High volume kitchens
June 24, 2025 6:58 PM Subscribe
If you want to read something that is more union friendly but covers the same territory, this profile of the egg line at the Flamingo is awesome.
posted by 99_ at 8:19 PM on June 24 [13 favorites]
posted by 99_ at 8:19 PM on June 24 [13 favorites]
I love cooking so much but I could never do that sort of work. I'd burn out so fast.
posted by drewbage1847 at 8:36 PM on June 24 [3 favorites]
posted by drewbage1847 at 8:36 PM on June 24 [3 favorites]
it would nearly be criminal not to mention the nigh-compulsion Sikhism seems to have with feeding LOTS of people. While generally suspect of religion, I consider the langar one of the most amazing human systems out there- they can produce some of the most amazing high-volume food out there. I mean, this is wild.
posted by furnace.heart at 8:36 PM on June 24 [26 favorites]
posted by furnace.heart at 8:36 PM on June 24 [26 favorites]
Here was a FPP on the Waffle House's plate-marking system for high volume service.
(Here is my comment reproduced from that thread, after many people were baffled by the Waffle House system, or claimed they could come up with a better one, or asked Why don't they just do it my way?, or otherwise disbelieved the cooks and service workers in the thread:
I just want those in this thread, whose misapprehensions of these logistics techniques have been corrected by experienced professionals, to take these lessons and apply them to the next time y'all see a complex system that you don't immediately understand, and you're tempted to dismiss it as nonsense or 'fix' it with fast, easy suggestions. Please allow yourself to learn from what traditions came before you showed up. You have so much to learn, and that's not an insult, it's a benefit.)
posted by panhopticon at 9:05 PM on June 24 [23 favorites]
(Here is my comment reproduced from that thread, after many people were baffled by the Waffle House system, or claimed they could come up with a better one, or asked Why don't they just do it my way?, or otherwise disbelieved the cooks and service workers in the thread:
I just want those in this thread, whose misapprehensions of these logistics techniques have been corrected by experienced professionals, to take these lessons and apply them to the next time y'all see a complex system that you don't immediately understand, and you're tempted to dismiss it as nonsense or 'fix' it with fast, easy suggestions. Please allow yourself to learn from what traditions came before you showed up. You have so much to learn, and that's not an insult, it's a benefit.)
posted by panhopticon at 9:05 PM on June 24 [23 favorites]
p.s. Thank you Lemkin for this post!
posted by panhopticon at 9:07 PM on June 24 [3 favorites]
posted by panhopticon at 9:07 PM on June 24 [3 favorites]
I think this is the Waffle House post you're referring to If the customer wants wheat toast, we simply flip the jelly pack over
posted by drewbage1847 at 10:52 PM on June 24 [7 favorites]
posted by drewbage1847 at 10:52 PM on June 24 [7 favorites]
I was a chef at busy restaurant kitchens for about 10 years (Not as high volume as the one in the article), and I loved it.
posted by growabrain at 1:09 AM on June 25 [3 favorites]
posted by growabrain at 1:09 AM on June 25 [3 favorites]
That second link is on point - it's engineering of people's well-being with ergonomics, lighting, waste management.
I loved working assembly-line style in a 4-person food-truck and a 100 people in line outside. You get in the zone, time flies and you don't even notice when your shift is over. Everything is gritty, immediate and urgent. Conflicts dissipate fast and thoughts don't linger.
posted by mit5urugi at 1:40 AM on June 25 [8 favorites]
I loved working assembly-line style in a 4-person food-truck and a 100 people in line outside. You get in the zone, time flies and you don't even notice when your shift is over. Everything is gritty, immediate and urgent. Conflicts dissipate fast and thoughts don't linger.
posted by mit5urugi at 1:40 AM on June 25 [8 favorites]
Yes! Every time someone has my home cooking or coffee roasting or whatever dozen projects I’m tinkering at and they say “You should start a restaurant” I say “I can make a meal that’s amazing, but there is a huge difference between home cook and restaurant chef/cook, to grind out 10s of 1000s of meals people actually want to eat.” The home cook can throw it away or change the plan. The restaurant has to nail “I would eat it” as the minimum every time, or do it again quickly. “…That difference is called professional.” Kudos to all of them no matter the size of their patronage or staff, medium they do their skill in, or symbols to support their name.
