Article

How to Fine Tune Your Kitchen Stations for Maximum Efficiency & Output

Imagine a visit to the ballet. The dancers have practiced their technique for years and have learned every step and every swell of the music. In each part of the piece, they know exactly how to hold their arms, when to leap and where they need to land so that they don't hurt each other or interrupt the flow of the performance, particularly on a busy night.

The result of all this planning and practice is a piece of art that, if well executed, is a beautiful thing to watch. A high-performing kitchen team is much the same as a ballet company. Each member knows exactly what to do and when, and has got his or her movements down so well that the food gets out to each guest exactly as intended and no one gets in each other's way. This, too, is a beautiful thing to watch.

So how does your kitchen team become a smoothly functioning performance, especially when you may have seasonal turnover or have lots of part-timers working the line?

Choreographed Kitchens

Just as the ballet company has a choreographer to design the dance before it is performed, a restaurant needs to choreograph how each position on the line will function during service.

The way we choreograph kitchens is through a detailed planning exercise that translates the activities of each work position into a set of kitchen station diagrams.

A kitchen station diagram is a drawing that shows the position of each piece of equipment and all utensils held at a particular workstation as well as the location of all the prepped ingredients or mise en place that need to be kept there for service. These diagrams are the roadmap to good process flow and are invaluable for training new staff.

You can also use these diagrams to make it faster to set up the line each day as each station can be clearly labeled with what goes where. This makes it easier when you have different setups for dinner and for brunch - just post the appropriate diagram and your team will know where to put what so that your line cooks can work most efficiently and safely during service.

Preparing kitchen station diagrams take some work and some forethought. To create these, the restaurant operator needs to have a good handle on what food items are going to be produced and in what quantities, and what degree of preparation each item will require. For new operations, this should be worked out before you finalize the layout of your kitchen equipment or commit to buying any particular item so that you can build out the space to closely match your operating needs.

Are You Stuck
With the Layout You Have?

Often independent restaurateurs inherit existing restaurant spaces, which also means inheriting a kitchen that may or may not be ideally designed. Even in this circumstance, kitchen station diagrams can play a role.

They help the operator think through how to make the existing kitchen work for the proposed style of production and anticipated volume. Whether the restaurant is new or already existing, you can help ensure a smoother, more efficient operation by mapping out the stations ahead of time.

Stations are the work areas dedicated to a set of kitchen functions, such as prepping vegetables, cutting meats, making desserts, sauteing or grilling. The types and number of stations a restaurant kitchen will have will depend on the restaurant's menu, the style of production that the chef adopts and the volume of covers that need to be produced during service. For example, a simple American grill restaurant might have four cooking stations on the line: saute, grill, fry and cold items.

The classic French "brigade de cuisine" will have many more, including stations just for roasting, for pastry, for fish dishes or for sauces. For a new restaurant, an important part of the planning process is working out what stations you'll need in your kitchen based on how you want the back-of-the-house operation to work.

For most stations, you'll probably have one employee working at a time, although in larger or higher-volume operations it is not unusual to have two or more employees working in the same position concurrently.

As an example, next time you are in a Cheesecake Factory restaurant, have a look at the line. There will be multiple grill and saute stations, each one designed around a portion of the menu with two or more employees on each station. A Cheesecake Factory cooking line may look like just this side of chaos to the uninitiated, but in chain operations like this, each station is carefully planned because it has to be to support very high volumes and a rapid pace.

Take a Walk
Through Your Menu

How do you know what stations you'll need in your restaurant? Start by walking through your menu, identifying precisely what is needed to produce each item. Take a piece of paper and list the steps required to produce each item. Or prepare these breakdowns using spreadsheet software so that you can easily insert a line if you've forgotten a step or rearrange the steps if you didn't have it quite right the first time.

It is a little time-consuming, but you will find it to be an interesting if not illuminating process.

If your restaurant has a constantly changing menu, you can still think through the functions you will need to execute different types of items. Every day you may be grilling different proteins and pairing them with different sides or finishing them differently, but you will still need to have a grill and someone to man it, and that means you'll want to diagram how that grill station should function.

As an example, the table below shows an example of how you might break down each menu item into its component steps to work out what needs to happen at each station. Start with the steps you need to perform to create each dish, from prep through plating. At each step, identify which station should handle the activity, what kitchen equipment is needed to execute the step and to hold ingredients used at this stage, and what smallwares are required. ("Smallwares" is a collective term for utensils, pots, pans and bowls - essentially anything you run through a dishwasher. "Equipment" refers to everything else.) Don't forget the little extras you'll need, like spreads and garnishes.

For example, let's say we are preparing the steps by station for an item on our menu called a Grilled Chicken Sandwich with Avocado and Bacon:

Ideally, you would prepare one of these lists for each menu item you need to produce. Spelling out each menu item in detail like this may seem like a lot of work but I assure you that it's time well spent. Thinking through these steps individually and listing everything you'll need ensures that you select the right types of equipment for your operation without overbuying or leaving out something important. It also helps you figure out your staffing needs and even whether your menu items are overly complicated or expensive to execute and could be simplified without sacrificing quality.

