Dominic Achterberg

Head chef at The Coalhouse and this course's week 8 guest lecturer on how preparation is timed against a live service

Affiliation

The Coalhouse

Contact

Not a member of the regular teaching staff; direct questions about week 8 to the course convenor rather than by email.

Dominic Achterberg is a working head chef, invited to teach week 8 as a guest rather than as a member of Slop University’s regular staff. He is not a Slop University employee and holds no other role in this course.

Twenty-two years in professional kitchens, starting as a commis chef and moving through line sections — larder, then sauce, then pass — before six years as sous chef at a mid-sized bistro kitchen and, for the last nine years, head chef at The Coalhouse, a fixed-menu restaurant built around a short pass and a stated ticket time.

His stated approach, and the reason he was asked to speak in a course built on preparation: a kitchen does not manage time by working faster during service. It manages time by deciding, before service starts, exactly which tasks are finished, which are held, and which are deliberately left undone until a ticket calls for them — and by treating any deviation from that plan as a fault to be traced afterward, not absorbed silently in the moment. He is on record, in the kitchen he runs, as telling incoming staff that a service does not create a timing problem so much as reveal whichever one was already sitting in the prep list.