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How to Get Out of the Weeds

The trick isn't keeping your restaurant from occasionally veering off into the weeds, because you won't be able to do it. The trick is getting back out of them again, during service.

"Before you can get out of the weeds you have to know that you're in them," says Angela Phelan, senior vice president of the Kingston, New Hampshire-based Clarion Group consulting firm. "Whether you're running a four-star restaurant or the smallest sandwich shop, the same lesson applies: Training is everything."

"First of all, in order to get yourself out of the weeds you're going to have to put the right people in the right positions," says Craig Pendleton, president of National Foodservice Consulting Inc. (NFC) in Surprise, Arizona. "A lot of times you will be cross-training or something during a busy shift when you shouldn't be. I can always tell the difference between a former back-of-the-house and front-of-the-house manager when it all hits the fan; the manager is either going to head to the dining room floor or to the pass shelf."

If you can only be effective in one area, Pendleton says, go where you're most effective; however, if you know consistently that you have an imbalance - e.g., the floor staff can always throw more at the kitchen than the kitchen can handle - you've got to adjust that.

Cross-training is a great resolution, Pendleton says, because it necessitates thinking outside the box and pulling resources from wherever you can to do what you've got to do, whether it's borrowing a dishwasher, a line cook or a person off the line. "It's really nothing more than thinking on your feet and doing what you have to do," he says. "But again, you have to see it coming. You can't let yourself reach that point where the manager is out 'tap dancing' at the table buying meals, because by then you've lost it for the shift."

"Every meal is a perfect storm waiting to happen," says veteran restaurant consultant and operator Arlene Spiegel, FCSI, president of Arlene Spiegel & Associates in New York City. "Ice machines break down, the chef is off his game, deliveries come late, unexpected volume of guests, POS glitches, equipment failures and inexperienced or un-engaged managers all contribute to crisis."

The most common cause of service failure, Spiegel says, is the lack of leadership and an unclear understanding of the difference between hospitality and service. Other candidates include poor infrastructure and systems and lack of training. "A bad mealtime experience is a great learning tool," Spiegel says. "Broken processes need to be mapped and redesigned."

Spiegel lists four all-too-common causes of operational problems during meal service, all of which are preventable:

1. Failure to have premeal meetings to set the mood, assign tables and staff, share reservations and bookings with staff and go over menu changes and specials.
2. Failure of managers to communicate with kitchen staff to identify staffing- or food-preparation issues.
3. Failure to conduct line checks to ensure product is stocked and ready to prepare.
4. The manager not being on the floor to anticipate and solve problems.

"Every now and then even a well-run restaurant runs into unexpected challenges," Spiegel says. "It's time to reset. Even a three-minute huddle with the staff can get them back on track." The most important outcome of a crisis, she says, is that the guests see that it is handled well even if meals have to be comped.

Is Your Menu Too Complicated?

If problems continuously crop up, the menu might be too complicated for easy execution, says Mohammad Qureshi, assistant dean for the School of Hospitality Management at Florida International University, North Miami, Florida. Qureshi says backups will occur if you don't have the right equipment, or if employees are improperly trained and can't execute a product in a reasonable amount of time, or if the flow of the kitchen isn't designed properly. Another likely cause could be the lack of a qualified individual to stand in for an employee who calls in sick. "It could also happen because you underordered a product and ran out of something," he said.

The fix, says Qureshi, a 15-year veteran of T.G.I. Friday's, involves adding someone who can jump onto the line and start things moving. "Usually it's the kitchen manager or chef on duty who will have to get involved," he says. An essential ingredient is motivating people and taking the necessary steps right away. "When you have a situation in which you are extremely busy and orders are taking way too long you have to get in and help someone out," he says.

If the staff finds itself having difficulty with a single item, whether the product has run out or a piece of equipment has gone out of service, you may need to take that item off the menu, Qureshi says. "You have to say to yourself, 'You know what, this piece of machinery has broken down, we just can't do this today, so let's go out there and do the things we can do.' There is nothing worse than to have all orders backing up because of one specific problem. You need to identify the problem, fix it, or temporarily move it. That way you can get the operational flow back up to speed."

Another smart correction that can be made is simply asking front-of-the-house people to slow down the seating. "The issue may be that too many orders came into the kitchen at one time," Qureshi says. "If the kitchen is getting slammed you are almost inevitably going to make people wait. If you're not ready to go then tell them to slow down."

Of course, the best pound of cure is an ounce of prevention, or in this case preparedness. "I usually say that we need to be ready to go, and so be prepared. 'It's Friday night, we know we're going to have at least this many orders, so tell me now what we need to fix because we won't have a break for five hours,'" Qureshi says.

Rudy Miick, FCSI, CMC, founder and president of Miick & Associates, a foodservice consultancy based in Boulder, Colorado, urges restaurant operators to define excellence. "Is it an eight-minute ticket time? A 50-second ticket time? What is excellence in delivery to you?" Miick says.

