Restaurant Operations

“Fire table twelve.” “Heard!” “Where’s my fish, six minutes on that fish!” “Coming up now, thirty seconds!” Stand near the pass in a busy kitchen for five minutes and it sounds like nobody’s in charge. It’s the opposite. Every one of those shouted lines is part of a system, and the person standing at that […]

There’s a laminated card taped to the wall above a station in almost every professional kitchen. It lists a recipe the head chef could recite in their sleep. They wrote it. They’ve made the dish hundreds of times. So why is it still sitting there, sauce-stained and half peeling off, months after opening night? Because

By the time a restaurant opens its doors for dinner service, most of the decisions that determine how the night will go have already been made. The vegetables are cut to the same size they were cut yesterday. The proteins are portioned before anyone orders them. The sauces are built and ready, waiting in exactly

Restaurant consistency is often explained as talent or effort. A “good night” gets credited to the team being sharp. A “bad night” gets blamed on people being off. In reality, most of what guests experience as consistency is designed long before service starts. Consistency also isn’t the same as perfection. Restaurants are always adapting to