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Prep sheet 005 — the other side of the pass

Four hours, one table,
nobody shouting service.

You cook in somebody’s kitchen in Plymouth, teach them as you go, and eat what you make with them. Your menu, your pace, your diary. This exists because Plymouth has good chefs the trade is wasting, and four hours at somebody’s hob pays better than four hours on a section. Everything from scratch, because for once there is time to — no prep list written by someone else, no section, no pass.

Apply to cookSee how a session runs

Self-employed, never staff. No premises, no lease, and nothing stored at yours — you shop on the way and it goes straight to their kitchen.

Why bother

The constraint that ruins the cooking is time, and this removes it

Most chefs did not leave restaurants because the hours were long. They left because the hours were long and the food still came out of a bag, on somebody else’s menu, forty covers at a time.

The problem

The trade stopped paying for the skill

You did the training and you did the years, and the job pays what it pays. Split shifts. Sixty hours in a bad week. A rota you find out about on Thursday. Prep time cut first, because it is the easiest thing to cut and nobody outside the kitchen sees it go. That is not one bad employer — it is what the sector has settled into, and it is why so many good chefs have left it.

We are not fixing hospitality. We are offering four hours of it that work differently, and being straight with you about which four.

The fix

One table, four hours, and your own menu

Eight to fourteen covers, once, all at the same time, with the people eating it stood next to you. You write the menu, you agree it with them, and then you have the afternoon and the evening to make it the way it should be made. Stock from bones. Pasta rolled in front of them. The bread.

The limit

It is not a job, and we will not pretend it is

No salary, no rota, no holiday pay, no guaranteed nights. You are self-employed, you hold your own diary, and a quiet February is yours. What we do is find the bookings, take the payment, carry the insurance and have the awkward money conversation. What we do not do is give you a wage.

The evening

The same evening the customer reads about on the landing page, from the other side of the hob — theirs is here.

What one of these actually looks like

  1. 16:30

    You shop, on the way

    The list is yours and you buy it the same day, on the way over. Nothing goes home with you and nothing comes from home — no cold store to manage, no stock to rotate, no Tuesday spent counting what went off. Ingredients are billed to the household at cost, so you are not funding the menu out of your own pocket either.

  2. 19:00

    You arrive at a kitchen you have never seen

    Six knives, an apron, and a household who are pleased you are there. You get ten minutes to work out where the sharp bit of the hob is and which drawer has the sieve. That is the job and, once you have done it twice, it stops being the hard part.

  3. 19:15

    Everything from scratch, because there is time to

    Stock, pasta, the sauce, the bread if the menu has bread. No prep list written by somebody else at four in the afternoon, no forty-minute window, nothing out of a bag because the section is behind. You cook it the way you would cook it if anybody let you.

  4. 20:45

    They plate it, not you

    You stand next to them and let them. It is their dinner and the teaching is the point — watching somebody get the sear right on the second attempt is most of why chefs who try this keep doing it.

  5. 21:00

    You eat it with them

    At the table, with a glass of what they bought, in a kitchen that smells of what you just made. Nobody is calling away. Nobody is shouting. There is no next table.

  6. 22:15

    You wash up and you go home

    Washing up is part of every session and it is quicker than a section deep clean by a wide margin. Kit back in the car, paid without asking, and home by eleven with no shift tomorrow unless you put one in your own diary.

What you need

Five things, and we pay for one of them and help with two. None of it is a test of how good a cook you are — the trial service is that.

The list, in full, with nothing left off it

Level 2 Food Safety. Yours to hold, because you are the one cooking. It is around thirty pounds online and takes an afternoon. If you have one from a previous kitchen and it is still valid, that is fine.

A Basic DBS check. We pay for it and we apply for it with you. Basic is the right level for this work and the only one the law allows us to ask for, so it is what we ask for and what the site says we ask for.