Once you have prepared the list of steps for each menu item, you can begin to consolidate all the steps that need to be performed by each station. (Here's another argument for using spreadsheet software: You can sort your lists by station to create a master list of everything that has to happen at each position.) The value in consolidating the information in this way is twofold: Not only does it help you figure out the size of equipment you need - ideally, at least - at each station, but it also shows you if you are relying too heavily on a single station to execute your menu.

Having the majority of your menu items coming off a single station may result in bottlenecks in getting the food out and leaves you vulnerable to major service interruptions should there be a problem on the line.

After consolidation, your "Master List" for a given station might look something like this:

What does this list tell you? Well, for one thing it tells you you'll need at least two refrigerated drawers at the grill station, as you'll want to keep your proteins separate from your produce.

It also tells you you'll need some kind of holding place for multiple sets of tongs, ideally hanging at waist height for easy grabbing. And you'll need some kind of flat surface adjacent to the grill that can hold a container of doneness markers if nothing else.

The Classic French "Brigade de Cuisine" will have many more, including stations just for roasting, for pastry, for fish dishes or for sauces. For a new restaurant, an important part of the planning process is working out what stations you'll need in your kitchen based on how you want the back-of-the-house operation to work.

Experienced restaurant operators may be able to think all this through in their heads without documenting it in a formal way, but it's a good idea to commit your thoughts to some kind of record, if only to help you direct your designers more accurately.

The Next Step

The next step in the process is to try to quantify the volume that each station will produce during service. This is relatively easy for an existing restaurant with a relatively static menu because you can just review your point-of-sale (POS) data to see what sells and when. Most POS systems do a good job of tracking menu item sales although be aware that this data is only as reliable as your servers' data entry skills, and if you are using a handwritten ticketing system to place orders, you may have to adopt a different strategy to track your item volumes.

For restaurants that are still in the planning stages, estimating volumes is much harder and those estimates will probably need to be adjusted once the operation is underway, but for now you can try to make some educated guesses based on a mixture of seat count, turn estimates and some idea of your target customer.

One study by Culinary Visions, a Chicago food consultancy, showed that when presented with a test menu, about 50 percent of American consumers went for the most familiar or straightforward dish - steak - compared with menu items with less common ingredients or more complicated preparations. Of course, your target market might be much more adventurous depending on where you are. Make sure you've done your homework about your neighborhood and your competitive restaurants to get a sense of what your customer base might find appealing.

Finally, consider where each element needs to go at each station. What should be above, below, to the left or to the right of the cooking or prep surface? Where will plates go, if you are doing some plating on the line? Assume that most people are right-handed -- at least 70 percent and perhaps as much as 90 percent of the population is more dexterous with their right hands. So put items that require more dexterity to manipulate on the right and simpler elements like stacks of plates to the left or above. Think about what can be readily located under counter: refrigeration, bus tubs for used smallwares, or backup supplies. For safety, avoid placing important items where your employees will frequently have to reach across an active cooking surface to reach them.

Now you have everything you need to create the kitchen station diagram. These don't need to be nearly as detailed as construction drawings, nor do they need to be particularly pretty. They just need to be easy to interpret at a glance. Here is an example of one approach, which breaks the station into three sections: counter height, which is the main working height; above-counter height, for items on shelving or mounted on the wall above the work area; and under counter, for items that go in refrigeration, on shelves, or in drawers below the work area.

This sample diagram shows a grill station on the line, and includes the locations of stored items above, below and to the right of the grill. You could also add a second landing surface and under-counter storage area to the left of the grill, although it is standard practice to place cooking equipment as close together as possible on the line to keep the ventilation hood as short as possible.

As you develop your own diagrams, think about where you might be able to economize on labor during slow periods. It is not unusual for a single employee to man two stations when you aren't sending out many covers.

One common combination is grilling and frying, because unlike sauteing, these food production techniques do not rely on constant motion or undivided attention, provided that volumes of food being cooked at one time are relatively low. So you might consider locating these two stations together on the line.Just make sure that you leave sufficient space between the fryer and any source of open flame so that you conform to fire codes, and that you consider a space to the left of the fryer for dumping cooked items with maximum efficiency and safety.

Test Drive Your Plan

Just like a ballet doesn't come together without plenty of rehearsal, your kitchen plan needs to be "test driven" before you commit to the equipment layout and placement of items. Kitchen station diagrams can help here too. Print out the diagrams and lay them out on a table in the same relative positions as you plan these stations to be in the real kitchen.

Then select some sample menu items and "walk through" exactly how each item will be prepared, looking for excessive travel distances, long reaches, cross traffic, bottlenecks or even processes that you may have forgotten. (There are software tools that can help here, too, if you like computer-aided design programs.)

You may find that you'll need to make many revisions to your diagrams before you have them right. If your restaurant is an existing one, it's also an excellent idea to run the station diagrams past some of your employees, as they may have insights about how they prefer to work that you might not have considered. After all, employees who have input into plans are far more likely to adopt them.

Finally, your diagrams can be laminated and posted in the kitchen to help employees set up their stations each shift and to help you bring new hires up to speed quickly and effectively. Just make sure you keep an original copy on file so you can create a revised version as your menu changes.

Taking the time to really think about how your team needs to execute and providing them with a simple visual that will help them work effectively pays off in multiple ways: You'll save on training time, reduce the potential for injury, help employees be their most productive and, most importantly, get your guests' food out better and faster - by design.