posted by rubatan at 2:38 AM on June 25 [7 favorites]
posted by rubatan at 2:38 AM on June 25 [7 favorites]
One of the things I have always found interesting about cruise ships is that for meals in the main dining rooms, the reason they are served so quickly is that basically nothing is made to order - not that it isn't fresh, just that the cooks don't give a shit who ordered it or when. The cooks make and plate the dishes on the menu continuously, and the waiters just grab the dishes that they need. The kitchen staff can adjust how much of any given fish they need as service continues but mostly they don't because mostly the proportion of steaks to salmons to vegetarian pastas is the same from cruise to cruise.
posted by jacquilynne at 3:37 AM on June 25 [2 favorites]
posted by jacquilynne at 3:37 AM on June 25 [2 favorites]
furnace.heart: "it would nearly be criminal not to mention the nigh-compulsion Sikhism seems to have with feeding LOTS of people."
and now I'm *really* hungry. ("we can never run out of dal" *swoon*)
posted by chavenet at 3:58 AM on June 25 [1 favorite]
and now I'm *really* hungry. ("we can never run out of dal" *swoon*)
posted by chavenet at 3:58 AM on June 25 [1 favorite]
I shared this a few years ago, and am still amazed:
The Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab, India, feeds 100,000 Sikh worshipers and visitors for free every day - and up to 200,000 on holy days. Here's how.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 4:11 AM on June 25 [8 favorites]
The Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab, India, feeds 100,000 Sikh worshipers and visitors for free every day - and up to 200,000 on holy days. Here's how.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 4:11 AM on June 25 [8 favorites]
they say “You should start a restaurant”
You could say, truthfully, “But then it would be years before I had the time to share a meal with you again.”
Such appreciation is like encouraging the local go-kart champion to become an F1 driver. From the heart, no doubt, but a childlike failure to understand the entirely different skill sets involved.
posted by Lemkin at 5:13 AM on June 25 [4 favorites]
You could say, truthfully, “But then it would be years before I had the time to share a meal with you again.”
Such appreciation is like encouraging the local go-kart champion to become an F1 driver. From the heart, no doubt, but a childlike failure to understand the entirely different skill sets involved.
posted by Lemkin at 5:13 AM on June 25 [4 favorites]
I had just a few weeks on the line of a very busy independant pizza kitchen, omg, great pizza and I did not have pizza for several years, but wanting to be locked into this for decades? Never been so happy to be let go. Have had to hold my breath when someone goes on about opening a cute small restaurant.
Do want to volunteer for a day at a sikh food temple but will probably not get to India.
posted by sammyo at 5:19 AM on June 25 [1 favorite]
Do want to volunteer for a day at a sikh food temple but will probably not get to India.
posted by sammyo at 5:19 AM on June 25 [1 favorite]
Do want to volunteer for a day at a sikh food temple but will probably not get to India.
No need to travel to India - there are at least 74 gurdwaras in the United States.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 5:57 AM on June 25 [3 favorites]
No need to travel to India - there are at least 74 gurdwaras in the United States.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 5:57 AM on June 25 [3 favorites]
My first job as a teenager was in fast food, and I worked fast food for several summers. I remember being surprised by how pleased my managers were with me, because it's fast food, just about everybody's entry-level job.
But it didn't take me long to figure out that they valued me because I could keep so many orders in my head at one time, and work on filling a bunch of orders at once. This was a skill most of my co-workers didn't have, either because they didn't have the capacity or because no one had taken the time to teach them.
I really loved working rushes. As people have said about busy kitchen work, the time flies by, and there's a sense of satisfaction in staying on top of that constant busy flow of orders coming in and orders going out.
(I also really liked opening at 5 a.m. and working the breakfast shift, when it was really slow, the menu was limited and easy so the cooks couldn't cause a big bottleneck, and most of the customers were congenial regulars.)
Even now, 40 years later, when I get bad service at a fast food restaurant, I can't help but see what it is the people are doing wrong. My worst-ever fast food experience, many years ago now, was when the person working the counter could only do one thing at a time, meaning that she would wait until she'd filled one order before even taking the next order. She spent quite a lot of time standing there waiting for the cooks to send her order down the little chute. This was about the only time I've ever spoken up. "You know," I said. "You could take the next order while you're waiting for the sandwiches for this one." (and only then fetching the fries and drinks.) I even spoke to the manager about it, and got only hostility in return.
There was some reason we couldn't just leave, which is clearly what we should have done. But it was a fascinating train wreck to watch.
