Hi all,
I was always wondering how some restaurants make food. Recently for example I was to family small restaurant that had many different soups, meals, pasta etc and all came within 10 min or max 15.
How do they make so many different recipes quick?
– would it be possible to use some of their techniques so cooking at home is efficient and fast? (for example, for me it takes like 1 hour to make such soup)
Thank you!
In: 9052
Restaurants do a lot of prep work.
So a lot of things like stock, sauces etc are made in huge batches. Different Restaurants maintain those products differently between freezing, refrigerating, and keeping them at a low simmer.
Basically in most cases the parts of the food that take a long time to cook are done in advance, and they only have to wait for the other stuff to cook which sometimes is also partially cooked during prep.
The kitchen is always running, starting from the morning to after closing, even when the restaurant has not yet opened. There’s a lot of prep work that happens out of sight. The chefs do everything short of actually cooking most food in order to save time when orders come in. Long lead items like soup stocks get started in this time.
In general your meal isn’t made when you order it. Your meal is finished when you order it.
Pasta is par-cooked, or cooked partially, and finished when ordered and plated. For example your pasta takes 10 minutes in boiling water, the restaurant will cook 25 servings of pasta for 8 minutes and then dump into cold water and held. When your order comes in, the cook takes a serving of pasta and dumps it into a boiler, think a deep fryer but filled with water, finishes the last 2 minutes to get it cooked and hot and then in a bowl to sauce and on to your plate. Now your pasta order took 4 minutes instead of 15 to go from order to plated and ready.
Soups are prepared during the day in large batches, this is where “soup of the day” comes from.
Meats are cooked until rare and stored.
Sauces are prepared in advance. Veggies are cooked in large batches. Baked potatoes are made in advance.
*EDIT:* WOW. This really blew up.. Thank you to everyone for the awards and updoots.. I hope this was helpful.
I was a professional chef in haute cuisine for 10 years, so I actually have the answers. We have a credo: “mise en place.” This means everything in its place. The first part of the day is spent on prep, preparing your mise en place, all the ingredients you need. This means knife work (cutting ingredients), long fire items (something that cooks for a long time), sauces, dressings, garnishes, portioning meat and fish, etc. The prepped ingredients that will be used for service are brought to the station and organized in special chilled pans.
When an order is placed, a ticket with the order prints to the kitchen and is hung on the “expo” (expediting) station. Expo calls out what is on the ticket. “Order in” means something has been ordered, but don’t make it yet. “Fire” means start cooking. So expo will say “fire entree on table 42” and the chef knows to start making the dish.
Let’s say I’m making seared halibut filet with roasted sunchoke mash, miso vinaigrette, and fresh herbs. From 10am to 3pm, I am roasting the sunchokes, mashing them, adjusting seasoning, picking herbs, making the vinaigrette, slicing portions of halibut. From 3p to 5p, I set up my station.
Now, it’s dinner time and someone orders the halibut. I take a precut piece of fish from my station’s lowboy (fridge under counter), oil it and salt the flesh, throw it in a pan, throw the sunchoke mash in a pan to heat it up, plate and garnish everything, and pass the complete dish to the expo window, where I say “I need hands to table 42!” From the time expo said “Fire 42” to the time I said “Hands!” only 5 minutes have passed.
TLDR: Mise en place. Everything is prepared and organized so you are simply (using my halibut example) searing the fish, reheating/reseasoning the set, plate, and garnish.
A lot of it comes down to prep. With soup in restaurants, it isn’t usually cooked to order. It was prepared earlier and kept warm. But there are plenty of techniques that can transfer to a home kitchen. To start, come up with a menu for your week, purchase the required ingredients, prepare all of the food and then put it in the fridge. Then its just a matter of getting the stuff out when you want to cook it. You can also just cook everything in one day and refrigerate the meals.
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Lots of the replies I’ve read so far seem to focus on finer dining places – I can totally imagine how organized these places are where they have all day to prepare for dinner service.
OP’s question – and I’m interested in this too – seems to relate more to casual all day dining places where they have a million things on the menu and are open all day so there’s no prep time?
Prep, prep, prep. Its all about preparation.
Your soup: prepared, cooked, ready in a pot (or to be microwaved!), With garnishes ready. Four minutes, tops.
Your pastas: par cooked, ready to be finished off and tossed in the pre-cooked sauce, and topped with parmesan and parsley. Five mins max.
Your dips: out of a bucket (either ordered in or pre-made), into a dipping cup, microwaved if needed and flatbreads or corn chips out of a packet onto them. 60s max
Your nachos: nuked corn chips, cheese, and toppings scooped out of a buckets. 2 mins or they’re free. Maybe not.
Your salads: pre mixed, fresh from my bucket, dressed, and to your plate. 30s if you gotta make them pretty.
Your sides: fryers going continuously, 4 mins for fresh fries.
Your meats on the grill continuously; 10m max for a steak ruined (well done) if they’re not already cooked blue ready to be finished.
Your burgers: ingredients ready on an assembly, ready for the meat off the grill, hey you’re lucky if the patty is grilled fresh rather than just cooked halfway and finished 2 minutes each side while the bacon and egg and bun cooks.
Your vegetables? Out of a steamer or bain marie, maybe if you’re in a fancy place, a pan with their own vegetable station; even then they’re all still blanched and pre-cooked and just finished off to order; 10m max to finish roast veggies on a tray, about the same time it takes to reheat your sliced roast in stock on the pan and slop over your choice of premade gravy from the Bain marie too.
Your apple pie a la mode? Nuked, then finished in the oven to crisp. If we’re paying attention we’ll put the ice cream on after nuking it. Your sundaes? Pre-made, and prettied up to serve. Fresh from the freezer.
