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The Restaurant Roadmap is your guide to building and running a successful restaurant. Each episode explores the full journey of operations—from planning and development to menu design, execution, and growth. Hosts Danny Bendas, Amanda Stokes, and Chef Eric Lauer bring decades of expertise, joined by industry leaders and restaurant professionals who share their insights and stories. Together, they uncover strategies, tools, and lessons that help operators improve performance, strengthen teams, and elevate the guest experience. Whether you’re opening your first location or refining an established brand, The Restaurant Roadmap equips you to navigate every step with confidence.
Danny: Welcome to The Restaurant Roadmap podcast, powered by Synergy Restaurant Consultants, your go-to source for actionable insights and real-world strategies from the industry’s top experts, clients, and special guests. Whether you’re building a new concept or refining an existing one, we’re here to help you create a forward-thinking sustainable brand, elevate guest experience, streamline operations and maximize your bottom line. With decades of hands-on experience, our mission is simple: to deliver practical, proven solutions to the everyday challenges restaurant operators face. Let’s dive in and get to work.
Amanda: Hi everyone. Welcome back to The Restaurant Roadmap. Today, we are going to pull the curtain back on kitchen operations, and with me, I have two of our consulting experts. I have Danny Bendas, one of the managing partners here at Synergy consulting firm, and also Eric Lauer. So, I’m going to give them a second to introduce themselves.
Eric: Hey y’all, how are we doing today? I’m Eric Lauer. I’m one of the managing consultants with Synergy. I focus mostly on culinary and kitchen operations, but I do venture out into the front of the house just to help out there as well. And I’m going to toss it over to you Danny.
Danny: Eric is being much too modest. He’s a great GM, back of house, culinary guy, all around good guy. Everybody loves him, so we don’t want to underestimate his capabilities and his knowledge, which we’re going to rely on him a lot today, as we talk about back-of-house because that’s really his primary expertise. So anyway, Danny Bendas, of the managing partners of Synergy. If you follow us, we’ve been on these podcasts several times before. Look forward to a lot more, and thought to change it up today. Rather than me being a host, we’d have somebody else do most of the talking. So, we’re going to turn it back to Amanda. You’re going to introduce yourself. We can get going.
Amanda: Awesome. My name is Amanda Stokes. I’m one of the managing consultants here at Synergy, and I wear many hats. I can focus primarily on operations, but I write training materials, I do recruiting, and I also help with concept development. So, with that said, today we’re going to dive into the back of the house and pull back the curtain and really dig deep on what are some of the systems, processes, and operations that make a kitchen successful.
So, I want to kick it off and talk about purchasing, receiving, and storage. So, in my opinion, having great vendor relationships is one of the most important things that you can do in the back of the house. So, I’m going to open it up with the question of, how do you develop great relationships with vendors?
Eric: So, for me, it’s all about building a relationship. It’s not just ‘my company does business with your company;’ I’m in business with my rep. So, I have multiple conversations a week with my rep, we kind of talk through things, we go through things, they understand what I’m trying to do as a business, and that, in turn, helps me because sometimes they see things that I don’t get to see. They’re in a different realm, a different world, so they get a lot of information prior to me learning about it, so they pass that information on to me and help me make educated decisions on my business for the growth and the profitability side of it.
You also should have more than one food vendor, right? So, most people say, “Oh, I’m loyal. I stick to this guy.” But when you do that, you kind of are at the mercy of that one company. And if we’ve learned anything since 2020 and Covid, supply issues play a major role in our industry. So, you have to have that backup vendor. You have to have a vendor that you can rely on if your initial vendor does not have everything.
I recommend an 80/20 scenario where you get 80% from one company, 20% from a different company. That way you keep the 20% guy a little bit hungry, he’s trying to push, he’s trying to get more of that business, and 80% guy doesn’t want to lose that 80%. He wants to stay at that. They run on margins, just like everybody else, so they want to make sure that they’re making their margins and getting where they need to get to at the end of the month, just as well as we are.
Amanda: Wow. Eric covered a lot of ground [laugh].
Danny: Yeah, right, so let me just say, you know, I think it’s all about partnership, like so many things. I mean treating people fairly. We’ve done work with clients as you guys know, where the person in charge or the kitchen manager or the chef thinks they have, like, they have to have, like, 80 vendors and so nobody gets any volume. And to the extent that makes sense, competitively, getting enough volume to make it worth somebody’s while to be a partner with you, and then staying on top of them, you know, checking prices, you can just, you know, you can do competitive research and stuff like that, but I think there’s a loyalty factor that really comes into play as well that I think is really important to build a relationship. You rely on them, they kind of rely on you, and it’s just a really solid partnership that works.
