How to Stay in Control When Orders Start Piling Up

When you get slammed with a few tickets, I’ve seen newbies freak out. Not because the food is hard, but because they don’t know what order to do things in. They end up freaking out because they’re trying to do everything at the same time, rather than identifying what needs to be started first. There’s a timeline for every dish that needs to be fired, with some things that need to be done ahead of time and others that can be done at the last minute. When you can see the timeline for a dish it makes things easy, but when you can’t it becomes overwhelming.

The first step is to understand which tasks are your anchors. These are the tasks that will dictate how long it takes to cook your meal. If you have a meat that needs to rest before slicing, or something that needs to be baked or roasted, or a grain that needs to be cooked while you wait, these things should be started first. It doesn’t hurt to wait until the end to sauté some quick-cooking veggies or finish a sauce. One thing you can try to help you do this is to write out the recipe for one dish and note which task, from beginning to end, takes the longest. Then try to imagine when you will do all of the other tasks in relation to when you have to complete this task. This will help you to start thinking about how tasks build on one another.

What we often do wrong: We start over when it feels like dishes aren’t coming out fast enough. We turn up the heat, or change the order of items, or leave a pan to go do something else, only to end up with dishes that are half-cooked, or parts of dishes that are burnt. We fix this by choosing an order and sticking to it, and waiting for each step to finish. And if we make a mistake, we calmly make a correction instead of trying to correct for everything. Pacing ourselves fixes our timing much better than trying to do everything at once.

Communication with your station is just as important. If utensils, ingredients, or dishes are disorganized, it takes mental effort to focus on one of them. You should be able to see where everything is without much thought. This might only be a second here and there, but over the course of service, it adds up. Most veteran kitchen staff will clean and reorganize their station any time they have a short break.

Next, practice your timing. Take fifteen minutes and create a mock service. Pick two or three dishes and fire them in succession, as if you’ve received new tickets before you’ve finished the previous ones. Try to keep the dishes moving as fluidly as possible. Then go back and think about where you paused and which actions seemed to trip you up. The more you practice this exercise, the better your sense of timing will be, and the more service will feel not like a runaway train but a string of familiar actions.