I watch the operation in the kitchen and then we go from there and figure out where the problems are and what lies. Perfect.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've been following you for quite a while now. I got the pleasure to meet you first months ago and we've been somewhat of contact between now and then Back out there again this week. Plan to see you again in the next couple months Sounds good to me, man. Love seeing you out here doing what you're doing, bro, especially for the kids, what you're doing with the kids and the programs and the training.
Speaker 2:We've got great students. We've got great students. We do a session in the morning. All of our vendors come in, talk to them about the products, because it starts with your culinary students and your guests about what it is that's going to move forward in the future.
Speaker 1:Multi-fascinated culinary experience right here. Brian Duffy, Come check him out. You saw he plugged. You can go over to find him. I'm Chef Antonio Caruana. This is the Burnt Hands Podcast Burnt Hands Perspective. Thanks for watching. Ciao for now.
