How do kitchens work

Running a cloud kitchen, you may be more inclined to hire on-demand staff to control margins. While this can save on your wage bill, it comes with some caveats. Of course, you can try to boost morale and motivate staff in other ways, but it may be more difficult to build a brand culture if you are not attracting the top foodservice talent. Hiring on-demand staff also carries risks in terms of food safety and consistency, both vital to successful food businesses. Can you be sure these workers have adequate training?

If you want to invest in training, it makes more sense to hire permanent staff members. There is a trade-off here that you will have to work on to try to figure out the best balance between on-demand workers and permanent staff. The high fees can also eat into your margins and you have little control over last-mile delivery which can affect the quality of the food and put your reputation at risk. One way to counter this is to offer your own delivery service, but this comes with higher marketing costs and logistical complications.

It may make sense for large shared kitchens where multiple brands can share the burden. You are competing exclusively in a crowded online marketplace.

The good news is, if your product is good enough, it should rise to the top thanks to social proof like good reviews and word-of-mouth referrals. But you may find yourself having to pay for visibility on these platforms.

That is, after all, how they make their money. With a delivery-only brand, your reputation relies on the food getting to the customer in perfect condition. Getting this right is the only way to get repeat orders. There are significant challenges in keeping the product at proper temperatures so it arrives as intended to the customer. Not just at the right temperature for them to best enjoy it but also to ensure it is safe to eat.

This means testing out different types of packaging and potentially investing in containers that are more expensive and harder to source. This is a cost that can quickly add up when you are pumping out a high volume of orders, but it is a vital consideration. Soggy, luke warm food will guarantee failure. And one food-borne illness or outbreak and your brand is toast.

Food production is largely regulated at the local level by your health department. Since cloud kitchens are so new, regulators may be unfamiliar with the concept. They may start hitting you with unexpected requirements, or start treating you like a full-service restaurant. Agents will want to see that food is being safely stored, produced, packaged and delivered, which may require the production of HACCP and other production plans for review.

Also, having multiple tenants producing under one roof increases complexity of who is licensed to produce and distribute food. You must be prepared to go the extra mile in showing them that your operation is safe and responsible. Cloud kitchens started popping up in the early s in response to increased demand for high-quality meal delivery and rising rents in city center locations.

Green Summit Group opened one of the first cloud kitchens in New York City in , and have grown out to four locations across two cities. Many more start-ups have followed suit and as we enter a new decade, cloud kitchens are becoming big business, with venture capital pouring into start-ups specifically aiming to take advantage of this new market.

The trend is driven by the coming of age of millennials with disposable income demanding digital, mobile-friendly solutions. And this will only get more pronounced as the next generation, who have grown-up with the internet and smartphones, enters the marketplace sorry boomers. Looking further forward, advances in kitchen automation, drone delivery, and the continued growth of the gig economy look to give cloud kitchens more of an advantage by lowering their costs even further.

The only restriction on their location is that they must be within a realistic delivery distance of enough hungry customers. Companies like Kitchen United are focussing on light industrial areas outside dense urban centers but near enough to satisfy the demand of residential areas.

Large warehouses at low rents are the perfect venues to house expansive shared kitchens, if you have the capital to outfit them. Using demand data collected from delivery apps, they are able to determine the best locations to serve particular neighborhoods.

With 91 million monthly users, Uber Eats is currently the most popular food delivery app. Consumers are increasingly willing to pay a significant amount for the convenience of having their food delivered. While other orders are being processed, the station chefs are notified of how many minutes they have to prepare the main meal. The head chef may yell out "8 minutes away on that pork chop".

This is to remind the butcher chef how much time he has till the order is needed. Using this system of prioritization they handle all meals on the order, from starters to desserts, while skipping from one customer's order to another.

Robert Irvine, a renowned chef credits the chefs' commitment to the system as the most important factor in the kitchen. That's the biggest factor in a kitchen," he explains. Once customers leave, the waiter clears the table and brings all the dirty dishes to the kitchen. The dish washing staff takes over from here.

The first step is emptying of the leftovers. Some restaurants sort this into greens and meats for purposes of feeding animals, while others dump it all together.

The plates are then placed in the dish washing station of kitchen. Most restaurants have at least two or three washers. One does the washing, another the wringing, and the third does the stacking. This way, chefs always have clean plates to serve the meals. To clean up dirty dishes, you can use undermout kitchen sinks. This is a continuous activity.

The kitchen porters are always on their toes removing all the chopping, filled up leftovers, and any messes that occur. Cleaning of the floors is also done after every few hours to keep the place neat. In conclusion, a restaurant's kitchen is not only its busiest section but also one with the most complex of operations. For efficiency in the kitchen, there must be a well-designed management system, and self-discipline from each individual staff member. Your email address will not be published.

Skip to content The kitchen is the engine that runs the entire restaurant. Pre-prepared meals 2. Ordered meals 3. You can pick up the large equipment and even restaurant dishes , serving utensils, and other small items for pennies on the dollar. You might also consider the leasing restaurant equipment , such as ice makers. Before you open for business, make a plan for keeping the kitchen clean. You'll need daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly kitchen cleaning lists that outline everything from wiping down prep stations to cleaning grease traps.

