What happens in a restaurant
Until recently, most of what I knew about restaurants came from watching Ratatouille, which actually does a decent job of explaining the various positions and stations that make up the kitchen. It’s been fascinating to learn how the whole machine functions, from taking an order to getting dishes out at the right time. My experience is limited since I only have my single point of reference, but I’m going to walk through how things work at my restaurant. I believe what I’ve seen holds true for many others.
The kitchen is made up of line cooks and porters (who take care of dishwashing, trash, and some prep), who are all managed by the chef de cuisine and a few sous chefs (think of them as deputies or team managers). There’s also a pastry chef and her assistant, who are in a bit of a bubble separate from us in the kitchen. On the front-of-house side of things, there’s a general manager who also usually works as the host, a beverages director, a bartender, and a bunch of servers. All of us report to the owner, who’s been there every minute I’ve been in the restaurant, and always busy, running food to tables during service or on Zoom meetings during the day while simultaneously slicing bell peppers paper-thin. I’m sure not all restaurant owners are as involved as she is.
For cooks, there are prep shifts, which last morning until evening, and service shifts, which go from the afternoon into the night. Mostly I’ve been a prep cook, which is the more entry-level position. We chop and peel and parbake and put all the prepped ingredients into the walk-in fridge clustered by the dish they’re for. Regardless of position, at 4:15 we stop whatever we’re doing and sit down for family meal. The meal is usually something simple, like BBQ tofu or spaghetti with chickpeas, but always vegan and generally pretty good. During the meal, the general manager might brief us on the guests with reservations (So-and-so is a regular and — watch out — a voluble talker, there are three tables with birthdays), any changes to the menu, or any other news about the restaurant. At 4:45, we all go on break, but we have to be back by 5:15 for those working service to set up their station. Each of those stations (Hot 1 or 2, garde manger or just "Cold", etc.) is responsible for making one or two dishes. Setting it up ("mise en place") means getting all your ingredients and tools out and easily accessible. Each station then produces one full dish and several people taste it to make sure it’s right. By 5:30, guests begin to arrive and everyone should be ready to go.
After a server takes a meal order, they go to the back and enter it into the POS (point-of-sale) system. A ticket is generated with all the items ordered by the table. It creates several carbon copies of the order, and these copies are passed out to some of the stations in the kitchen. Someone called an “expeditor” then manages the flow of the meal for all the tables. When servers go out to check on their tables, they’re also checking how far through each course the diners are. They might report back that the diners are “3/4” through or have reached “last bite,” and the expeditor uses that information to call out, “Sam, fire table 3,” so Sam starts making his dish and it’ll be ready at just the right moment after the previous one. The server or a runner clears the dishes from the guests’ table and the server lays out the appropriate silverware for the next course, which is called “marking.” Because one person has a steak knife, another has a spoon etc, then when a runner goes out with the food, they know where to put each dish. At my restaurant, the runners are mostly cooks, so while we aren’t as practiced in talking to guests, we might be able to tell you more about how a dish is made.
And that’s it! I’ve been leaving around 10pm so I haven’t even had to stick around to clean up the whole kitchen. We clean up our own stations and take all ingredients back down to the walk-in. Some cooks are scheduled to stay until the end, as does the chef de cuisine. The porter is always among the last ones out.
A brief glossary of kitchen talk
During service, most kitchen conversation comes in bursts of short to-the-point utterances
Corner / behind / below / coming through - Always announce where you are if you are passing by people (or the possibility of people) who can’t see you, to avoid collisions
Sharp - A descriptor sometimes attached to the above, to indicate that you are coming through with a knife
Hot - Same as “sharp” but with something hot
Reaching - You need to reach across someone
Fire (an order) - start preparing it
Walked - A dish has already been sent out to the guest