How do restaurants cook food so fast?

Cafe Society
1

I work swing shift, and usuall head out for “lunch” about 9:00 - 9:30 p.m. I’m too lazy to bring my own food to work, so it’s usually fast food or something similiar. A couple nights a week I treat myself to a few restaurants.

There is a black angus and macaroni grill nearby, so I go there quite often. Either I’ll eat there, or take out. Tonight I went to Black Angus and ordered baby back ribs. The food arrived 10 minutes later. Now, I’m pretty sure that you can’t cook ribs in 10 minutes. And you certainly cannot bake a baked potato in 10 minutes. The restaurant at this time is generally not very busy, so I’ll grant them to entire 10 minutes to prepare it. But there must be some pre-cooking or microwaving going on.

Macaroni Grill performs the same 10-minute miracle… Granted, I order pasta dishes most of the time, and they can be prepared quickly. But I once ordered lasagna, and it too arrived in 10 minutes, max. I KNOW it takes more than 10 minutes to cook lasagna.

These are not fine dining establishments, but they are not fast food. What’s going on here?

2

Food is often partially cooked by the time you order it. All sauces are on warm standby and heavy things like steaks & ribs are already slow-cooking in a broiler. If the kitchen receives word that a large number of people have come into the restaurant some more fillets are tossed into the slow cooker. By the time the order actually comes into the kitchen, the meat if half-way cooked.

As the steaks cook, they are moved from the meduim rare area into the medium area. If no orders come in for steaks by the time they are M-W, they are sliced up for some other dish like fajitas or ground up into chili. Ribs can slow cook for quite a while before they become inedible.

Occasionally, you place your order at the exact wrong time, when the steaks in the broiler are too overdone for your taste but the ones just put in are not cooked well enough. That’s when we experience those uncommon “what the hell is taking my order so long?!” moments.

Lasagna is probably made in a huge lasagna pan and kept on a low fire until a slice needs to be cut out of it.

A well organized kitchen is an amazing model of efficiency with its plan-a and plan-b cooking processes.

3

If you want to read more about it, look for “Kitchen Confidential.” The author’s a NYC chef of long experience. Full of great stories.

4

A lot of things are also partially cooked during the prep. period of the afternoon. Things like chicken and I suspect your ribs can be kept pre- cooked in the fridge and then chucked in a hot oven for ten minnutes to heat them up and finish them off. Premade sauces can be quckly heated up in a frying pan and pasta or rice can just be dunked in hot water for a few minnutes.

The more expensive the resturant the more cooking is done immediatly before the food is served to make for a better quality product and the longer you should expect to wait. Don’t be in a hurry good food takes time. In a very good resturant whole meals will occasionally be chucked because they are substandard and the whole process will start again.
Getting a table of ten all eating different things served at the same time is a real art.

5

And after reading those “great” stories, you’ll never want to eat out again.
Some of his stories were gross.

6

I know where I work, ribs are often prepared ahead of time, since there is no “doneness” level to them. Pasta is cooked early in the day, weighed out, bagged into individual portins, and stored until they are needed. Steaks are grilled pretty quickly - I don’t know whether they are precooked or not (Im only a waitress :slight_smile: ). I know that they aren’t on BBQ night. Sauces and soups stay on the warmers all day (or at least from start of service - no soup at breakfast, sorry!.).Sunnyside eggs take only about 3 minutes, and an omelette can be cooked REALLY quickly when you have the right training. Bacon is prepared in bulk in the morning, since it can be used throughout the day for such things as club sandwiches and BLTs.

And if the book people have mentioned is the one I’m thinking about (was the guy on Oprah a while ago?) - it;s not ALL true of ALL establishments. Where I work, we do not reuse bread baskets unless one was made up about 10 mins previously and turned out not to be necessary. The “worst” cut of meat does not go to the Well-Done order - though our chefs order fairly standard cuts. If there IS a significant difference, then they might do this, but its not the rule.

It CAN however, be pretty crazy back in the kitchen - when there are several orders in at once, you have the entire line working, trying to coordinate everything. I would say that delays in getting your food are less due to below-par work, than simply to a kitchen rush. And it is NOT the waitresses fault! If the tables around you are full, then there’s a good chance your food will be a bit delayed, because everyone wants to eat too, and the chefs can only do the best they can. Personally, I think they do a great job (I’ve worked at two different well-respected places).

Note: can you tell I just got off work? People ought to appreciate kitchen and waitstaff more

[rant]
Oh, and by the way, the pager I wear at work is NOT because I’m waiting for a call from friends - thats the system we have to let me know when my orders are ready. So stop frowning at me when you see me turn it off!

