The restaurant service system

October 3, 2021 0 Comments

A main issue that needs to be addressed before deciding on a kitchen design is how the food will be delivered to the guests. This is recognized as the service system. A large operation, such as a hotel, may have more than one service program at work simultaneously: elegant table service, room support, and casual bar support. At the other end of the spectrum, quick-service restaurants employ service systems that emphasize speed and convenience, including takeout support and also the fast-food option of standing in the same counter to order, pay for, and wait for a meal served within minutes. Every service system has subsystems; Together, they cover every aspect from the progression of food from the kitchen area to the table and back to the dishwashing region.

This progression is known as flow, much like the flow of traffic on the grid of busy streets. There are two types of flow to consider when planning your kitchen area layout: item flow and traffic flow. Product circulation is the movement of all food, from its arrival at the reception area, through the kitchen, to the guests. Visitor flow can be the movement of employees through creation as they perform their tasks. The perfect thing, in each type of circulation system, would be to reduce backing and crossings, again, to ensure that the “streets” are not obstructed.

You will find 3 basic flow patterns in every foodservice operation: The raw materials to create each plate have a back-to-front flow pattern. They reach the back of the restaurant, to the kitchen area, where they prepare. They then travel to the front from the restaurant, to be served in the dining area. Finally, they go back to the back again, like waste. The third type of traffic pattern can be the flow of wait staff as waiters choose food, deliver it to guests, and clear tables. In the busy night, the whole system really does look like a busy highway. As you can imagine, there is often the possibility of disaster if someone takes a wrong turn.

The key to managing these 3 types of circulation is that none should interfere with the others. Inside the kitchen, there is also a unique flow for each cooking section. It could be a pattern of steps that chefs follow to put together each dish or the methodical way that dishwashers scrape, sort and wash dishes and dispose of waste. The support systems and flow designs of your business should guide the style of your kitchen. An operation with large quantities to feed in short periods of time will differ from 1 which also feeds large quantities but in a longer period of time.

Can you see how? The distance from the kitchen to the dining room is an essential consideration, and

Kitchen designers have come up with numerous strategies to deal with it. You may have noticed that in some restaurants, waiters are expected to perform some food-related tasks outside of the kitchen area, at the waiting stations closest to the guests. They can cut and serve bread, serve soup, prepare and dress salads, or serve drinks themselves. The idea is to speed up support and preserve the (sometimes inappropriate) space of the kitchen area for actual cooking tasks.

An additional critical decision to make early in the styling procedure: Should waiters enter the kitchen area to collect food, or should it be delivered through a pass-through window between the kitchen and dining room? Although the pass-through window is considered informal, it could be used in a fancier restaurant, perhaps masked from public view by a wall or partition. Each of these elements (distance and access to the kitchen) helps determine your flow patterns. In an ideal world, the flow patterns would all be straight lines that do not intersect. However, this perfect is rarely achieved. A simple rule of thumb is that the faster you want your service to be, the more important it is that your traffic patterns don’t cross. Within a quick service setting, flow lines should be short and straight.

The next time you’re standing at a fast food counter, take a look at the few steps most workers take to serve their soda, pick up their burger, and bag their fries. Speed ​​is the desired result.

The opposite occurs within a fine dining establishment, wherever all the work can be done in the kitchen area to enhance the feel of a relaxed dining experience. No noisy dishes, no bustling waiting stations right here. Now that we have analyzed the movement of people while they perform their restaurant tasks, let’s follow the food flow line: the path of raw materials from the moment they enter the creation to

the time they become leftovers.

The receiving region is where food is unloaded from delivery trucks and brought into the building. Most restaurants locate their reception locations near the back door. Our next stop is storage (dry storage, refrigerated storage, or freezer storage), where large amounts of food are kept at the right temperatures until needed. Food coming out of storage goes to one of several prep areas for vegetables, meats, or salads. Chopping and dicing takes place here, to prepare food for your next stop – the production region. The size and function of the prep region vary widely, depending primarily on the style of service and the type of cooking area.

When most people believe in a restaurant kitchen, what they imagine is the manufacturing line. Right here the food is given its final form before being served: Boiling, sautéing, frying, baking, roasting and steaming are the main activities in this area. Food is placed on plates and decorated before it goes out the door on a serving tray. And that’s the end of the typical food flow line. Various kitchen centers are not included in the common food flow sequence, but are closely linked to it. For example, storage locations should be very close to the staging area to minimize the movement of employees from one side to the other. In some kitchens, there is a separate ingredient room, where everything necessary for a recipe is organized, to be collected or delivered to a particular workstation.

Storage is much more useful when placed near the preparation region than near the receiving region, saving steps for busy workers. The bakery is usually placed between the dry storage and cooking areas, because mixers and ovens can be shared using the cooking area. A meat cutting region is also essential. It should be in close proximity to all refrigerators and sinks for safety and sanitation reasons, as well as to facilitate cleaning. However, keep in mind that some kitchens are simply not large enough to accommodate separate, specialized work centers. Kitchen space planning becomes a matter of juggling priorities and it is an ongoing commitment.

As you juggle yours, think about each task that is performed in each workplace. How essential is it to the overall mission from the kitchen area? Are there duties that can be modified, rearranged, or eliminated entirely to save time and / or space? Some of the ideas that need to be discussed here are: the frequency of movements between numerous teams, the distance between teams, leaving room for temporary “landing areas” for raw resources or finished plates to sit on until needed, put the equipment on wheels so it could move from one website to another, creating a “parking space” for the equipment when it is not being used.

In short, if the work centers are contiguous with each other, without becoming overcrowded, time and energy are saved; And if people who work in more than one area have convenient, unobstructed paths between those locations, they can perform more efficiently. One frequently missed work center is the sink, which always seems to be relegated to the darkest back corner of the kitchen area. It is true that it is not one of the most attractive areas, but think about the many other work centers that depend on it. The common kitchen generates an overflow of pots and pans. Why isn’t the sink positioned closer to the manufacturing line to cope with clutter?

And, speaking of pots, carefully create where to store them. Each clean and dirty, they take up a lot of space and require creative storage solutions. Pot / pan racks can often hang directly over the sink area, giving dishwashers a convenient place to buy clean pots right from the drainer. (Remember that anything stored near the floor must be at least 6 inches from the floor for health reasons.)

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