When you want to hire a chef for your restaurant or a cook, the selection process can be a bit challenging. Nevertheless, hiring a chef in your restaurant is imperative for your restaurant to blow up. So, discover here for hire best a cook in Dubai, as a cook is not just there to make food, but is also responsible for sorting menus, deciding specials, training the new chefs, overseeing the cooking inside the kitchen, etc. So stick till the end of our article to find out how to find a cook for your restaurant, what questions you should ask them to assess their capabilities, and some qualities to look for in your cook. 

Where to Find a Cook?

You can find a cook for your restaurants by hiring through different methods. You can recruit cooks through a number of methods:

• Through a Recruiting Agency:

  If you don’t want to go through a hiring process, you can always use a recruiting agency for the same. An agency has professional recruiters who can look at your needs and demands and hire cooks based on the job profile you want.

• Internal Hiring:

  If you don’t want to look at foreign prospects for the cook of your restaurant, you can consider hiring from within the team of chefs you already have. This also provides your employees a prospect of continuous growth within your restaurant.

• Post Advertisements:

  You can attract cooks to apply to your restaurant through ads that they see online or on your website. Apart from these techniques, you can also ask your suppliers to look for cooks by word of mouth advertising. 

Questions to Ask your Cook

While hiring a cook and when you discover here for hire best a cook in Dubai, you need to keep in mind some questions to ask your chef to have a clearer picture of their strengths and flaws.

Ask about Qualifications and Experience

To start with, you can ask basic questions about whether they are qualified or not. You can ask them if they have attended culinary school. It might not always be the case, so you can ask them what other pieces of training or courses they have undergone.

Next, you can ask about their years of experience working in restaurants. Common questions would be to ask about how many types of restaurants they’ve been a part of and how many employees did they manage.

Enquire about Work Process

Next, you can enquire the cook about what their process of work is. Ask them the way they would like to run a kitchen and how will they manage the day-to-day activities of the kitchen. Pose them with challenging questions and scenarios. For example, you can ask them how they would deal with a conflict in the kitchen or how they have in the past handled nerve-racking days of work.

Where will the Cooks be in the Long Run?

After all the basic questions are done, you should ask your cook about what they have set for their future. You can ask what the career goals of your cook are and on what areas do they want to work so they get better with time. Also, to get a better look at how they like to grow in their field, you can ask the cook the reason they left their earlier job or the position they were in. Also, ask them what made them choose your job opening and why it excites them.

Restaurant-Specific Questions

You might want to know if the cook is a perfect fit for the specifications of your restaurant. For example, if your restaurant demands more of a particular cuisine, you should ask the cook about their experience in that specific cuisine. Ask them what their favorite dish is in that cuisine and how equipped they are in cooking that. You can also ask them what they like about your menu, what they’d like to add to the menu, what their area of expertise is in that menu, etc.

Qualities to Look for when Hiring a Cook

When you are done with the questions, you will have a nice idea about how the chef cooks, what their skills are, and which fields they have expertise in. But apart from just the cooking skills they have, you need to know about their strengths that will help the day-to-day functioning of your restaurant. You need to know about their leadership skills, problem-solving skills, how much they value customer experience, and whether they are a team player, to name a few qualities.

• Will they Train the Staff Efficiently?

Your whole team of staff should work like a well-oiled machine if you want your restaurant to succeed. Hence, apart from the chef’s qualifications, their ability to train and educate other cooks and waiters is also important. Since they have an idea about what equipment and tools are put to use, they can train the staff in using those types of equipment.discover here for hire best a cook in Dubai.

• Patience to Handle Situations

There are a million things that could go wrong in a restaurant or inside the kitchen at any given time. How the cook handles these situations can ultimately decide how the rest of the staff reacts to the situations. When there is a lot of pressure and stress, having a chef who reacts well to pressure and is calm will be a major boon to your kitchen.

• Quality Food

You don’t need a cook who is just slacking off to complete orders. Your chef needs to bring up the quality of your kitchen and set the bar high. All your efforts to present the kitchen with a great ambiance and atmosphere will only bring fruit only when the quality of food on the table is top-notch. Only great food forces the customers to have a great recall value of your restaurant and forces those customers to keep coming back to your restaurant.

• Similar Values

You and your cook need to agree on some shared values. As much as a qualification from a culinary school matters, other values of the cook matter too. For smooth sailing of your restaurant, both the cook and you should have a similar view on customer experience, how to engage and talk with customers, etc.

• Detail Oriented

Your cook needs to pay severe attention to detail in your restaurant. It is their job to overlook the menus and contribute to them, write the specials, know about the stock available and order more goods when needed.

• Tech Savvy

In today’s digital era, it is very important that not only your cook is detail-oriented but also is proficient in computers. A cook’s skill in making spreadsheets will help your restaurant in keeping check of all the profits, which dishes are being ordered the most, what dishes on the menu are ignored, etc. Also, if they know how to effectively use social media to promote your restaurant’s name, it would go a long way in popularizing your brand.

So, when you are looking to hire a cook in Dubai, you should keep in mind the above-mentioned questions and qualities so that your restaurant has the best cook, the best menus, and the best possible staff.