And I’m not talking about fast-food joints like macdonald’s. I’m talking about your everyday restaurants, especially asian restaurants where they have many dishes. How do they take your order and have it cooked and out in a reasonable timeframe? (Less than 10mins waiting time)
In: Other
Prep.
Everything is cut, chopped, portioned, etc. ahead of time, so the only thing they have to do is cook and plate. Also multiple steps that you might do serially (one after the other) at home happen in parallel in a restaurant.
Most restaurants have prep cooks that come in before the shift and do nothing but prep and portion everything that the restaurant expects to sell that day.
EDIT:
Here’s an example of how that goes.
So, let’s say you have a cajun chicken pasta dish that includes linguini, a cream sauce, a grilled chicken breast, and some vegetables (garlic, tomatoes, onions, bell peppers).
The order comes in and there’s usually a manager or “expediter” that calls out the order to the different stations. So for this pasta dish he lets the person on the saute station know that he’s got a cajun chicken pasta and the person on the grill station know she has a chicken breast to grill. Each gets started.
The saute cook empties a pre-portioned, par-cooked (i.e. previously cooked part of the way) baggy of linguini into already-boiling water; that will take maybe 2-3 minutes to finish cooking. Next, he grabs the appropriate amount of peppers, onions, tomatoes, and garlic from a refrigerated table where all the pre-chopped vegetables are stored, and tosses them in a saute pan on an already hot stove with a knob of butter. Those will take about 2 minutes to cook.
Meanwhile, the grill cook has pulled an already seasoned and butterflied chicken breast from the refrigerator and thrown it on a ripping hot grill — 2-3 minutes per side, and it’s done.
The saute cook pulls the finished pasta, tosses it in the pan with the now-cooked veggies, adds a ladle of already-prepared cream sauce and a shake of cajun spice blend, tosses the whole mess together to combine, coat the pasta and veggies with the cream sauce, and warm up the sauce.
Meanwhile, the grill cook takes the grilled chicken breast off the grill and puts it on a cutting board behind the saute chef. The saute chef finishes the pasta/veggies/cream-sauce, plates it, then quickly slices the chicken breasts and places the sliced chicken on top of the pasta.
Garnish with parsley and parmesan, and then it’s time for the line cooks to start bitching about why there’s no server ready and waiting to run the dish to the customer’s table. If done well, the whole process takes 7-8 minutes. Not counting the bitching, which is constant.
(And before someone who has also worked in restaurants jumps down my throat, yes, in a cajun chicken pasta dish, the cajun or blackened chicken is usually sauteed in butter in a separate pan from the veggies and pasta, not grilled. Deal with it. I started writing the example and then realized I need to include two stations in the example, so this imaginary restaurant grills the chicken for the cajun chicken pasta dish. You don’t have to eat there, so let it go.)
Prep work.
Suppose you go to a Chinese restaurant and order Shrimp fried rice. You need cooked rice, peeled and de-veined shrimp, chopped vegetables, soy sauce, and some beaten eggs. You do all the prep work during the day, and put all the prepped ingredients into separate containers, and wait. Just before the dinner rush starts, you put the wok on the fire so that it’s warm, but not too hot.
When the order finally comes in, you crank up the heat, add the ingredients, and have the order done in less than 10 minutes.
And, many dishes have the same basic ingredients. Suppose the Chinese restaurant also offers pork fried rice. The only different ingredient is the pork. And so on.
Italian restaurant will bag pasta portions ahead of time. These days, it would not surprise me if they have bagged portions in a sous vide, waiting for orders. Pull out a bag, open it, plate it.
The restaurant I worked at started prep at 10 am, we did not open until 5 pm. The food takes a long time to make but most of it is done beforehand.
Prep time. Most of the 8 (preferably) hours are done prepping. Service is a relatively small part of the day (preferably).
Source: Me. Am a chef.
The big difference between home cooking and restaurant cooking is that in home cooking the people wait for the food to be ready, in restaurant cooking the cooks are very skilled at making the food wait for the people.
They do most of the food preparation in the morning. Things like thawing ingredients, chopping vegetables, making dough, etc. Things that can cook for hours are started early, things like soups, sous vide meat, sauce, etc. Even potatoes and similar things are made in batches throughout the day so there can be a pot of hot potatoes or rice ready to be served at all times.
The kitchen staff also heats up all ovens and pans before the first customer comes inn, and they stay on all day. And pots of water are put to boil in case they are needed. This means that when the kitchen gets an order they can get straight on with cooking as everything is hot, all ingredients have been prepared, and all long cook time items are already done. It does not take more then 10 minutes to sear a steak and boil some vegetables then serve with potatoes and sauce.
When you see restaurants with many dishes these are often just variants of the same ingredients. For example a burger joint can have a huge menu but most of the items are just different variants of the same dish. Similar with pizza as it is the same dish with slightly different toppings. And most Chinese food is variants of rice and chop suey which are both made in batches waiting to be served as well as ingredients prepared well in advanced that just needs to be fried before serving. There are some restaurants that have a big menu with lots of different items on it, but you should avoid these as there is no efficient way to prepare for all dishes so the kitchen is usually not prepared to make half the menu items. Similarly any oddball item on a menu like salad at a pizza place is probably not going to be good. The best restaurants usually only have one or two items on the menu in each category.
Constantly cooking and prep cooking. Different items are always in different stages of cooking during lunch and dinner rush. Things like veggies take less than a minute in the microwave in steamer bags. Mashed potatoes and the like are kept hot and ready in big “steam” water baths. So nothing really takes more than 10 minutes from the stage it’s in to make it to your table, but many chain resteraunts have built in timers to space out the order just right: Apatizers, Salads, entrée. At a local kitchen they may not have this but the servers and kitchen work even better together to maintain a flow.
Prep cooking for a restaurant works because they are making a lot of the same things routinely. The home cook has to prep not only to the day but to the portions of a single meal or you waste a lot. Restaurants make a lot at once and if there is extra it just gets used first tomorrow. No waste. You want extra so you aren’t having to prep during the rush because you ran out. That is really bad.
There are a lot of other things too. Enough staff doing dividing up the tasks so multiple steps get done at once not just one person cooking entree and sides and getting drinks and setting the table. Workspace optimized for speed. Practice making the same dishes so it is routine. No looking at the recipe and figuring things out. Recipes optimized for speed and consistency. A professional kitchen is an assembly line for food.
They hvae prepped ingredients, skilled chefs, and efficient kitchen setup. It’s all about organization and experience.
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