Chef's PSA

Episode Overview In this solo episode, André Natera reflects on what he would tell his younger self if he could go back to the beginning of his culinary career. Not the polished version of that advice that sounds good in an interview. The real version, the things he learned the hard way, the decisions he

Episode Overview In this solo episode, André Natera breaks down how serious chefs think about ingredients and flavor, the intellectual and sensory framework that separates cooks who execute recipes from chefs who create dishes. Most cooking education focuses on technique. But the foundation of genuine culinary excellence is understanding what ingredients actually are, how they

Episode Overview In this solo episode, André Natera addresses one of the most significant transitions in any culinary career: the leap from sous chef to executive chef. This is not a promotion in the conventional sense. It is a fundamental change in what the job actually requires. As a sous chef, you execute. As an

Episode Overview In this solo episode, André Natera talks about what it actually takes to build a great kitchen team, and makes a direct argument for why surrounding yourself with people from diverse backgrounds produces better results than hiring in your own image. The instinct to hire people who look, cook, and think like you

Episode Overview In this solo episode, André Natera runs through his top ten kitchen pet peeves, the behaviors, habits, and recurring failures in professional kitchens that experienced chefs find inexcusable precisely because they are completely avoidable. These are not complaints for their own sake. Every pet peeve on this list points to something real about

Episode Overview In this solo episode, André Natera breaks down what chef consulting actually looks like in practice, stripping away the vague descriptions and getting into the specifics of what a consultant does when they walk into a struggling restaurant operation. The work is not glamorous and it is not primarily about menus. It is

Episode Overview In this solo episode, André Natera makes the case that mentorship is one of the most powerful and underutilized tools available to any chef trying to build a serious career. He describes it as a cheat code: the ability to compress years of hard-won experience into a relationship where someone who has already

Episode Overview In this solo episode, André Natera maps out the learning resources available to cooks and chefs in the current environment and talks through how to use them deliberately rather than passively. There has never been more access to culinary knowledge. Books, video, podcasts, online courses, stages, and peer networks all exist in a

Episode Overview In this solo episode, André Natera continues his two-part series on opening a restaurant with the practical work that happens in the weeks immediately before the doors open: pre-opening operations, mock service, and staff training. This is the period that determines whether a restaurant opens with confidence or opens in chaos. The decisions

Episode Overview In this solo episode, André Natera kicks off a two-part series on opening a restaurant by laying out the pre-opening critical path: the sequence of decisions, preparations, and milestones that need to happen in the right order before any restaurant is ready to open its doors. The critical path is not a checklist.