Heard: Kitchen playlists from Atlanta chefs Max Hines and Jarrett Stieber

This story kicks off a series on restaurant kitchen and back-of-house playlists, featuring music selections from local chefs and bartenders.

Did you know that what you’re listening to in a restaurant dining room is likely not what the chefs are listening to in the kitchen? The dining room playlist is curated to set the mood for guests, carefully choreographed to follow the peaks and valleys of service.

But music in a restaurant kitchen plays an equally important role, and one that starts well before the first people are seated in the dining room.

Starting hours ahead of service, music keeps the kitchen energized as staff prep ingredients, accept deliveries, and take inventory. When service begins, music provides the rhythm for chefs to keep pace while cooking and expediting umpteen dishes per hour. At closing, music soundtracks cleaning and powering down kitchen equipment for the day.  

For this installment of “Heard,” Atlanta chefs Max Hines and Jarrett Stieber share their thoughts on the importance of music in the kitchen before, during, and after service, along with songs playing in the back of house at their restaurants.

Chef Max Hines of Breaker Breaker

Dining on the patio or open-air bar at Breaker Breaker along the Beltline in Reynoldstown, you’ll hear a medley of 1980s rock, light hip hop, and country music songs pumping through the sound system. But in the kitchen, it’s all rhythm and beats. 

“Most of the music you want playing in the dining room is going to be a happy medium for the guests. The music you hear in the back of the house is typically going to be reflective of the staff,” Hines said of the difference between music in the dining room versus the kitchen. “I have worked in kitchens with trap music, R&B, oldies, 80s punk rock, reggaeton, mariachi and norteño playlists.”

Hines, who also founded Atlanta chefs collective Stolen Goods, tries to democratize choosing the music for the kitchen. Sometimes he uses music choice as a reward for the best cook or person working the hardest station in the kitchen. Other times it’s the kitchen manager choosing the music, or the person deemed to have the best taste in music. Hines usually has the final say on the kitchen playlist.

When Hines selects music for brunch service, he leans into 1990s R&B, oldies, and uptempo tunes for the kitchen playlist. 

“It’s probably nostalgia for me, but we listened to a lot of Anita Baker when cleaning on the weekends or making breakfast, so that kind of vibe still lives on in the Breaker Breaker kitchen during brunch.”

On high-volume days like Fridays and Saturdays, however, Hines and his team lean into hardcore hip hop and trap music, since much of the Breaker Breaker kitchen staff hails from Atlanta. 

“Music is so important in the kitchen because a lot of the work is muscle memory. If you are in a good flow and setting a good pace, you can cook more off instinct than having to stop and think too much,” Hines explained, comparing the experience to listening to music while exercising.

“I am pretty sure it’s been scientifically proven that music helps you get that last rep in or cut down on time in a mile run. I feel like the pace of cooking in a professional kitchen has a lot of parallels to sports,” he added.

Jarrett Stieber of Little Bear

Unlike Breaker Breaker, the kitchen at Little Bear in Summerhill shares its playlist with the dining room. The kitchen at Little Bear opens onto the dining room, making it difficult to separate music between the two spaces. Chef and owner Jarrett Stieber tries to strike a good musical balance at Little Bear to keep staff and guests happy throughout service.

“While it’s important to have good music that we all enjoy and think is cool playing in the dining room for guests, it also has to be palatable,” Stieber said. “I love everything from Philip Glass’s ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ soundtrack to Paul Chain’s ‘In the Darkness’ to Miles Davis’s heroin years, but all of that is God-awful music to play in a dining room.”

Curating the playlist at Little Bear comes down to whomever gets to the restaurant first. Sometimes the prep team arriving early in the morning chooses the music for the day. On non-prep shift days, the kitchen manager picks the pre-dinner service playlist. Once dinner service begins, the host for the night selects the music heard in the dining room at Little Bear. 

Since opening in 2020, Stieber has compiled several playlists for Little Bear, which they rotate each week and add songs to based on what’s working well during service. Songs tend to be upbeat, starting off lighter in the morning with folk, outlaw country, or tropicalia/samba/bossa nova. Music gets faster and dancier in the early afternoon when most of the staff arrive for work. It gets everyone energized.

“A lot of our staff love to play 2000s booty pop and butt rock, and sometimes that hits when it’s a weekend during the middle of the night when we’re full and on a wait for bar seats and the crowd is younger,” Stieber explained. “But 5:45 p.m. on a Tuesday when there’s fewer people in the dining room, maybe older and more subdued, that music will flop so hard.”

Stieber said it comes down to feeling the vibe in the dining room and pairing that vibe with the right music.