I don't mean to denigrate people who haven't gotten decent training, or whose brains work differently so that juggling multiple tasks at once just isn't their thing. The fact that some people have a skill doesn't mean people who don't have that skill are deficient. But I do hope they all found their way to more suitable work.
I couldn't do the egg-cooking job, though. Not only would my yolk-breakage exceed tolerances by orders of magnitude, but keeping track of even a fraction of that many orders with such tight time frames, where a few seconds can turn an egg from just right to too hard, would be far, far beyond me.
posted by Well I never at 5:57 AM on June 25 [5 favorites]
But it didn't take me long to figure out that they valued me because I could keep so many orders in my head at one time, and work on filling a bunch of orders at once. This was a skill most of my co-workers didn't have, either because they didn't have the capacity or because no one had taken the time to teach them.
I really loved working rushes. As people have said about busy kitchen work, the time flies by, and there's a sense of satisfaction in staying on top of that constant busy flow of orders coming in and orders going out.
(I also really liked opening at 5 a.m. and working the breakfast shift, when it was really slow, the menu was limited and easy so the cooks couldn't cause a big bottleneck, and most of the customers were congenial regulars.)
Even now, 40 years later, when I get bad service at a fast food restaurant, I can't help but see what it is the people are doing wrong. My worst-ever fast food experience, many years ago now, was when the person working the counter could only do one thing at a time, meaning that she would wait until she'd filled one order before even taking the next order. She spent quite a lot of time standing there waiting for the cooks to send her order down the little chute. This was about the only time I've ever spoken up. "You know," I said. "You could take the next order while you're waiting for the sandwiches for this one." (and only then fetching the fries and drinks.) I even spoke to the manager about it, and got only hostility in return.
There was some reason we couldn't just leave, which is clearly what we should have done. But it was a fascinating train wreck to watch.
I don't mean to denigrate people who haven't gotten decent training, or whose brains work differently so that juggling multiple tasks at once just isn't their thing. The fact that some people have a skill doesn't mean people who don't have that skill are deficient. But I do hope they all found their way to more suitable work.
I couldn't do the egg-cooking job, though. Not only would my yolk-breakage exceed tolerances by orders of magnitude, but keeping track of even a fraction of that many orders with such tight time frames, where a few seconds can turn an egg from just right to too hard, would be far, far beyond me.
posted by Well I never at 5:57 AM on June 25 [5 favorites]
Metafilter: Not to be overly "MetaFilter" about this article
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 6:43 AM on June 25 [4 favorites]
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 6:43 AM on June 25 [4 favorites]
My first — and last — day alone in a kitchen was Super Bowl Sunday, 1991 in a bar owned by Buffalonians. I cooked almost two tons of wings that day. I quit the next morning and haven't eaten a chicken wing since.
posted by ob1quixote at 8:58 AM on June 25 [4 favorites]
posted by ob1quixote at 8:58 AM on June 25 [4 favorites]
In Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell gives a vivid account of culinary multitasking and the “delirium” of rush periods.
posted by Lemkin at 9:25 AM on June 25 [2 favorites]
posted by Lemkin at 9:25 AM on June 25 [2 favorites]
Thanks for this post.
Back in the day, I would occasionally do some catering out of my tiny kitchen, even for lots of people. I cooked for a crowd of about 500 on one burner once in a gallery in downtown Manhattan. But, one day I got a catering job in a big media company here in CPH, and we were invited to use their big kitchen (this is a place with over 2000 employees). It was wondrous. The things you can do in a real large scale kitchen. We made thousands of choux pastries, and of course lots of other nice things. After the job we were asked to offer a bid for the daily service and we politely declined. It's not the ideas or the cooking or the scale or the procurement. It's the huge public management job I just am not educated for or even interested in. I would never cook again if I got a job like that. Incidentally I visited that same company the other day, and now they have a very bad catering company running their 24/7 needs. I think there is something to think about here, but I don't know exactly what it is.