Once you're open, keep a checklist handy so that those daily jobs get done. The most important part of any restaurant kitchen is the staff that works in it. While many jobs in a restaurant kitchen are entry-level positions, such as dishwasher or prep cook, others require years of experience. When hiring restaurant cooks, chefs, and managers , look for experienced people who can work as part of a team. Badly run restaurants suffer a lot of turnover, so you should do everything you can to make your restaurant staff feel appreciated.

Model the behavior you want to see. Offer bonuses for stellar customer service. Most of the prepped food was stored in fridges under the line, all portioned out and ready to go. The line was divided into about six stations, including appetizers, salads, someone running the griddle and the french fry fryer, someone running the forno oven, and someone doing desserts. Each station would be set up for the dishes that the person working at that station would need to make. The appetizer station, for instance, had access to a salamander, a microwave, and all of the sauces and the fridge with all of the components facing in one direction, and a fryer, a stove, and all of the dishes in the other direction.

That way, the appie person could make all of the appies on the menu which was maybe seven or eight things without walking more than a couple of steps. Similarly, the salads station had a huge case full of romaine lettuce, a scale, all of the dressings, a drawer full of mixed greens, and a fridge containing things like avocados, or the corn and bean mix for the tex mex salad, all within arm's reach.

New people, when they were first being trained on a station, would take a list of the recipes home overnight and try their best to memorize them, then on their first shift they would be trained, and then on their next couple of shifts they would be monitored by someone to make sure they were getting all of the ingredients into a dish.

Even though the line was divided into stations, many people were trained on more than one, if not all, stations. When it got really busy, at lunchtime or on Friday or Saturday evenings, there would be maybe ten people on the line, and they would double up on certain stations that were more likely to be busy, such as salads or appetizers.

If people became overwhelmed they would just yell out that they needed help, and someone else would come from another slower station to help out for a few minutes until it was back under control.

The orders were entered by the waitstaff into a computer in such a way that, ideally, the orders would be split up and sent to the appropriate printers, which were distributed along the line I think there were three or four - for example, if someone order a caesar salad, some chicken tenders, a steak, and a piece of cake, the caesar order would go to the printer closest to the salad guy, the steak order would go to the forno guy, and so on.

Sometimes if someone ordered a steak and a salad, both orders would go to the forno guy, and he would call out to the salad guy that he needs a side salad. I'm not sure exactly how the bills were split up by the staff or the computer, but I know that I would never get an order for a steak or a dessert while I was working at the appetizer or salad end. Each item on the menu was assigned a bill time, which ranged between three minutes for a side salad to about ten minutes for something like a steak.

If a bill came through with two dishes with very different bill times, like a steak and a salad, the salad would be delayed until the steak was almost ready so that all the dishes for a table would come out at roughly the same time. Everyone knew all of the bill times for the dishes they were trained on, and the importance of getting things into the pass-through under the bill time was repeatedly hammered into us.

On busy nights, when some of the bills would take twenty minutes to put together, we would get a stern talking to. Typically the chef, who obviously knows everything about all the recipes, would hover around the pass-through and monitor the quality of the food before it went out to the customers. Dishes that got through to the customer even though they were raw, or that were so over the bill time that the customer refused to pay, were called "lost sale-kitchens" because they were the kitchen's fault.

Obviously, if someone or something was causing a lot of lost sale kitchens, that would be worked out ASAP. Usually we didn't have more than one or none on any given night. Send at AM on July 21, [ 2 favorites ]. To answer Brockles's question, our restaurant kept detailed records of the amounts of everything that we sold, organized by day of the week and time of the day usually a lunch vs.

This chart was used as the basis for ordering more food, and as the basis for determining how much food would be prepped for any given day. Fridays and Saturdays would always be bigger days, so more food was prepared accordingly on those days; this was never too difficult because a typical Friday would be pretty much the same as any other Friday, even though the difference between Monday afternoon and Friday evening would be huge.

Not that much was actually cooked during the prep stages, aside from sauces, pasta, dessert cakes, and other things like that that would easily last a whole day. If prepped food was left over at the end of the day, it was usually kept, because all of the perishable food was stored on the line in fridges.

The food would be arranged the next morning so that any leftovers from the previous day would be used first. I don't think anything was kept for more than about thirty-six hours. Sometimes we would run out of something. If it was something that needed prepping, like a sauce, or something that needed portioning, like tenders, someone would go into the back and prep it while someone else looked after their station on the line.

If the prep depended on an ingredient that we were actually out of, our options were to either tell the customer that we were out of the thing, or if we were desperate to run down to Safeway and get some more of whatever we were missing.

This obviously didn't happen very often. Send at AM on July 21, [ 1 favorite ]. Best answer: Kitchen Confidential and Heat are great reading recommendations. Kitchen Confidential was written to answer your very question from the perspective of a veteran chef. Heat gives you the novice's perspective on a professional kitchen.

The first is an account of Ruhlman's time at the Culinary Institute of America, the second profiles two different chefs whom Ruhlman spent time observing Michael Symon and Thomas Keller.