Working The Line In A Restaurant
Constant Motion - The Art of Working the Line

Even if you’ve never been to culinary school or worked in a restaurant or seen cooks putting out food in a commercial kitchen, you’ve probably eaten in a crowded restaurant and wondered, “How do they keep track of it all? How can they possibly feed all these people without screwing up or serving cold food?”
The answer is organization and division of labor. That is a deceptively simple answer, not simple in the sense of “easy,” but simple in the sense of “basic.” I’ve been back there and seen cooks hard at work during a busy dinner service. Even from a layman’s point of view, it may be basic, but easy, it ain’t.
The backbone of any service—breakfast, lunch or dinner—in a restaurant is “mise en place”. Each cook at each station is responsible for getting every component prepped for every dish that comes off that station. The trick is to make sure that, once tickets (orders) start coming in, the cook has everything he needs to fill those orders without ever having to leave his station. This can get very murky for a novice. Let me explain by illustrating.
Say a cook works the Panini station. (For those not familiar with Panini, it is a sandwich served hot or cold but most of us are more familiar with toasted Panini.) On the menu is a grilled vegetable Panini with goat cheese and herbed aioli on focaccia, a grilled Portobello Panini on ciabatta, a Cuban sandwich on Cuban bread and a bacon, lettuce and turkey Panini with Swiss cheese on seeded rye. All items come with fries, potato salad, side salad or chips. That doesn’t sound like too heavy a load, but let’s look at the mise en place for that station:
Pre-slice, pre-toast breads
Make vegetable marinade
Marinate vegetables
Grill vegetables
Make herbed aioli
Prep goat cheese
Make mushroom marinade (if different from veggie marinade)
Marinate portobellos
Pre-grill Portobellos
Slice cheeses
Slice some cheddar—there are always substitutions
Slice pickles (or stage pickles)
Mustard
Mayonnaise
Cook pork shoulder
Slice ham
Cook bacon
Wash and stage lettuce
Slice turkey
Make potato salad
Have chips ready
Oil for Panini press
Salt and pepper
Chop herbs
Being Prepared For Anything
Not only does the cook need to make sure that everything is prepped, but he has to make sure that he has enough of everything to make it through service. While it might be no big deal to send someone back to the walk-in cooler to get another dish of mustard, it’s a huge deal to need more grilled vegetables when the grill cook has the grill full of hamburgers. Often the cook will have two pans of their ingredients ready - ones at the station to start service and ones in the walk-in or in the low-boy under the station for back up.



Once again I have the opportunity to share with you a very informative interview with a top American chef. This time with 
