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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Worked New York City restaurants for a decade.
Some restaurants (especially in larger restaurant groups) use tracking software. One onion on average weighs 375 grams. When you peel it and cut the ends off, you have 232 grams (the numbers here are made up). Your recipe for uh… French Onion Soup uses 5kg of onions. You know how much 1 kg of onions cost (also plugged into the same software), so now you know how much this recipe costs to make WITHOUT profit. How much profit do you need on this one recipe to cover other costs? Check everything else in the software – how much does your staff cost (25% of your weekly gross?), how much does your monthly rent cost (10% of your monthly?), etc. So many more factors. Charge the appropriate amount so that you don’t go broke.
Almost every restaurant these days uses a Point of Sale System (Toast, Breadcrumb, Clover, Square, etc). Even without paying extra money, they at the very least can tell you how many of each item is ordered on a daily/weekly basis. So you know you sell 40 portions of French Onion Soup a day. So buy enough to prep that many portions, give or take a few extra, and you should be ok! Soup, for instance, can be cooled and reheated the next day safely. Steaks may have been taken out to come to room temperature, but if they haven’t been ordered by a customer, they can be safely cooled again for use the next day… but generally, you only ordered as much as you needed for the day so you should only have so many left over at the end of the day.
There’s all sorts of weird fuckery to get it right, though. Is it supposed to rain this week? Do you have outdoor seating? You don’t, but the guy next door does and it’s supposed to be 75 degrees and sunny all week? Is it the summer and everyone with money went to the Hamptons? Is it the Puerto Rican Day Parade, and you’re on the parade route? This can all be done without software, but then experience comes into play a lot more.
Some restaurants I worked liked to pretty much empty the walk-in every single day – a perfect day is when you pretty much have nothing left, and you start it all over the next day. But the reality of kitchens is such that it’d be pretty hard to do that every day – cooks would hide an extra quart of vinaigrette in the back corner of their low-boy fridge, or they have some picked herbs stored somewhere. There’s a great story by Andrew Carmellini (who runs some very well regarded restaurants) working at Lespinasse, the fanciest of the fanciest French restaurants at the time. His legendary chef, Gray Kunz, demanded that EVERY item on the garde manger station (cold apps, salads, etc) be fresh daily. Lespinasse was in a hotel, and there was a commissary kitchen on like the 19th floor. At the end of the night, when people weren’t looking, he would sneak up there and store some prepared items (referred to as mise-en-place) so that he wouldn’t start from scratch the next day. Otherwise, he and his station partner would be responsible for 117 items of mise of varying complexities (from finely minced shallots to vinaigrettes with cooked components in them).
I love talking about this stuff, so feel free to respond with further questions, and I am sure others can (and will chime in) as well.
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