Going with the Flow

At my externship site the whole kitchen ran like clock work most of the time. Everyone depended on everyone else and a common goal was the key to service. The flow of service is pretty simple the breakfast crew will batch cook a variety of breakfast favorites for a buffet style breakfast. We also have an ala cart breakfast offered for those who want an omelet or any other typical breakfast fair. Once breakfast is over the crew begin to prep for the lunch buffet. Mid morning a few cooks show up to help with the lunch buffet. Once that prep is done many of the cooks will start on dinner prep while a few from the morning shift with fire and pan up all the food for the lunch buffet. A few more cooks will show but before the lunch buffet goes out but their primary focus is on making sure dinner prep is being done and will be done in time. Dinner service opens at five o’clock sharp. We have an expeditor on the line that calls out orders and makes up plates before handing them over to the other expeditor who is more in charge of final presentation and food runners and servers. As stated before we do a lot of batch cooking so the line expeditor is on the hot line with most of the vegetables, starches and sauce offered that night and he is calling for the protein which either comes from the grill or sauté station. Serve run smoothly most nights but the alkyls tendent of batch cooking is the fire guy in the back batch cooking the starches and vegetable and some proteins. If anything goes wrong with his process the whole line get messed up and backed up wait on his food. The fire guy is one of the least labor intensive jobs during service but has the most responsibility. As you can see the whole kitchen run together but in different ways and if one man goes down the whole team goes down. It is so important for all of us to of been on the same page through service no matter what happened.