Like, so many different tables, they can’t do each table at a time, so confusing
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It’s really just part of the skill of cooking. I would say it’s one of the things that culinary school can’t teach. Cooking to order is a very high pressure and difficult job. Eventually the timing just becomes second nature.
The dish that takes the longest to prepare and plate sets the pace for everything else. Often there will not be a single person preparing the entire table’s food, so call outs on the time remaining for different portions allow the various kitchen staff to work together and time the landing on the plates in windows to all come together at the same time.
They stagger starting on food: if one part takes 8 minutes to cook and another 5 minutes, they’ll start the one that takes longer 3 minutes before the next. Extend that to all the parts of all the meals. Sounds hard, eh? There are also heat lamps to smooth the timing out too
You start cooking the longest cooking portion of the meal first (like a steak). As time passes, you start the rest of the meal at the required time. In a perfect world, everything finishes at the same time.
Some good replies, but what no one is mentioning is ‘heat lamps’
When the server says “careful, this plate is hot” they’re telling your it’s been under the hot lamp while the other dishes are finished.
Yes, a good kitchen can sequence food, but with multiple stations, this can be almost impossible to perfect if there are different proteins / types of entries being cooked.
They do a lot of food preparation beforehand. So ingredients are cleaned, chopped and weighed out and the stoves are hot with warm frying pans and boiling water on them. Some things can be left to simmer all night waiting to be served. Even the meat can be cooked saus vide so that the chef only need to brown it for less then two minutes before serving.
When they get the table order in place they start by making sure they have everything in place. Then they go through cooking the thing that takes the longest first. A lot of the skill in cooking is the timing, knowing how long everything takes to cook and planning ahead so you have time to take care of each ingredient. So everything will be ready in the order they are needed to be put on the plates. Some ingredients need to rest a bit as well before serving. But even if the different orders might get ready at different times the servers will not serve until all of them are done. So the plate might be sitting there in the kitchen ready to be served but waiting for the other dishes to be ready.
As well as excellent sequencing many dishes are prepared in part in advance- sauces, soups for example.
Vegetables may be partially cooked. Starchy elements such as mashed potatoes etc will all be pre prepared.
The restaurant will structure the menu so that there is as much pre prep as reasonably possible done before Service actually begins.
The menus are planned out in advance so X takes 5 mins to cook Y takes 6 mins to cook So you put Y on first then do X.
They stagger the prep by starting the longest cooking process first, then continue prepping other dishes as the “expected” cooking time matches with how much is left on that longest item. Also, most restaurants are going to have an expo area/window that will sometimes have heat lamps or some method of keeping dishes hot if they end up ready before the rest of that same order.
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.
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