Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
The Hooch and the Cachet
Canlis is a third-generation, family-owned fine dining restaurant in the Pacific Northwest. Other restaurateurs pointed to it as a place where the brothers who run it do something interesting about how they hold heat. They keep two spaces for it, the Cachet and the Hooch, which are private, separate, one-on-one spaces away from everyone else.
Feedback in the handbook
Canlis goes past telling staff to give each other feedback directly. The practice is written into the employee handbook: take the person aside, don't do it in front of other people, and expect many moments of conflict every night of service.
The handbook treats those moments as part of how the staff works as a team, with no disaster in them. This is molehill clearing: small kerfuffles sorted out early, like passing a ball back and forth. The bell and the handbook give staff a place and a script, so nobody has to improvise a hard conversation in front of a full dining room.
Why are restaurant kitchens so confrontational?
Modern professional kitchens inherit the brigade system that chef Auguste Escoffier formalized in France in the late 1800s. It borrowed a military hierarchy, with a chief, station leaders, and cooks who answer to them. Orders are called loudly and answered instantly, because plates must leave in minutes. That structure gave kitchens a culture of blunt commands and fast correction.
Why does public criticism sting so much?
Psychologists Sally Dickerson and Margaret Kemeny reviewed 208 lab studies in a 2004 paper in Psychological Bulletin. They found that tasks involving social-evaluative threat, where others can judge your performance, produced the largest stress hormone responses. The cortisol spike was biggest when the task was uncontrollable and an audience was present. Being criticized in front of colleagues contains both of those ingredients.
How long has Canlis been in the family?
Peter Canlis opened the restaurant in Seattle in 1950. It sits on a hillside above Lake Union and was designed in a Pacific Northwest modern style. His son Chris Canlis ran it next, and then Peter's grandsons Mark and Brian Canlis took over. Few fine dining restaurants in the United States have stayed in the founding family for three generations.
More from The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant
