Celebrate the world’s chefs and recognize their noble contributions to the hospitality industry this coming International Chefs Day.
Honoring the artists behind the scrumptious masterpieces that have become your restaurant’s best menus, guests’ favorites, and everyone’s comfort food after a long day deserves the best celebration ever.
You can have a simple celebration by hosting cooking workshops, farm visits, and other interactive activities to pay proper tribute to your chefs.
To help you streamline your operations, having an interactive menu software is a great option.
There’s no need to worry about taking orders while conducting these activities — a smart, intuitive software has got you covered.
Why International Chefs Day is celebrated: A bitesize history
It all began in 2004 when chef Dr. Bill Gallagher served as the President of Worldchefs, a global network of chefs’ associations that brings education, networking competition, and sustainability to the community to which this celebration is dedicated.
The Worldchefs organization was established to study the role and contributions of a chef.
Over the past years, they released annual campaigns to help broadcast their mission.
This year’s campaign, “Growing Great Chefs,” commits to providing opportunities for children to express their creativity and love for cooking.
It is also a way to share the joys of the culinary profession, learn the importance of healthy eating, indulge in the art of restaurant branding with their artistry in food, and help local communities in the hopes of leaving a lasting impact on these young hearts as future culinary leaders.
When is the International Chefs Day?
This year, this global celebration is held on October 20, the third Sunday of the month.
7 International Chefs Day activities you can do to drum up business
If you are looking for fun and interactive activities for your little customers that also promote creativity and learning, here are a few ideas:
Host a cooking competition
Hosting a kiddy cooking competition in your diner is an innovative way to celebrate the best chefs in the world.
Not only does it allow children to exhibit their cooking skills, but it also serves as an educational activity.
They will learn to appreciate what it takes to get lunch on their tray in school, understand the basics of nutrition, and even gain valuable life skills by working in a team challenge.
You may also invite the parents to be their kids’ cooking partners to make it more exciting and a fun family time for them.
In the competition, you can set a theme where your participants can get inspiration.
Suppose the subject is ‘school lunch.’ Students can focus on creating dishes they usually eat during lunchtime, placing them in lunch boxes, and providing as much creative input as possible.
In addition to having panels taste the entry dishes, you can add them to your daily deals: Customers can vote for specific awards, such as most visually pleasing or most artistic plating.
Make a kid’s kitchen corner in your restaurant
Having little aspiring best chefs in the world at your diner not only lifts the mood of the whole place but also helps them unleash their imagination through a kid’s kitchen.
Setting up this role-playing activity allows children to mimic their parents or a chef for a day. Local diners, cozy cafes, or women-led restaurants are great venues for this event because the staff or the owner will be more hands-on during the activity.
Another great thing about this activity is that it’s a creative and safe way to introduce cooking while fostering a love for food and the enjoyment of making it. It could even inspire them to pursue a culinary career in the future.
Hold a Food Art exhibit during Chefs’ International Day
Food art is an act of preparing, cooking, or serving food in a creative way, from intricate plating to fruit and vegetable carving.
For example, a carved pumpkin with triangle eyes and a spikey smiling mouth is displayed outside houses and streets during Halloween. It is not only popular food art but also a well-known symbol for that specific occasion. It is even used as concept decoration for cafés, restaurants, and the like.
Organizing a food art exhibit can motivate children to express their creativity through designing and creating dishes with colorful ingredients.
They can cut food into different shapes or whittle vegetables to form figures such as flowers, cartoon characters, or whatever else they wish to make.
You can also introduce to them how you artistically place their masterpieces in the food directory through the art of menu design, which they can try as part of their activity.
Simply mount a tent outside your restaurant (if you have enough space) or make a gallery corner inside to showcase the children’s artwork.
If you have an interactive menu software—an application that provides vivid images and descriptions of food items, you can integrate their artworks as special deals in the menu.
You can also use social media for wider reach when promoting your food art exhibit. Social media for restaurants is an excellent tool for advertising events. Everything is now just one click away.
Organize a cooking workshop for kids
Cooking workshops are good interactive activities for children for this cooks’ appreciation day to have hands-on experience in the kitchen.
Though it requires patience and time, the benefits they can get from it are rewarding: learning basic cooking skills, developing adventurous, varied taste palettes, and improving hand and eye coordination skills.
To organize this workshop, plan the recipes you will introduce them to. Consider choosing dishes that are simple to make — remember, they’re just kids.
After deciding which recipes to use, check your kitchen tools to see if they are safe for children. If not, you may require them to bring their own.
During the activity, make the whole event an environment to learn new things. It’s an excellent way to incorporate math, science, and creativity simultaneously.
Let them measure the ingredients using weighing scales, measuring cups, and spoons, making it a fun way to teach numbers.
The kitchen is like a science lab. They can have a first-hand experience of how ingredients change in form (liquid, solid, gas), color, and texture — it’s like experimenting while cooking.
Let’s say a carrot turns into juice by blending it, or red meat turns black because of fire or the high fire temperature.
Kids can also express their creativity with how they present their food. Let them decorate their meals and encourage them to be as artistic as they want.
They can create different shapes from vegetables or arrange food to form figures.
