Pros
The team that handles the day to day was awesome! There is so much support and teamwork it makes coming to work really motivating. The guests and students that come for the classes are mostly wonderful and have a great time learning new things along the way. A great confidence boost for any chef as you share your knowledge and skills with people who are there to learn and enjoy themselves. Management at my particular location was okay. Needed better orgazation and communication, but overall they were supportive of the kitchen. I'd give them a B+.
Cons
The company as a whole low balls your pay. The amount of knowledge and experience that you need for this job is worth more than the just barely above minimum wage they pay you. There is a lot of prep to be done to prepare for these classes and the company doesn't want to pay you to review recipes and game plans or even have meetings with your head chef and coworkers to get proper training and insight from your peers, outside of class time. The company has policies and ways of executing programs or tasks that are archaic and just simply don't make sense. The recipes are from corporate and are sometimes trial and error, which isn't good for a student who is paying upwards of $100 per 2hr. class. The company is retail, yes, but the Cooking Classes and how the chefs and kitchen assistants are treated, trained, paid, and how the program is run needs a revamp. If you are the head chef position (resident chef), you are blamed for everything even if you were unaware that corporate wanted you to do something a certain way and you weren't trained. You are expected to figure it out yourself and if it doesn't work, they will let you know how you are failing without helping you get better at your job. You are on call and work sometimes 60+ hours a week with little reward, appreciation, or rest. It's weird how the part time chef instructors get confident boosts from this job but then when you climb high enough to be the resident chef, the company depleats that confidence. Also, for a store that sells kitchen tools and equipment, the cooking classes shouldn't be using sub-par or overly used or broken merchandise to use in class.