Apart from prep, there is one other important ingredient.
It requires everyone knowing their place, and where orders are at and when things are coming out. That’s the chef’s main job during service – organising the team and making sure they communicate so they’re on the same page. Chef, after all, means chief.
We have a saying: hard prep, easy service. Nothing is truer. If everything is in order – including the “foreseeable unforeseens” such as substitutions, rushes, spoilages and spillages etc, then it’s easier to manage. If you’re not prepared, it is chaos, and that’s when you notice things are wrong. A well prepared chef can run a 120 cover, 2 hour a la carte service by themselves and it would look smooth as anything from beyond the pass. A poorly prepared brigade couldn’t cover 12 without it looking like Fawlty Towers.
Pareto principle also works here: 80 percent of the work belongs to 20 percent of the meals. Work out which ones these are, then find a way to make them easier. My bug bear when running a kitchen by myself was burgers; even with a good set up, they took time as there were a heap of things going on the grill and requiring slicing or reassembling from the salad. A simple switch to two thinner patties that cooked in a quarter the time, par cooked and steam held if we knew were busy, using a simpler but fancy salad leaf, and a ladle of melted cheese, bacon and onion sauce made these burgers both easier to assemble and gave them a point of difference (we called them Sloppy Jims). People would order the sauce on its own as a dip or to coat their fries too, which meant we turned 20c of sauce into $5 of profit. Time savings and value adding all in one!
The key is knowing what you can and cannot do in advance, and organising what you cannot so it is done efficiently and well. Hard prep, easy service. Good chef, good communication.
Former line cook here. Worked at a family-style cafe and a chain seafood place for years.
It’s all about the prep work. That’s the time-consuming part. And a whole lot of that can be accomplished by the kitchen crew in the hours before the restaurant opens. A lot of the food is already ready before you get there.
* veggies chopped and portioned out
* biscuit dough mixed, bread parbaked, pancake batter mixed and in a giant bowl in the fridge. Frequently served sides like cheddar biscuits or fries are cooked in large batches and kept hot under lights or similar.
* potatoes for hashbrowns pre-cooked, peeled, and cut. All they need is a few minutes on the griddle to brown.
* Meats portioned and breaded as applicable, kept in the big fridge, ready to go straight on the grill, chain-broiler, deep fryer, etc. It only takes like 3 minutes to run a premade batch of shrimp scampi through the chain broiler or slap a steak on the grill (just a couple minutes a side if you want it med-rare). Couple minutes in the steamer for crab legs… you get the idea.
* A lot of sauces and things can be made ahead of time (or even ordered from the chain distributor and kept frozen until day-of).
* Soup, chili, etc can be made as a huge batch and kept hot in a steam table.
* Pasta can be parboiled and dropped in a basket into boiling water for the last minute of cooking before they throw on the sauce and send it out.
*Some* of that is possible at home, but not to the same extent.
* You can practice [*mise-en-place*](https://food.unl.edu/article/use-mise-en-place-make-meal-preparation-easier) in your own kitchen – just run through the recipe in your head before you start, then get out all the ingredients, measuring tools, and utensils you’re going to need, have everything where you can reach it efficiently… everything in its place before you start.
* You can do meal-prep. A lot of people think that’s just for fitness/diet nuts, but if you have a system, you can do a lot of the same kind of parcooking and then refrigerate/freeze your meals. Caution: You really have to know your way around [food safety](https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and-preparation/food-safety-basics/how-temperatures-affect-food) if you’re going to do a lot of reheating – do it wrong and you can expose yourself/your family to a high risk of foodborne illness.
I work in a sports bar/restaurant as a bar manager. Our kitchen prep team arrives at 8am for an 11am open. We make about 25 different dips and sauces anyway from 4 liters to 20 liters at a time, anywhere from once to 3 times per week. Soup is made typically 2-3 times per week. meat and veggies are prepped daily. We get ingredient deliveries 4 days per week.
Since our place has been open for over a decade we are pretty good at estimating our needs for the day, week, and month. As well as that, we’re constantly able to adjust base on “par” levels (we should have x number of steaks on Wednesday, or need to order y number for Friday).
With all that we’re able to assemble things quickly when needed.
When you MAKE a burger, you have to prepare the meat, light the BBQ, cut the veggies, get out all the sauces, etc. and it might take you an hour.
When you ORDER a burger, the grill is lit, the veggies are sliced, and everything is right at hand for us as 50 minutes of work has already been done, we only need the last 10 minutes to get cooked and assembled. (Fast food gets even quicker because they often already have it cooked, meaning just the assembly is needed.)
I will go on to say that most ingredients get used in several different meals as well, and if they don’t the menu item is likely to be changed. So the same chicken pieces that are already cooked and tossed into pasta sauce, can be added to stir fry, or put on pizza.
Can you do this at home? Absolutely! But you’re going to find that YOU don’t go through enough stuff to make it as worth while. A few of the easier things to prep are stocks and sauces. So you could make 10 meals worth of pasta sauce and freeze it in different portion sizes and cook as needed. You could make a large batch of soup stock, freeze some of it, and add things to it for different soups that would each last a week. Shop sales at your grocery store for meats, and use one for a whole week worth of different meals.
One thing I’ll often do is triple/quadruple a batch of something, and freeze 2-3 portions of it for later use, then I can make fresh Lasagna twice per year, and use it every other month without spending a whole day each time I want it.
This CAN require a lot of effort and investment, but I find cooking to be relaxing and rewarding so, it’s typically fine with me.
Look up ‘meal prep’ on youtube and you can get A LOT of great ideas.
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