Some tips for garde manger cooks out there tasked with making family meal salad every day. Learn to think outside of recipes for vinaigrettes and creamy salad dressings. 

Mastering Salad Dressings

Making an aïoli is something every cook should be able to do without a recipe. I’d even go so far as to argue that aïoli is a mother sauce of the modern restaurant kitchen. 

There’s no recipe required for Mayonnaise

Culinary school can teach you so much about cooking, but it's a mighty questionable value proposition. Is it worth it? 

Should I go to Culinary School?

Michael Cecchi-Azzolina’s Your Table Is Ready, Tales of a New York City Maître D’ is here.

The Next Big Industry Read Has Arrived

The very essence of cooking lies in learning to make use of the mealy bits - the bones, the vegetable trim, the parsley stems. The good news is that making stock is way less complicated than the culinary Gods want you to believe.

Stock is a necessary touchpoint on the road to culinary enlightenment

The story behind the genesis of usefirst.com. How a New York City line cook used his down time during Covid to try and change the industry for the better.

Why I Built Use First

Tips on how to show up for that big first restaurant job interview. First appearances are everything. Make sure you’re not ice-capading around the kitchen in a hairnet in front of your future comrades and other lifesaving tips.

What tools should you take on a restaurant trail?

Ever wonder how professional line cooks make use of cake testers to hit the pass with perfectly cooked proteins every time? Here's everything you need to know to become a ringer on grill.

How To Use A Cake Tester

SOS is a common notation servers use as a line note when ringing in a ticket indicating that the guest would like the sauce, or dressing, or anything liquid, to be served on the side. The abbreviation is literally sauce on the side or salsa al lado in Spanish.

When a cook is reading a dupe, and sees, for example, burger medium, the cook will put anything wet on the side. In the case of a burger it would mean that any mayonnaise, aïoli, ketchup, mustard, or other sauce that is normally put onto the burger, should go into a metal or porcelain ramekin and be served on the side of the plate. 

In fine dining, you'll also see sauce on the side applied to dressings and purées. It can be frustrating as you, the cook, knows that the artfully plated and flavor balanced menu item is now out of balance because of the SOS request, but it is what the guest wants, and it's best to keep in mind that there could be a medical condition, or a simple taste preference that you can easily accommodate with the sauce on the side request so it's nothing to get bent out of shape over. 

SOS is a common notation servers use as a line note when ringing in a ticket indicating that the guest would like the sauce, or dressing, or anything liquid, to be served on the side. 

SOS - Sauce On the Side