How the firm started
Firecourse began in 2009, in the year Chicago independents were closing at a rate nobody in the industry wants to remember. Our founding group had between them run four kitchens and closed two, and the thing they kept seeing was operators making the right decisions on ingredients and the wrong ones on arithmetic — a menu nobody had costed since it was written, and a prep list nobody had counted since the site opened.
Seventeen years later that is still the whole business. Eleven consultants, one office above a former tool works on Hubbard Street, and no ambition to be larger, because at fifteen people we would have to take chain work to keep everyone busy.
Who works here
Every consultant has run a kitchen line, most for longer than they have consulted. We hire from kitchens rather than from business schools, and we teach the arithmetic afterwards; it turns out to be far easier than teaching someone to read a service they have never worked.
| Group | People | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| Menu and costing | 4 | Item costing, mix analysis, price architecture |
| Operations | 4 | Prep systems, ticket flow, station layout, labor |
| Pre-opening | 2 | Equipment schedules, opening pars, brigade planning |
| Office | 1 | Scheduling, contracts, invoicing |
Correspondence goes to the office rather than to individuals, and engagements are staffed by pair, so that a restaurant is never left waiting on one person’s calendar.
Independence
We take no commission, rebate, referral fee or hospitality from equipment dealers, purveyors, software vendors or brokers. This is written into every engagement letter and it is the first thing we would want to know about a consultant if we were hiring one.
It has cost us work. Twice a year or so, an operator asks us to specify equipment through a dealer who would “look after us”. The answer is the same both times, and it is the reason our advice on whether you need the second combi oven is worth reading.
What we are not
We are not a marketing agency, a design studio or a recruiter. We do not sell software. We have no branded system, no certification and no methodology with a name — the method is on the method page in plain sentences, and anyone is welcome to run it themselves.
