Best Served Together is a Q&A show where we celebrate the Unsung Hospitality Heroes. Join Chef Jensen Cummings as he talks to industry leaders about the people that have been there through the trials and triumphs of their lives and careers. On this episode of Best Served Together Ben Hayes talks to Jensen about going to culinary school together, taking the extreme passion he learned from playing sports and putting it into culinary, and how it is working in a kitchen without a ticket machine.

1. Ben Hayes works at Flagship @ Facebook which runs cafes that are solely for Facebook employees at the different FB locations. It is a cool place to work because the Facebook employees don’t pay anything so there is no handling of money and the menu changes often so there are always new things to cook and new skills to learn.

2. Ben also went to culinary school with Jensen. “I wasn’t behind the stove with my grandma learning how to make sauce. I thought that I was going to make it in sports. Sports didn’t work out, so I took that drive into culinary school. Having a type of competitive model that brings out the best in everyone is good for teamwork.” (5:40)

3. “There is more than one way to get to that end result. Have your own opinion but you should be able to bounce opinions off of other people.” (7:41)

4. “I think I tried to overwork food since I left culinary school. Honestly, I didn’t find my style until two or three years ago. I stopped trying to work so hard. I started from the end and then worked backwards. I think I was just putting so much on the plate before. There’s so much to learn.” (15:56)

5. When speaking about his dishwasher, Ben said, “It’s hard to replace that attitude. To be able to work 8 to 10 hours washing dishes and have a great attitude about that, you just can’t teach that.” (25:14)

Website:

Facebook:

/bestservedpodcast

Instagram

@bestservedpodcast

@ChefJensenCummings

Twitter:

@BestServedPodcast

@JensenCummings

Youtube:

Best Served Podcast