Food business registration with Plymouth City Council. Free, it cannot be refused, and it needs doing at least 28 days before your first paid session. What you are registering is a business with no premises: you shop on the way, it all goes straight to the customer’s kitchen, and nothing is ever stored or prepped at yours. Your address goes on the form because every business has to give one, not because anybody is coming to look in your fridge. We will walk you through it — and we are putting the question of exactly what the council wants from a business that works this way to them before launch, rather than guessing at it here.

A way of getting there, with the shopping. Most chefs drive, and a car used for this needs business use on the policy — you are going to a different kitchen every time with a boot full of shopping. Most insurers want telling; it is usually a small change and occasionally a free one, but it has to be done. A taxi or an Uber is equally fine and needs none of that, as long as your knives and the shopping fit in it. Worth knowing before you decide which: the £20 travel charge on a PL8 and PL10–PL21 booking passes to you whole, because it reimburses the journey rather than paying you for it — and inside PL1–PL7 and PL9 there is no travel charge at all, so a fare there comes out of your own share.

A trial service with one of our leads. One session, cooked properly, with somebody who has done a few. It is the only part of this that is about the cooking, and it is the only part we will not shorten.

You will also want to be within about twenty minutes of the city, because the coverage is PL1–PL21 and the drive has to stay sensible at the end of a long evening. Knives are yours. Everything else about the kitchen is theirs.

Questions

Anything not answered here, email [email protected] and a person writes back.

The ones chefs ask first

Is this employment?
No, and it is not designed to creep towards it. You are self-employed, you hold your own diary, you can decline any session without giving a reason and without it counting against you anywhere, and you can cook for anyone else you like at the same time. We publish prices and take the payment, which is what makes us the customer’s contracting party — it is not what makes us your employer.
Do you rate us, or rank us?
No. There are no stars, no score, no league table and no number attached to you anywhere in the system — not a visible one and not a private one. Customers are shown a suggested chef with the reason written out, and are told plainly they can ask for somebody else. What we do show is what you said about your own cooking and what you are like to have in a kitchen, in your words.
Do I have to take the work you offer?
No. An offer is an offer. Declining one leaves nothing behind — no record held against you, no effect on what you are offered next, no explanation required. If that stops being true, we have built the wrong thing.
Who writes the menu?
You do. The customer says roughly what they want and what they cannot eat, and you write something you would actually be pleased to cook. We check it has a written allergen line and that it is honest about what is in it. We do not hand you a menu and we do not have a group one.
Can I keep my restaurant job?
Yes, and most people who do this will. Two free evenings a week is the shape this is built around. You put the nights you want in your own diary and we only offer you those.
What if the kitchen is terrible?
Some of them are. We ask the household about their hob, their oven and their space at booking and we tell you before you accept, so a two-ring flat with no counter is a thing you knew about rather than a thing you discovered. If you arrive and it is genuinely unsafe to cook in, you stop, and you are still paid.
Whose insurance covers it?
£5m public liability sits with us and covers the session. If you drive, the car is yours and needs business use on it; if you take a taxi, that does not arise. Depending on what our insurer asks for, you may also be asked to hold your own public liability — if so we will tell you before you do the trial, not after.
Why not just use a listing site?
Because a listing is what a listing site gives you: the enquiries, the quoting, the chasing and the cover are still yours to do. We find the booking, answer the household’s questions, take the payment, chase it when it is late and carry the £5m cover, and we pay for your Basic DBS check. There is no listing fee, no subscription and no charge for a month you did not work. And nothing here moves you up or down a page for answering quickly, or for saying no.
When do I get paid?
The customer pays us and we take our commission. If front of house or anybody else was booked with you, what is left of their line is theirs, and everything left of yours is yours: by bank transfer, by the last working day of the month the session was in. Every month has a statement showing each session and what it paid you, so you can check our arithmetic instead of trusting it. One exception: if the bank details we pay you into have changed, or we have not paid that account before, the founder phones you first and the payment waits for that call, however late that makes it.

Next

Tell us where you have cooked

There are 6 chefs on the site and none of them has cooked a paid session yet, so this is early rather than a waiting list. If the applications page is not open when you get there, it will say so and give you the address below — which reaches the same person either way.

Apply to cook Email [email protected]

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