And, you know, ultimately, it always gets down to your sales representative. You judge any major distributor on that one person that’s in contact with you. If they do a great job, you feel great about the company and they’re going to take care of you. So, I think loyalty, honesty, integrity all play a huge part on both sides to picking the vendor that’s going to do the best job for you.
Amanda: Wow, that was a lot of great information. And I think what Eric alluded to in the beginning was exactly right. We’ve gotten into restaurants where they have, like, 14 different vendors, and my head goes [exploding head sound] because I’m like, how do they keep track of all this stuff? So.
Danny: Just to jump back a second there, you know, we work with a company that it cost them, like—and this is a long time ago; I’m sure it’s higher—cost of over $60 for every invoice they had to process, you know, with the tracking, the system, the employee to pay the bills, audit the bill, having 14 vendors, that’s 14 invoices you have to deal with. If you get a lot of deliveries, it’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of accounting. So again, there’s another way to look at it, to how do you streamline your accounting as well? Sorry, Amanda, didn’t mean to interrupt you.
Amanda: No, absolutely great, great point. I’m glad you made that. So, when a delivery comes in, what are some non-negotiables for checking it in? What are some systems that you recommend to make sure that you receive all product?
Eric: What I like to do is I have a scale, I have the clipboard with the invoice on it, I have my idea of what I ordered to ensure that what I ordered is what’s on the invoice because nothing’s worse than come Friday night, you ordered ten cases of steaks, but only seven came in. You’re 36 steaks short. Next thing you know, you’re running out. So, you want to make sure you balance the invoice off the order. You want to make sure you count all the packages.
You want to make sure you weigh all the packages. You want to make sure frozen food is frozen. You want to make sure cold food is cold, and dry food is dry, not wet, not moist. You want to make sure all of those things are in place. You want to also ensure that everything—you have the cases are not beat up to the point where you can see it was frozen at one point, thawed out, and then frozen again. So, you want to check to make sure the quality is correct and ensure that there was no time temperature abuse prior to you receiving the food.
Danny: You know they say your cost of goods starts at the back door. Literally, you get terrible produce, there’s higher waste, higher costs. One of the things that we always advocate, also, is every once in a while, go and check the truck temperature because, you know, there’s people that turn off their refrigeration thinking they’re going to save fuel, and then it doesn’t help your product. If you have some semblance of a [unintelligible 00:07:57] problem, if the temperature of a product coming in doesn’t meet your temperature standard, below 45 or 40, or whatever it is, you don’t know how long it’s been sitting out of that temperature range so that you have some potential food safety problems, also. And I also think if you purchased it, if you can have somebody else receive it, you have a check and balance that I think can be very important as well.
And oftentimes people are too busy to receive an order, which, you know is kind of sometimes a challenge to understand, but you know, people are busy, we always advocate at a minimum, pick five items that you thoroughly inspect on a delivery. Dump out a case of lemons and count them. Check their quality at the bottom. Very seriously, check the spec on different things every day. Record it on your invoice. Make sure you track it, and just keep your vendors honest.
I worked for a restaurant many years ago, the driver knew that nobody checked in the order, so all the stuff that he didn’t want his other people to get came to our back door and he saw he could dump off all of his stuff that nobody else would receive at our restaurant. And, you know, once I started checking in, it’s amazing how quickly the quality improved. The other thing, a lot of times, we advocate for night drops or key drops, which I think can be really helpful. And even though you get it, you still got to receive it and check it and make sure. Again, there’s where the relationship is critical is even though you got any good vendor, if you have a problem, they’re going to take care of it for you, even though you weren’t there to receive it and sign for it at the time that it came in.
Eric: So, let me add on to that, Danny. There’s so many vendors now that have great ways to fix that night drop, key drop situation where something was wrong. There’s a lot of vendors, US Foods is one, where in the app, they give you an app, you can take a picture of the product, you can send it right to them. They credit it right from there. It’s just an amazing system, now.
These food companies are moving forward in such an efficient manner that they don’t want to see those types of things impact the guest experience, which the restaurant is the guest, and the quality of their food. They want to make sure that they have a great reputation out there, just as much as the restaurants want that as well. So, that’s a big, big thing. I’m glad you brought that up.
Amanda: Very important stuff, and the only thing I would add to that is our vendors are also our guests. And I used to like to say that they would talk. And I remember being a GM, checking in an order, and they would say, “Oh, don’t go down the road to such and such restaurant. It’s really disgusting in the kitchen. Don’t eat there.” So, I would always try to instill in my teams that, like, these vendors are telling other people what the state of our kitchens are, so never let them see a kitchen that’s unacceptable.
