i know this sounds like a stupid question but how do cook to order restaurants work? how often do they have to throw away food? and do they keep the leftovers for the next day(/s?)
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Some things I haven’t seen emphasized yet:
A restaurant’s staff is split into “back of house” and “front of house.” “Front of house” is the servers, bartenders, hosts, all the people the customer sees. Back of house (BOH) is everybody else. Back of house is responsible for ordering, receiving, preparing, and cooking the food, and cleaning the facilities. The work that starts when your order is put in is only a small part of what the BOH does.
BOH has a philosophy called “mise en place” — “everything in its place”. The goal is for as much work as possible to be done before your order is placed, so that when the kitchen receives the ticket, no complex ingredients need to be made from scratch, no one is unsure of how to cook something or what their role is, and every element of the dish is ready to be used. This philosophy extends to the service (the shift) as a whole: a good kitchen knows before the front doors open how many orders of every dish they’ve prepped for. Nearly every cook-to-order restaurant has two shifts of cooks/chefs per service, a prep shift and a line shift. The cooks on the prep shift make complex and time-consuming ingredients like stocks and sauces, and do labor-intensive work like peeling and chopping vegetables, butchering, and washing and picking produce, before the restaurant opens for service. The chefs on the line line cook and assemble those prepped ingredients to order while the restaurant’s open. In many restaurants the hours spent on prep is double the hours spent on the line, meaning 70% of the labor behind your food is done before you sit down. (Of course, for cheap chain restaurants where “service” just consists of reheating frozen food, that number is more like 95%.) As bad-ass as line cooks are when it comes to multitasking and working under pressure, it can be really incredible just to watch the manual dexterity and speed that prep cooks develop. These guys and ladies can get work done in five hours that would take anyone else ten. The products of their labor that can be stored go into cold storage labeled and dated, and the stuff that’s needed for that night’s service goes to the line.
Of course, none of this quite answers the question about how restaurants know how much food to order and whether any is wasted. The BOH also has managers and staff that plan menus, handle ordering and receive deliveries. Ordering just the right amount of a huge variety of products with varying shelf lives, from an array of purveyors with different operating schedules and order minimums, and training and scheduling cooks to process these items as they come in. You might have to order Monday’s fish order on Friday afternoon, for example, requiring you to predict how much halibut you’ll need after three busy days. And if you order too much, you definitely won’t be able to get rid of it by Wednesday, since Monday and Tuesday will probably be your slowest days. In most restaurants, there’s at most one or two BOH managers, and they’re usually also working either line or prep, so it’s a really challenging role. It’s easy to look at a clock on Friday as you’re scrambling to get ready for the busiest night of the week, and realize you’ve missed the cut-off for that fish delivery. Luckily it’s possible to find a weekly rhythm, especially when the core menu isn’t changing quickly. You know about how much of everything you should order on a given day, and your experience the same day last week having to throw out (or, more likely, serving to staff) or running out of an item informs how you might change your order this week.
Since the ideal for the restaurant is for the prep cooks to get every ingredient exactly ready enough to cook, but kept refrigerated, fresh, and within reach until needed, it’s not such a big deal for many components of a dish to be kept for the next day. Food does get tossed (or, more likely, served to staff) when it reaches the end of its life, whether that’s an hour, a day, or a month, depending on what it is, but the close of service isn’t a death-knell for every food item in the restaurant. (Yes, you’re eating “leftovers.”)
The real BOH heroes, though, are the cleaning crew. Shoutout to cleaning staff and porters.
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