How to Recover Quickly After a Dish Goes Wrong

While there’s no training quite like the pressure of having to repair a dish in the middle of a dinner service, there are some general principles that can be applied to any situation. And if you get in the habit of applying these principles, you’re going to find that even in the heat of the moment, you can think clearly and make the right decision. Don’t panic. The fact that you burned a sauce or overcooked a protein doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to mess up service. The first thing to do is to figure out which components of the dish you need to replace, and which can still be used.

It’s easy to get into the habit of thinking you need to rebuild a dish from scratch when a problem arises, but that’s rarely true. Nine times out of ten, you can repair a dish without having to start over. Start by identifying what can still be used. Maybe you can thin an over-reduced sauce out with some stock. Maybe you can slice a seared protein that’s overcooked into a medallion or cut it into chunks. Maybe your garnish is ugly, but the rest of the dish is fine. Take a breath and think it through. Take a moment to calmly assess the situation. This is where so many cooks go wrong. Instead of taking a moment to think it through, they panic and get moving.

Most cooks try to slide by with the problem when they panic. If a protein is overcooked, they might try to slice it and hope no one notices. If a sauce is broken, they might try to mask the texture with a garnish. Don’t try to hide problems. If you need to re-fire a component, do it. The worst thing you can do is try to cover up a mistake. This usually results in a dish that’s not good enough to serve. Instead, repair the component that’s bad. Fire a new piece of protein or rebuild your sauce. If one of your components is not good enough, then fix it. But don’t mess up the other components in the process. Fix what’s bad and keep moving.

One of the ways you can repair dishes more quickly is to have extra batches of some components ready at all times. If you know you’re going to need twenty portions of a certain sauce to get through the night, make thirty. This way if something happens to one, you can quickly grab another without losing any time. It’s the same thing with garnishes. If you use a lot of pickled pink peppercorns throughout the menu, make a double or triple batch. You can always use them later. In fact, one of my favorite techniques is to make a double batch of just about everything and freeze what I don’t use. This way I have backups ready to go at a moment’s notice for next time I’m short. You’d be surprised how much faster you can move when you have a few backups ready to go. This is not a hack or a crutch, it’s just smart.

I suggest setting a timer for 15 minutes and practicing a scenario in which you have to repair a dish that has fallen. If you once had a problem with a sauce breaking, practice breaking a sauce, then fixing it. If you had a protein that got overcooked, practice overcooking a protein then slicing it into a medallion and repairing the dish. When your timer goes off, take a minute to assess how that exercise felt. What solutions seemed to present themselves easily, and what did not? The more you practice scenarios like this, the easier they become. After a while, they become second nature.