Danny: Yeah, and I think the other part of that is we always had a policy that we don’t do credit memos. We want to correct invoices right at the time. It’s getting harder and harder now with the sophisticated online ordering, receiving, but just following up to make sure that if you are returning product, you are getting the credits or following through on that path because if you don’t, you get a case of French fries, or you didn’t get a case of French fries, but it still shows up on the invoice. So, make sure you have all those checks and balances in place to make sure you’re meeting quality standards, you’re getting what you paid for, you’re paying for it at the right price, which is staying on top of your bids and your invoicing and follow up on any shorts or credits and stuff like that. So very, very important. Like I said, it all starts—cost of goods starts there. Make a mistake at the back door you can’t recover from, it’s going to hurt you down the road.
Amanda: Absolutely. Great, great points. And so, putting the truck away is usually not the most fun job in the restaurant. I used to have, like, a ski parka if I had to put the freezer away. Helping to coach and train FIFO is a process, so I’d love to know your thoughts. I’ll start with Danny this time, so Eric doesn’t steal all the thunder. How do you select who puts the truck away, and then how do you ensure that it’s put away, using first in, first out each time?
Danny: Well, I think most importantly certifying who can put the truck away, knowing how to do it, how to label, how to rotate. You know, oftentimes you’re using the label that came on the product, and in night drops, you know, hopefully everything’s at least stored in the right place, and getting things put away as quickly as possible, if it doesn’t immediately go into a walk into a freezer so that temperature clock isn’t ticking, where the product is going to get above 40 or 45 degrees.
Now, we had an interesting scenario with a client many years ago. They had a standard where when the truck came in, pretty much it was all hands-on deck. Everybody in the restaurant helped put the order away. As you know, they bring it in, you’re trying to work around a bunch of cases stacked up on the walk-in cooler storage areas, so everybody was trained on how to put the order away, and they could put a delivery away in, like, under ten minutes because everybody jumped in and helped out.
I’m like you, Amanda, I hate being cold, so I always had a big winter coat hanging in the office to, you know, to put the freezer stuff away. But yeah, I think being certified, knowing what to do, how to do it, get it labeled properly, follow all of the FIFO and all the food safety parameters, you just got to train people to do it, and then follow up with them and do it with them until they understand what’s the best way. What’s the right way, right?
Eric: Eric, since you covered the, how do you select somebody to do it, I’ll talk more about the storage itself. So, if you ever walk into somebody’s walk-in and it’s unorganized and messy, I can almost guarantee you they have a cost-of-goods problem. Unorganized, messy walk-ins lead to over-ordering, spoilage, quality issues. There’s just so many things that happen when you don’t get your truck put away correctly. Now, if you do get it put away correctly and everything’s in its place, you hit it to a tee, the next time you do that order, everything is right there. You can count correctly. You make sure you’re hitting your pars, you make sure you get exactly what you need.
When it’s not put away correctly, there’s two cases of buttermilk over here, one case over there. You don’t know what you got, so you’re just flying blind, so it’s super important that the person who puts your truck away puts it away correctly every single time, and puts it away consistently, every single time. If buttermilk goes here, buttermilk goes here. I don’t need to see buttermilk here, there, and everywhere. We need a consistent spot for it so when we do the order, it’s done correctly.
And your order guide should be set up on a sheet-to-shelf, so everything should be in the same spot every week. It helps with inventory. It helps with ordering, it helps with receiving. It helps with storage. It helps all kinds of efficiencies with your prep person and your line guys too, right? So, when your prep person goes in and he’s searching all over the place for buttermilk, he can’t make all the ingredients correct. So, it takes time and it costs you money in the labor down downstream. So, do it right initially, do it correctly, get yourself set up for success, and then move forward from there.
Danny: Yeah. It’s a real time-waster when you got to run around trying to figure out where stuff is. But I think the other thing that we both miss I want to make sure we touch on, is before the delivery comes in, getting ready for the delivery, meaning, make sure the coolers, dry storage is organized. You break down partial cases where you can, you know, you just get things ready to go, and you clean, you do whatever you need to do to make sure you’re just ready to rock and roll when that truck shows up. Very important.
Eric: The reason I missed that, Danny, is because when I was in operations, every night, somebody went into walk-in and did that. They made sure every night there was reset the cooler, reset, make sure everything’s good. You’re breaking down those partial cases. You’re pulling everything to the front. We want to make that every night that happened, so when you hit the ground in the morning you can take off running.
