The Demi Skills Course: Adaptive Kitchen Productivity
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Why The Demi-Skills Course?
I know what it’s like to feel anxious and scattered in a professional kitchen. The feeling of uncertainty, disorganization, and fear of getting sent home during service plagued me for years.
The feeling of being in a career-plateau is all-too-familiar for me, too. When you’re unsure of how to break through the ceiling, it’s hard to get promoted.
The Demi Skills Course is made up of 5 detailed, comprehensive, and structured modules. They’re custom-designed to maximize learning, teach timeless principles, and give you skills to stand out.
What’s included in the course? 👇
Course Structure
The Demi Skills Course programming is split up into 5 modules, all designed to “bucket” different sets of skills that are critical for professionals to master in order to perform at the highest levels. The first module arrives to you after enrollment and a week before day one, so you can start learning right away.
From there, you’ll get 4, live-taught sessions for the other modules. This isn’t a pre-recorded course (most of those have 90% drop-off rates).
You’ll get 7+ hours of content through all modules, with over 28+ tailored sections, and a private Community to connect with other students (Community opens just before course begins).
Click into the Modules to learn more about each one 👇
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Where it all begins. Module discusses:
Kitchen Jargon | Instruction Following | Station Setup | Level-Setting | Heat Control | Plating | Portioning
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Beyond the foundation with increased technicality. Module discusses:
Prep List | Multitasking | Kit Building | Ergonomics & Consistent Variables | Timing Estimation
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See changes & execute results, over long time horizons. Module discusses:
Capture Prospective Requests | Night-before Prep | Building in Buffer Time | Marking Your Board | Station Partner Communication | Responding to Feedback | Reducing Steps
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Advanced techniques & frameworks. Module discusses:
“DDFP” | Making Better Decisions | TSD | Communication | New Menu, No Disasters | OOP Prep | Anti-fragility | Stoicism | Taking Projects from Others
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Final session, for those who want to create and lead. Module discusses:
Dish Creation | Pong the Project | Team Management | Tips & Tricks
Alumni Reviews
Save Valuable Time ⏱
What would you do with more of the world’s most precious resource? You could:
Execute your prep with a 10-100% time savings - in a 10-hour workday, that’s an entire HOUR saved, or 5, 20-minute chunks sprinkled throughout your day to be less stressed, less anxious, and more organized at work. I’ve trained chefs who are able to cut the duration of certain projects completely in half - a 2x improvement.
Avoid potential career plateaus where you get stuck in a position you know you want to scale out of - saving an average of 6-15 months of “lost time”.
Free up head-space to explore leadership opportunities, present dishes you’ve created, or improve your relationships with your co-workers. What would that give you the capacity to achieve?
🗓 Timing & Scheduling
Course Length: The live sessions run for 4 weeks.
Schedule - Cohort #2 begins Summer 2022, with each session starting at 2pm PST.
✅All sessions will be recorded and available to watch afterwards, however it’s highly encouraged to join the live sessions to participate in the exercises with fellow students.
👋 About the Instructor
Hi, I’m Justin Khanna
I’ll be teaching this course, live, for every single session, of every single module.
The Demi Skills Course was born out of frustration.
I asked myself:
Why does a solid, foundational set of knowledge in the culinary arts have to cost tens of thousands of dollars?
(If you skip school) - Why does jumping into a professional kitchen not come with its own set of structured lessons?
Why are all of my peers that are running their own restaurants and food businesses crying out that, “good chefs are so hard to find these days!”
How can I turn the catastrophic global pandemic of 2020 & 2021 into an opportunity to acknowledge the current job market, track trends, and forecast where the industry is going, and structure lessons around that reality?
I went to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park. I staged at restaurants in New York City, Copenhagen and Chicago. I achieved an opening-team, Chef-de-Partie role at a restaurant that would go on to garner 3 Michelin-Stars. I worked my way up the brigade at The French Laundry.
I had to learn these skills the hard way: by recognizing patterns, researching how coaches train professional athletes, running experiments myself, reading about psychology, and deploying those learnings into real-world situations.
Back then, I wasn’t calling them “The Demi Skills”. I was so hungry to progress in a kitchen, and I felt like all I needed was an opportunity to show what I was capable of.
In 2014, I moved to the West coast of Norway and worked at the now-Michelin recommended Lysverket in Bergen.
Using these principles and (more that I learned there), I went from Chef-de-Partie to Sous Chef in 10 months. I would continue managing that kitchen team for almost 2 more years.
Since then, I Co-Founded a 6-figure-per-year event production company called Voyager’s Table where we produce private events clients around the world: from 4-person, 12-course tasting menus, to 200-person gala dinners.
I also host a ton of free-to-consume content online to an audience of over 30,000 industry professionals worldwide and host a top-rated Food podcast.
And I’d be honored to have you as part of the next cohort.
Why are they called “Demi” Skills?
Demi (adjective, French) - half
Skills (noun) - a developed aptitude or ability
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The first word being Demi is very intentional. I believe these principles to be the other "half" of what you need to be a successful professional, that aren't systematically taught.
Notice: I didn't say taught through culinary school, or in a restaurant, or via a mentor.
I'm also not saying that you can't learn these things in any of those environments, but in my experience (and maybe in yours) you might find that many of these things are just "learned along the way". I know everyone chooses a different path.
Unfortunately, as with most things you learn via that method, that strategy comes with having to deal with a ton of avoidable mistakes, potentially ruining your reputation, or having those learnings draaaaawwwww ouuuuuuttt foreeeeverrrrr.
I lived that myself. I was stagnant for almost 2 years of my career where I just couldn't break out of the productivity plateau I was in, and had I known some of these skills, I would've been able to progress much quicker.
The second word is Skills, and I use that because it inherently implies that you can learn these.
No one walks into a kitchen on their first day understanding how to make changes on the fly, how to execute a new menu by comparing it to the previous one, how to communicate with challenging team members, how to write a prep list (much less, optimize one)...and that's what The Demi Skills encompass and instill.
It's my job to teach you these skills, to put a name to them so we can all acknowledge them for what they are, define what it looks like to execute them at a high level, and then ultimately set you up for success so that you can deploy them in real world situations.