Remember to impose restaurant safety rules during the workshop to ensure a safe environment for the kids while learning.
Setting up a fun and interactive event will not just make them want to learn to cook but also make them feel the excitement of preparing their food.
Sponsor farm visits for Chefs’ International Day
Initiating a field trip to visit local farms with children is an excellent project during Cooks Appreciation Day.
It will show them where their food comes from and how they can grow them. Children learn more by experiencing things. There is no need to limit learning from a book or a screen.
Here’s a list of fun activities to do during a farm visit:
- Meeting animals. You can have a fun farm tour where the kids will have close and personal interaction with pigs, chickens, cows, and goats.
Consider having feeding tasks to these animals or collecting eggs from the poultry, a more hands-on experience.
- Planting seeds. It’s an effective way for them to understand where vegetables come from; they will also learn how to care for what they planted.
- Harvesting produce. Having children pick apples or oranges brings them enjoyment and satisfaction as they can see their efforts of going from one tree to another.
Not only that, they will learn to appreciate the jobs of local farmers as well.
These simple yet interactive activities give children awareness about their daily meals and teach them to appreciate not just the chefs but also the farmers.
Have a food donation drive with children
Food insecurity is having less access to sufficient food for each person in a household.
In 2022, the Food Agricultural Organization reported a rough estimate that around 691 million to 783 million people worldwide were hungry due to inflation, poverty, unemployment, and other factors.
With this number, raising awareness about the insecurity of food is essential.
As part of your celebration for International Chefs Day, organizing a food donation drive for communities experiencing this issue is an excellent initiative.
With its central theme, “Growing Great Chefs’’, children’s participation in the activity will not just help them understand the ongoing problem the world is facing today, but it will teach them how to value food and help those in need.
Start by choosing which group or community to support. You can collaborate with your municipal governments if you need help determining to whom to dedicate the activity.
They can suggest local places or groups who need it the most. Since there are children, prioritize safety in choosing a location.
You can also partner with your local food banks—non-government organizations that distribute food to those with difficulty accessing it.
Prepare the meals you will donate with the help of your young volunteers and send them to these local NGOs.
In your preparation, you can have an engaging conversation with your target community, highlighting the purpose of the activity and their thoughts about it.
Introduce cultural food with a QR code menu
Introducing children to various cuisines helps them explore diverse flavors and understand different cultures and traditions across the globe.
It is an opportunity to promote understanding and appreciation of these dishes and learn more about where they come from.
To give them information about their meals, you can use a ‘QR code menu,’ a scannable code where you can integrate images and descriptions of food.
Present it and guide them in scanning the QR code through their tablets or phones. If they do not have one, you can use your gadget or any other equipment available in your restaurant.
This way, they will see what the food will look like because images produce vivid colors that accentuate the dishes even more. You can also integrate the places they come from and other details like the ingredients used in them.
As children are visual learners, having an image presentation of food assists in developing their senses: they can conclude if a specific dish looks delicious or if they feel hungry just by looking at it.
In return, they will appreciate these meals more as they taste them. To make it more exciting, you can ask questions about what colors they can see or what flavors they can taste.
Fact check: Is there a National Chefs’ Day?
Chefs Day celebrations are celebrated annually on October 20, nationally or internationally.
It has been a yearly tradition since its creation by the late Dr. Gallagher of Worldchefs, committing to honor this noble profession.
Compass Group—the Global Leaders in Food and Support Services marked not just a national chefs appreciation day but a week-long celebration for culinary experts around the globe last September 10 to 16 of 2023.
The celebration brought together the food and hospitality industries to recognize chefs and their culinary teams.
Throughout the week, the Compass Teams from 40 countries convene in one place to show their utmost appreciation to the culinarians who inspire them on a daily basis.
The group greatly emphasized the contributions of their chefs and culinarians to its success and impact on areas like consumer health and sustainability.
To help them ease their kitchen operations, having an advanced tool such as digital software can make a difference.
How interactive menu software can help chefs run the kitchen smoothly
Manually jotting down ingredients and monitoring orders can burden chefs who must focus on making meals for their restaurants.
Having software that can help streamline kitchen operations can be a huge benefit. It’s more than just a tool on how to order using an interactive online menu.
With it, they can ensure that the kitchen is well-stocked and the menu is up-to-date.
They can also monitor incoming orders on tablets or computers, keeping them on track without losing any orders. It makes it more convenient and organized than having receipts sent to the kitchen.
Imagine having this installed in your restaurant; it will help smoothen the rough edges in your kitchen operations — the best gift to your chefs.
Summing up
There’s more to this commemoration: Celebrating International Chefs Day with events and activities while maintaining service efficiency is challenging.
But with MENU TIGER — a digital menu system that elevates your overall operation, you will surely get a seamless managing experience.
Not only does the system allow you to integrate your menu, but it also generates QR codes you can put on your counters or table tops for customers to access without waiting in line or calling for a waitperson to order.
A restaurant waiter call button system is added as a feature to streamline your workforce service.
In a bustling restaurant, it is difficult to do many things simultaneously, so intuitive software can help you improve your services.
All you need is an email and a phone number. So, Sign up, create your account, and celebrate Chefs Day with your new system.