Danny: Exactly, yeah. So, just organization is the key to all this stuff.
Amanda: I love it. I would imagine that you both ran very tight ships with your walk-in. But I want to go back to something, Eric, you triggered—I’m going to kind of go off some of the questions that I had, but I want to talk about building a freezer and a walk-in efficiently. So, when you’re building shelves inside a walk-in or a freezer, is there, like, a methodology that you would recommend to, say, a client that’s opening up a new restaurant? How would you approach that?
Eric: When I build a walk-in, I like to—most people, put the food six inches off the floor because that’s the health department’s minimum expectation. I like to put it up about 18 inches to two feet, that way you can clean underneath, right? You can even store kegs underneath there, if that space needs be. Then you set your shelves up. A lot of people put their shelves equidistant apart every time.
So, it doesn’t make sense, right? So, if you’re putting a third pan on a shelf and it’s six inches tall, your shelf should be six inches tall so you can fit the third pen in there. It gives you exact space, you’re utilizing every inch of that walk-in. Because we know walk-ins aren’t infinite space. You have a finite amount of space there, so you want to take advantage of every inch.
Heavy use items should be right by the door. So, if you’re running into the walk-in as a line guy, and you’re grabbing something consistently, it should be as close to the door as possible. You want your dairy as far away from the door as possible. You want your meats as far away from the door as possible. Prep items as close to the door as possible. So, when I build a walk-in, I spend a lot of time doing that, making sure we set the shelves up correctly in the beginning, and then we hold people accountable to storage correctly.
Danny: Yeah, that’s what we call ‘maximizing the cube,’ right? Because you’re paying for that whole space to keep it chilled, you try to use as much of it as you can. And we always try to, if we can, when we’re doing design, get the tallest walk-in that we can, so that we can put lighter weight things around the top to maximize that space. And then, good point, Eric, the way you store things and where you store them to manage temperature, but we used to always have what I call a junk shelf that was always closest to the door, so if you had partial containers, you wanted to make sure it got used first, they always went on the junk shelf, and that’s where everybody went first, before they broke open something new, right? So, it’s a really good topic, Amanda. Glad you brought it up because so many times there’s so much wasted space because the shelving is just not right.
Amanda: Yeah, I’m glad we talked about that. And the other thing that I would like to do, when I would help building shelves, which is probably one of my least favorite things to do, is what’s the most amount of that product you’re going to have on the shelf and build it for that, so that, to Eric’s point about the buttermilk, it’s like, oh, shoot. It’s Friday, and we received a bulk buttermilk, but we don’t have enough space to store it. So, back to when Eric was building the shelves. He’s thinking, “Hey, these are the most amount for the busiest day that I’m going to do,” and then build it that way. So, it’s not as easy as people think to assemble a walk-in.
Danny: Yeah, right? It requires a little thought and estimating your volume based on your products, and then not being afraid to adjust it once you get some history under your belt of how things work, you know? So.
Eric: Absolutely. You should evaluate it every 90 days.
Danny: Yeah. The same thing with dry storage. Same thing as applies, maximize the space, keep it clean, and keep it organized.
Amanda: Keep a rubber mallet in the office, and then you’ll be all set because those shelves are—
Danny: Is it for the employees or for the [shelving 00:19:24]?
Amanda: [laugh].
Eric: [laugh]. It’s a dual use, dual purpose use there.
Danny: One thing we’ve learned so far is Amanda hates being in the refrigerator. We’ve identified that.
Amanda: There’s stories about Eric, I’ll share really quickly, that he loves the cold, and he would do his inventory in shorts. And I just never understood that. Like, that is my least favorite. Like, I want to run in there, and so if there was too much product in there and it took me too long, I would be really aggravated.
Danny: I hate going to Costco or going into my produce because it’s always so cold in there.
Eric: Living in Florida, going to Costco, that’s one of my favorite days of the week. You go in there, you hang out in a produce cooler, whoo, free AC baby.
Amanda: Oh, my goodness. All right, gentlemen, we’re going to shift gears and talk about prep. So, building an accurate prep list is probably one of the most important things that happen in the morning. So, I’d love to know your thoughts about building an accurate prep list and maybe talk about some of the steps behind the scenes that go into that prep list.
Eric: When I build a prep list, I kind of build it around when we receive trucks. So, we talked about buttermilk a lot. So, ranch has a pretty good shelf life, and you want to build your prep list around your shelf life. So, if ranch lasts three days, five days, whatever your par is, whatever your shelf life is on your product, maximize that make your ranch last until the next end of that shelf life. So, it doesn’t make sense to make a gallon of ranch every day.
