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.)
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