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
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.
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