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Introducing a new approach to cooking can pose a challenge, especially when having to build the kitchen team from the ground up. “One of the biggest challenges was the fact that maybe others are not as careful as you’d hope them to be; it’s normal for people to want to take shortcuts, especially when you’re making dessert, because everything requires so much time and accuracy,” Champ said. “As a leader in the kitchen, it’s important to teach your team to step up their game, you have to teach them why just good is not enough and show them an example of something perfectly executed. Otherwise, they’ll see no point of improving.”
For Champ, learning to trust the team is also a big part in
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making the kitchen work. “In the end, you can’t really taste everything all the time, so it’s a lot of letting go and putting trust in your team. I’m really lucky that some of the team members have been with us since the opening of our shop.” Some recipes also require components that need to be made ahead of time, so Champ has to adjust to the new way of planning as well. “A lot of mousses and crust recipes you need to freeze or bake ahead of time, so it really taught me how to plan ahead more than when I was in a traditional kitchen,”
When it comes to ingredients, Champ takes a less-is-more approach, but quality always comes rst. “We use mostly imported ingredients because if you want to make French