I've mentioned before that my daughter is getting that exact education I needed because as a chef, she can feel that she won't be able to work in the kitchen forever. I am extremely proud of her, since she's worked her way up from dishwasher to chef before she was 21. This post made me realize that it might be because her first job was in the central municipal school kitchen of Copenhagen, and she observed how managing large scale processes work. She needs the degree to get the jobs, but she knows the drill already.
posted by mumimor at 12:46 PM on June 25 [1 favorite]
Back in the day, I would occasionally do some catering out of my tiny kitchen, even for lots of people. I cooked for a crowd of about 500 on one burner once in a gallery in downtown Manhattan. But, one day I got a catering job in a big media company here in CPH, and we were invited to use their big kitchen (this is a place with over 2000 employees). It was wondrous. The things you can do in a real large scale kitchen. We made thousands of choux pastries, and of course lots of other nice things. After the job we were asked to offer a bid for the daily service and we politely declined. It's not the ideas or the cooking or the scale or the procurement. It's the huge public management job I just am not educated for or even interested in. I would never cook again if I got a job like that. Incidentally I visited that same company the other day, and now they have a very bad catering company running their 24/7 needs. I think there is something to think about here, but I don't know exactly what it is.
I've mentioned before that my daughter is getting that exact education I needed because as a chef, she can feel that she won't be able to work in the kitchen forever. I am extremely proud of her, since she's worked her way up from dishwasher to chef before she was 21. This post made me realize that it might be because her first job was in the central municipal school kitchen of Copenhagen, and she observed how managing large scale processes work. She needs the degree to get the jobs, but she knows the drill already.
posted by mumimor at 12:46 PM on June 25 [1 favorite]
they say “You should start a restaurant”
When friends tell me this, I look them dead in the eye and say "Wow, I didn't realize you hated me"
posted by Rykey at 12:55 PM on June 25 [3 favorites]
When friends tell me this, I look them dead in the eye and say "Wow, I didn't realize you hated me"
posted by Rykey at 12:55 PM on June 25 [3 favorites]
Yes! Every time someone has my home cooking or coffee roasting or whatever dozen projects I’m tinkering at and they say “You should start a restaurant” …
My wife and I both enjoy cooking and feeding other people; I can cook a whole pig for a big group of people and have a great time doing it. But serving a consistent menu every night and being able to turn a profit is totally different. Fortunately for me my wife actually bought a restaurant some years before we started seeing each other. It was actually a seafood market that had a small cafe. It seemed like a successful small business when she took it over, but it turns out the previous owner took a lot of shortcuts. The sort of things you had to be friends with the various inspectors to get away with. Since she didn’t have that advantage, the first few months involved spending a lot of money to bring things up to code. And to help pay for that she had the audacity to increase the price of the hamburgers by 25 cents, which alienated a lot of customers. She had her teenaged sons helping out but still struggled to turn a profit, and eventually gave it up with her credit rating taking a big hit in the process. She has since bounced back spectacularly (that computer science degree was a big help) and her experience has disabused both of us of the idea that running a restaurant would be fun. It really is a business, and if you want to really send out a lot of plates and make a lot of money it is all about efficiency and keeping waste to a minimum. I know some people who have been really successful in the restaurant business, and many more who weren’t. There really is a special expertise it takes to be a successful restaurateur.
posted by TedW at 12:57 PM on June 25 [1 favorite]
My wife and I both enjoy cooking and feeding other people; I can cook a whole pig for a big group of people and have a great time doing it. But serving a consistent menu every night and being able to turn a profit is totally different. Fortunately for me my wife actually bought a restaurant some years before we started seeing each other. It was actually a seafood market that had a small cafe. It seemed like a successful small business when she took it over, but it turns out the previous owner took a lot of shortcuts. The sort of things you had to be friends with the various inspectors to get away with. Since she didn’t have that advantage, the first few months involved spending a lot of money to bring things up to code. And to help pay for that she had the audacity to increase the price of the hamburgers by 25 cents, which alienated a lot of customers. She had her teenaged sons helping out but still struggled to turn a profit, and eventually gave it up with her credit rating taking a big hit in the process. She has since bounced back spectacularly (that computer science degree was a big help) and her experience has disabused both of us of the idea that running a restaurant would be fun. It really is a business, and if you want to really send out a lot of plates and make a lot of money it is all about efficiency and keeping waste to a minimum. I know some people who have been really successful in the restaurant business, and many more who weren’t. There really is a special expertise it takes to be a successful restaurateur.
posted by TedW at 12:57 PM on June 25 [1 favorite]
Oh, and one cute detail about my daughter that I am going to make a poster of when she gets her degree. One time when we were catering, I almost dropped my chef's knife on her because she was crawling around the kitchen floor. I put her in the stock pot to keep her safe, and someone took a picture.
posted by mumimor at 1:33 PM on June 25 [2 favorites]
posted by mumimor at 1:33 PM on June 25 [2 favorites]
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posted by ropeladder at 7:38 PM on June 24 [5 favorites]