And Doug - just cuz I don’t know the guys NAME, doesn’t mean I can’t tell you which one at which table ordered the wine, so BACK OFF!!
[/rant]

Sorry - had to get that off my chest! :slight_smile:

7

Damn straight!
[my rant]
10% is not a standard tip. The only time you should tip 10% is if the server did something horribly wrong. If you didn’t like your Ribeye, I didn’t cook it, so back the fuck off! If you tip me 10% and everything went smoothly, that’s a real slap in the face! :frowning: So please tip at least 15%.

And for the cock monster that gave me $5 off a $75 dollar tab; they have a special layer in hell for you!
[/rant]

8

mnemosyne and cykrider, please remember that you are in GQ, not the Pit. Particularly you, cykrider. There have been service worker threads in the Pit before, go ahead and start up a new one, particularly after you get off work.

But please, keep rants in the Pit.

Lynn
Queen of the Pit

9

Sorry. My mistake.

10

I spent one summer at a good quality place (not a chain store). And we did weddings. You can bet that 99% of the food was at least partially pre-prepared. We like everyone did reduce our menu somewhat for weddings. But I was always amazed at how we were able to take 150+ orders simultaniously. For regular daily operations everything was simply timed as well as possible. We only had a few long time items that would be pre-prepaired and our average serve time was about 15 minutes. I would never work somewher like that again. It was a lot of work and perfection was a requirement.

11

I worked as the baker in a Mississippi restaurant that’s on the culinary map because of it’s excellent fare. On weekends, people would wait outside for two hours, and it’s packed from 5:00 on.

Attrayant and mnemosyne have pretty much nailed it. To add: Where I worked, soups & sauces were prepared early in the week, and heated before service. All meats were cut and marinated and ready to go, but were grilled to order. Baked dishes like lasagna, crawfish pie, quiche, etc, were made in advance and then heated in an oven to order. Pasta was cooked in large quantity, oiled, and cooked to order in saute pans.

All vegetables were cut in advance in the morning, and stored in bins, ready to be used by the cooks. That’s really the key to preparing food quickly. If all your ingredients are properly prepared and layed out, the actual cooking time is only a few minutes.

The timing of getting out appetizers and entrees with different cooking times to the table is really an art, and a good chef has several things going at once; a real balancing act. Add to that the fact that kitchens get awfully HOT, in the 100 + degree range in the South. It’s a difficult job, and tempers do flare.

For goodness sake, tip well. You’re not only providing the main livelihood of the wait staff, but a percentage goes back to the kitchen. If you regularly eat at an establishment, your tip record is noted by all, and you’ll always get better service if you pay your dues (and grumbled about if you don’t).

12

Ribs and roasts cook slowly, but steaks are cooked quickly over a very high heat. A one inch steak only takes 4-5 minutes a side for medium-rare on my Webber, and less on a professional grill.

I heard a chef from Ruth’s Chris on the radio. They have a system where they cook everything rare in a special two-sided broiler. They then move them to an oven to finish up. This lets themn get a good consistent char on the outside. When they are busy they will cook some ahead, knowing there is a good chance an order will come in. They can do this because of the high volume. We are talking about a few minutes, however.

For really fast food, try a Pho restaurant. Some times its seems the waiter takes my order, goes through the swinging doors, and then come back out with my food while the door is still swinging.

13

I was thinking a lot more would talk about some sort of sous vide. I was thinking presmoke ribs to full doneness sous vide to safe temp or just above for ribs so done fast enough as the heat doesnt penetrate as well due to ammount of connective tissue and give a quick sear for appearance and to dru em up a little

14

Welcome to the SDMB!

This thread is 19 years old, and I don’t think sous-vide was even really a thing outside the most advanced kitchens at the time.

15

[Moderating]
Another thing that wasn’t a thing in 2001 was our Cafe Society forum, our home for threads on the arts (including cooking). Since that now exists, I’ll move this over there.

16

That’s how pre-packaged ribs you get at the grocery store are made. When I go to a restaurant I expect the real thing.

17

When I worked at Pizza Hut, the lasagna was portioned out into the serving dishes ahead of time, before it was cooked. When cooking, we had “heat pins” that looked like large metal combs that we stuck into the lasagna before it went in the oven. The heat pins conducted heat into the body of the lasagna, so it cooked much faster than it would normally. When it was time to serve, you pulled the pins out, and the melted cheese on top flowed enough to conceal any holes.

The heat pins were very similar to this one:

It turns out, Pizza Hut actually had a patent on the far larger version we used when cooking Priazzos in thepizza oven:

18

On one of the Andrew Zimmern series, he went behind the scenes for a high end VIP dinner with top chefs for dozens of guests. One of the dishes was a truffle pasta dish that was prepared ahead of time and kept in individually portions pans, then reheated and plated at the right time.

19

This thread was pre-cooked before being served up in Café Society?

20

A key component to reheating the pasta and something home kitchens don’t have is that they were reheated in a steam box, not an oven. Steam boxes reheat quicker and more evenly, and also retains moistness.