Eli5 how on earth to restaurants get the orders out for each table at the same time despite the dishes taking different amounts of time to cook?

Question

Like, so many different tables, they can’t do each table at a time, so confusing

In: 327

Answer 1

A good commercial kitchen is military levels of organised. You do a lot of prep so there’s as few steps as possible to getting a dish ready to leave the kitchen when you’re actually busy.

Generally for kitchens I’ve worked with, every station will have the tickets printed with the table number and only whatever items are relevant to that station. There’ll be one guy with copies of the complete tickets. For my old kitchen this was usually the main grill chef; grilled chicken was the slowest thing on the menu, so the guy grilling chicken set the pace for everything else.

Let’s say the ticket has an item that takes 15 minutes, an item that takes 10 and an item that takes 4. Main ticket guy will immediately give the instruction to start the 15 minute item to whoevers job it is to make that item. 5 minutes later he’ll give the instruction to the guy whose job it is to make the 10 minute item to start (often this instruction will just be something like “go for fries on 6”). 6 minutes after that he’ll give the instruction for the 4 minute item. They’ll batch these, so if tables 6/10/11 all have fries and are coming out at roughly the same time he’ll tell the fryer station to do all three at the same time. It’s generally no harder to do multiple portions of stuff like that than to do one so this saves a lot of hastle. I can make half a dozen portions of the same side salad in one bowl rather than doing them one after another.

In a well trained kitchen, if any station is particularly slammed or having some kind of issue that will delay them a bit they’ll communicate that back to the chef asap, so he can adjust the timings of his instructions accordingly. On busy nights we also had a “donkey”. Their job was to go grab anything a chef might suddenly find themselves needing and step in to help any station that started to struggle. My old head chef loved being donkey on a Friday night.

Crucially you don’t need to get this all perfect. We have shelves with heat lamps on them, so if one dish is a couple minutes early that can buy you that time without the dish going noticeably colder. If you’ve ever been told “be careful, this plate is a little hot” it’s because it was sat under a heat lamp waiting for the rest of the table to be ready.