Kitchen training

A tutor that asks back — and never guesses on safety.

A Socratic line-side tutor grounded only on Marlowe & Finch's own recipes and SFA food-safety rules. It coaches the foundational questions so the chefs' hours go to the line — and it refuses to improvise a shortcut or a recipe. A culinary-academy pedagogy concept · supports Eleanor, Marcus & Lily — never replaces them

Training modules

Grounded on M&F recipes, SOPs & SFA food-safety rules

Kitchen staff trained

Apprentices & floor staff across the 60-seat room

Average checkpoint score

82%

11 knowledge gaps flagged this month for a chef to close

Modules on the line

Each grounded on a real M&F dish or SOP. Critical-safety modules are brass-edged and sit with a chef for sign-off.

①

Allergen handling — the smoked ocean trout

The tree-nut is in the dish, not a garnish: fermented bunya nut is plated under the trout, and it also carries fish and dairy. How to take, flag and refuse the order safely.

Critical · allergen safety

In progress

②

Service timing — the lamington soufflé

Made to order, roughly 15 minutes from the call. When to fire it against the rest of the table so it lands at the pass risen, not collapsed. Lily owns the bake.

Intermediate · pastry timing

Complete

③

Plating the pie floater

The beef-cheek & bone-marrow pithivier, pea velouté, build order and pour. Carries gluten and dairy — the allergen call still applies.

Foundational · plating

Complete

④

Oyster handling & shellfish safety

Coffin Bay oysters — cold-chain, shucking, the SFA rules on live shellfish, and the shellfish allergen call at the table.

Critical · food safety

Not started

⑤

The blind Burgundy bench-test

Pouring the Meursault against the Adelaide Hills chardonnay for the barramundi — talking a guest through a pairing without overclaiming.

Foundational · service

Not started

Active lesson — allergen handling, ocean trout

The tutor withholds the answer and questions back, citing the recipe step. Nothing here is improvised.

Allergen handling — Smoked Tasmanian ocean trout Module ① · grounded Trainee: Wei Tan

Wei (apprentice)

A table just said one guest has a tree-nut allergy but they really want the ocean trout. Can we just leave the praline off?

Tutor

Good that you're checking. Before we answer the guest — look at the recipe card for the trout and list every component for me. Where does the tree-nut actually sit in this dish? Grounding: Smoked Tasmanian ocean trout, fermented bunya nut, dill — declared allergens: fish · tree-nut · dairy.

Wei (apprentice)

Trout, fermented bunya nut, dill, crème fraîche… oh. The bunya nut is a tree-nut, and it's plated under the trout, not on top.

Tutor

Exactly that. So the tree-nut is built into the dish, not a removable garnish. What does that mean for whether we can serve it to a nut-allergy guest — and who makes that call? Grounding: bunya nut is a tree-nut and a core, fermented component — not a finishing element.

Checkpoint · select one

A guest declares a tree-nut allergy and asks for the ocean trout. What do you do?

A Serve it but leave off the praline garnish — that removes the nut.

B Refuse the dish for that guest, explain the bunya nut is built in, and offer a documented nut-free alternative — escalate to the chef on the pass. ✓ Correct — selected by trainee

C Make a nut-free version on the fly by swapping the bunya nut for something else.

D Ask the guest how severe the allergy is and serve it if they say mild.

When a trainee gets it wrong

The tutor catches the unsafe answer, corrects it firmly against the recipe and SFA rules, and never invents a workaround.

▲ Unsafe answer caught — allergen safety

Wei picked option A

"The trout is fine for a nut-allergy guest if we just leave off the praline — that takes the nut out."

Tutor — stop, this isn't safe

No — don't serve this dish to a tree-nut-allergy guest. The nut isn't a garnish you can lift off. The recipe builds fermented bunya nut in under the trout as a core component — bunya nut is a tree-nut. Removing a praline doesn't remove the bunya nut, and trace contact is enough to trigger anaphylaxis. There is no nut-free version of this plate.

What you do instead: decline the trout for that guest, tell them plainly the dish contains tree-nut and can't be modified, and offer a dish with no tree-nut declared — the pie floater (gluten, dairy) or the duck breast (dairy). Confirm the allergy order with the chef on the pass before it leaves.

I won't suggest a substitute ingredient to "make it nut-free" — that's inventing a recipe, and an allergen call is not the place to improvise. If you think the card is wrong, that's a question for Lily or Marcus, not a workaround on the line.

Grounding: Smoked Tasmanian ocean trout, fermented bunya nut, dill — allergens fish · tree-nut · dairy; bunya nut is a structural, fermented element. SFA allergen-management guidance: a declared allergen cannot be served by removal of a visible component. Logged as a knowledge gap for chef review.

Where the tutor stops: it coaches and flags, but it does not certify. Serious assessment and WSQ competency sign-off stay with Eleanor Marlowe and Marcus Tan; pastry timing sits with Lily Park. The tutor supports the trainers — it never replaces a chef's judgement on safety or a chef's signature on competency.

Under the hood What this is today — and where the tutor should go next

This page is a design concept, not a live system — the lessons, scores and the caught answer are hardcoded to show the interaction. The intended build is retrieval-augmented generation over M&F's own recipe and technique corpus, with a Socratic prompt that withholds the answer and questions back, plus a simple competency log. The honest point of difference is the safety floor: on an allergen or food-safety question the tutor cites the recipe and the SFA rule and refuses to improvise — it would sooner say "ask the chef" than invent a shortcut.

On the roadmap

Ground every answer, cite every source. Tie each tutor turn to a specific recipe step or SFA clause so a trainee — and a chef auditing later — can see exactly what the answer rests on. No citation, no answer.
A hard safety rail, separate from the chat. Allergen and food-safety modules run through a rules check that the conversational model can't talk its way around: a declared allergen that's structural to a dish always resolves to "decline and escalate", never to a modification.
Technique videos on the line. Link M&F's own short technique clips — shucking the Coffin Bay oysters, firing the lamington soufflé — so the asks-back dialogue lands on a demonstration, not just text.
Competency tracking for WSQ. Log what each apprentice has demonstrated against the WSQ competencies as evidence for a culinary-academy tie-in — kept on academy-controlled storage with a set retention period, since competency records are personal data under the PDPA.
The chef stays in the loop. Every flagged knowledge gap routes to Eleanor or Marcus; the tutor proposes, a chef certifies. Multilingual coaching (Mandarin, Bahasa) is a model-layer add for floor staff, but sign-off never leaves a human.

Full use-case write-up — the problem, benefits and vendor landscape: UC11 — Kitchen training tutor → Concept mock-up — illustrative data, not a live system.