Once ticket time is defined, define also how to get to that outcome. Hint-hint: Telling the team to speed up is not the answer. Define how to speed up - what actions they can take that expedite speed or quality in completion. Miick also recommends that clients develop their own system and continually improve that system. He says to find out what created the "fire" and put a plan in place with communication, clarity/definitions of excellence that puts out any type of fire.

Miick has another suggestion. "Never run out, only sell out. Even if you do run out, your guest only knows you've sold out. The goal is not to 'sell out' in your opening hour," Miick says. He also urges restaurateurs to create a par system, what he describes as a perpetual inventory that tracks your use and pars. "Continually update pars as you change food or beverage," he says. "Order only what you need and roll inventory. Do not buy more than you need. Track what you use, what you comp and what you waste. Anything else missing is likely due to theft. Pay attention to your inventory."

Where It All Begins and Ends

NFC's Pendleton, a 40-year industry veteran, says there are two basic ways that restaurants manage to get off course during service: less than ideal operational design - "which is where it all begins and ends" - and a lack of operations efficiencies.

"Those of us who have been in the industry that long, who started in the rear of the house and worked in many, many kitchens have sometimes wondered who the heck designed them," Pendleton says. "I do construction design and operations design, and I've worked with a lot of great architects and designers, and there are plenty of them who don't know the actual business."

When establishing time-and-motion steps movement in the kitchen, utility is paramount. "You can make a gorgeous kitchen with beautiful stainless steel and marvelous equipment, but it's just not going to be functional specific to the actual menu itself," Pendleton says. "For example, what's going to go up in the future? You can't stop the clock on labor costs; they're always going to go up, and the same with utility costs. So when you're looking at construction, if you can run that line with one less cook it's $30,000 to $40,000 worth of benefits per year, forever, and that is going to continue to go up."

...Cross-training is almost always critical. The sous-chef should be perfectly capable of handling the slot (Chef) as long as everyone else can move up a notch to cover... --Arlene Spiegel, FCSI, president of Arlene Spiegel & Associates, New York, NY

Pendleton says he doesn't see many restaurants suffer from running out of product. In fact, he says, "Most operators I see are grossly overstocked. They order extra product because they are worried about running out, and maybe they've run out a couple of times. When you have extra food for production, obviously, most of that is perishable. If something has a shelf life of a week - you beat up your supplier for perfect produce, for example - but it sits in the cooler for seven days because you have such oversupply." It ends up in the trash. "Many people don't hit the mark on product order, and it's the same with production of things like soups, sauces and other items," Pendleton says.

Nearly every problem is solvable, which means that every meal service can be saved - if you have prepared for whatever may come. "In the end, getting out of the weeds means trying not to get into the kinds of conditions that got you into them in the first place," Phelan says. "But if you're there, think on your feet. Make substitutions as fast as you can. Enlist the help of your entire staff to solve the problem. Always check your inventory, your par levels, your equipment and the health and well-being of your staff. Everyone needs to keep their eyes open, pay attention and remember that your customers are there because they love your restaurant."

Six Problems, Six Solutions

Examples of being in the weeds, says Clarion Group's Angela Phelan, include:

• Three six-tops - multiple large orders - arriving simultaneously.
• "The meat man forgets your veal chops, and that's the special on tonight's menu."
• Your chef breaks a leg on the way to work. "This happened to me," Phelan says.
• Your pot washer cuts his hand on a glass and is bleeding profusely. "This has happened to me, too," she says.
• Your best waiter doesn't show up - something that has happened to Phelan many times.
• A major piece of equipment goes down.

Each of these situations has things in common, Phelan says. "The only way out of the weeds is a combination of fast thinking and timing. If one could be clairvoyant, one would only hire people who have a talent for thinking on their feet." It is, she says, "pretty clear that people who possess this attribute are the problem solvers without whom no restaurant could get through a night - much less a week." Solving these problems takes a bit of experience and ingenuity. Here, Phelan says, are some approaches that will work:

Handling multiple large orders simultaneously. "The reservation person should space (patrons) out in quarter- to half-hour intervals to avoid the confusion of seating so many people at once. If the guests are 'on the books' the kitchen should be alerted in advance so they can gear up for what might be ahead, avoiding the awful dilemma of keeping the guests happy while waiting for their food to appear."

The experienced manager, she says, will offer as many diversions as possible, including bread, olives, refills of beverages and plenty of contact so customers don't feel passed over. "Make sure the wait staff makes contact frequently. This is all about timing: making the guests comfortable, giving the kitchen a heads-up on what's happening and making sure everyone is in the loop."

The meat man forgets. If the chef has placed the order in a timely fashion and yet overlooked the part of it that didn't arrive, Phelan says, he needs to rethink his own timing in order to avoid such an oversight in the future. However, if it is not his fault it is important to do two things. "Fill in with an interesting alternative, which might mean adjusting the menu to include an item scheduled for the following day," Phelan says. Another option: "Make sure the guests are offered the 'understudy' as a positive, rather than a lame excuse like, 'Sorry, we're out of veal chops tonight.'"

The chef breaks his leg. "This is deeply disturbing on many levels," Phelan says, "but the first order of business is figuring out who will do this important work long before you have such a major weed-producer to deal with." Cross-training is almost always critical. "The sous-chef should be perfectly capable of handling the slot as long as everyone else can move up a notch to cover."

This can prove to be "an interesting problem in the abstract," Phelan says, because "many chefs and cooks hate to relinquish their power and mystery to anyone else. Those prima donna types are not useful. It is the chef's responsibility to train everyone on his staff, no matter how small, to produce the menu flawlessly in his absence." There will, she says, always be some details that won't be replicated exactly. "But the goal of your manager and chef is to create a smooth, seamless operation." She further recommends allocating time to train staff when "everyone is up and running, and not on crutches."

The pot washer cuts his hand. A first-aid plan should be in place in every kitchen. "There should be a big, white first-aid kit mounted next to the hand sink or in the manager's office," Phelan says. The manager should have a plan for such an emergency that starts with immediate first aid to stop bleeding while a responsible staff member calls 911. After the person is stabilized or taken to a hospital clean the area of the accident and have someone take over the station.

"In a restaurant where sauté pans are needed to prepare or finish nearly every order, keeping the clean pans coming is a critical part of the operation," Phelan says. "It's a serious job that needs to be covered effectively to keep the kitchen running." If need be, the manager or owner should take over as the pot washer. Phelan says the smooth running of the kitchen with the least amount of hysteria is critical to keeping order and preventing the accident from causing any discomfort to the guests.

Your best waiter doesn't show up. This is a "colossal pain," Phelan says, "but unless you want your 'best waiter' to run your restaurant, it is important for your manager to take the time to train the rest of the staff. There are many ways to have a staff of 'best waiters,' but the best way, of course, is to hire people who exhibit that spark of energy that shows they can think on their feet."

In the case of wait staff that means people who are completely aware of the tempo of the kitchen, the habits of the guests who arrive at their tables, and a sharp eye for detail. "There is practically no substitute for that spark. It keeps the waitperson checking to see how long the guests are lingering over their first course before firing the entrée. It means taking away an unneeded plate to make more room at the table. It means being comfortable enough with the customer to clarify a preference: medium, medium well, really well done, etc."

An inability to communicate with the customer means returned orders to the kitchen, an irritated chef and a more irritated customer - all signifying a trip to the weeds, Phelan says. As for the missing waiter, she says, "He'd better have a really good excuse, and he really needs to know that there is someone equally talented at selling your food. Continually train the buspersons. Notice if one of your prep people likes the dining room, and give him an opportunity to be a busperson for a night. Keep training."

A major piece of equipment goes down. This is never good and signifies several critical things, Phelan says. "The first is that the kitchen will be thrown totally out of kilter if the outage takes place during service," she says. Beyond that, it means someone is not paying attention to the maintenance of the kitchen. And, of course, it's going to cost money. A weekly maintenance schedule that includes a complete scrub-down, examination of cables, connections, loose screws and other signs of wear needs to be addressed during downtime. "Many restaurant operators treat their equipment indifferently, assuming it will function forever," Phelan says. "It doesn't and it won't."

Instilling respect for the tools of the trade is the province of the chef, who needs to take the time and have the patience to explain to the staff - both entry level and experienced - how each piece of equipment works and how it needs to be cleaned, how frequently and with what kind of tools. Having a service contract with a reputable and reliable company is also a key to the safe maintenance of kitchen equipment, and helps to prevent the kind of events that throw the kitchen into the weeds, Phelan says.

Meanwhile, a creative chef will be able to substitute a parboiled and roasted potato for fries. She says a steak can be sautéed instead of grilled, but if the pizza oven goes out and that's the heart of your kitchen, then you have a much bigger problem.

The Origin of 'In the Weeds'

There is little dispute that the phrase "in the weeds" is restaurant slang for a situation when the wait staff gets behind in servicing their customers or tables. The origin of the phrase is not precisely known, however, some authorities claim it dates back to the U.S. Prohibition, when servers would hide cases of liquor behind the restaurant "in the weeds" to evade law enforcement. Other sources indicate that it refers to Prohibition-era servers heading behind the restaurant to take a shot of liquor hidden "in the weeds" to steel their nerves during difficult shifts. Others cite that the term simply means what it suggests, that is, servers getting so behind on their shift that they become "lost in the weeds."