Make three gallons of ranch that’ll last you three days, you’re only touching the product once, you get it back in the cooler, it has time to really meld the flavors together, and you get a better quality product, and it’s cold all the time. Because we know ranch. When we’re making ranch, we take that mayonnaise out of the dry store room, we take the buttermilk out of the cooler, and we mix them together. That’s not going to be a great product for at least four to six hours, when it gets down to a really good temperature. So, we want to make sure that we maximize the shelf life.
It’s not just on ranch, right? Pico, any type of those fresh daily items you want to hit those two: you don’t want to have a massive amount left over, you don’t want to be making pico that last two and three days, right? It’s good for maybe that day and lunch the next day. So, hit it, prep it correctly, and go from there. So, that’s one of my big things when I’m building a prep list. And I also want to make sure that you write your prep list in the way that you want the person to do it. So, at the top of your prep list is the first item you want them to do, and so on and so forth, down throughout it. And again, maximize that shelf life and utilize every inch of space that we created in the walk-in to store these items.
Danny: Yeah, and the other thing I know that we advocate a lot is storing in pan-ready inserts, so that you’re not dumping out of buckets and wasting and filling. So, if you’re making ranch and it needs to be in a six-pan on the line, you put it into six pans when you store it, and it’s just easier to trade pans and keep things organized and keep things clean.
So, there’s a different system that we have advocated, depending on the client. Rather than filling out a prep chart every day, we create a prep matrix. So Eric, you used ranch dressing as examples. Let’s say you make ranch dressing twice a week. You decide you’re going to make it on Tuesday and Saturday because you get a truck on Tuesday or whatever.
So, you create this production matrix of all the things you make, to your point, what do you got to make fresh every day and then you kind of sequence it. And based on your volume, you put a par level, or how much you’re going to make on Tuesday to get you to Friday. And once you figure that out, and you balance the workload, basically everybody knows what you’re making on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Monday or whatever. The only thing that changes is how much you’re going to make to get you through that period of time. So, we do a lot of work in restaurants is because they take inventory, they create a prep chart every day, they tend to make things every day, even though they don’t have to, to your point, Eric, about shelf life, truck delivery, and stuff like that.
So, creating more of a I call it a manufacturing or commissary mindset, where I walk in, I know what I’m making, I have my labor, you sort of establish how long it should take to make these items that could be based on time and motion, and all that sort of stuff, and everybody knows what they have to do exactly when they hit the door. And then you just kind of true up, you know, once a day, like, if somebody spilled three gallons of ranch dressing, you know, you’re not going to get to the next time, so you got to put in in an emergency. But just thinking more in terms of commissary or manufacturing, I think, can give you a lot of efficiency as well.
Amanda: Good points. And then the other thing I was going to ask is, if you have one guy dicing tomatoes, but you need it on three different stations, do you recommend just having one person dice all the tomatoes or does everybody do their own?
Eric: I recommend that one person, one item. So, I started this, shoot, 20, 25 years ago at a restaurant I was working at, and people looked at me like I was insane. We had three different people cutting basil, three different people cutting parsley, and you know, they would set up their own station with the garnishes, right? So, you have one person who could chiffonade basil, really, really well, and then you have two others who don’t. And then you look at it, and you have an eggplant parm come out from this station, beautiful chiffonade basil; you have a margarita pizza come out from this station, it looks like Ray Charles cut the basil, and then the next thing you know, you’re not happy with it. So, utilize your talent, utilize the people who do things the best, and of course, it does make it more efficient, easier, it’s a labor saver, and you can really get the quality you want from that model.
Danny: Yeah, and I think you can also put in, you know—you can direct production to the people with the most skill, and also what their wage is. You don’t need to have a $25 an hour cook chopping parsley necessary; you could have a lower level cook or a dishwasher, and that’s how they learn to become the high-level cook. And it saves you labor dollars because you’re not expending as much per hour to get some of these other tasks done. So, that’s another way to take a look at it to make sure you’re maximizing not only the time but also the dollar value of that particular employee.
Amanda: I love it. Danny, you talked about line-ready pans and the importance of that, so that if you know you need ten pans of diced tomatoes, you would have ten pans of diced tomatoes. How do you teach people to count appropriately? So, maybe one day Susie’s opening, the next day Eric’s opening, and then the next day I open. How do we know that we’re all counting what’s on hand correctly to ensure a correct prep list?
Danny: Well, I always advocate in doing prep lists at closing as opposed to opening—that’s just one person’s opinion—so that when the crew in the morning shows up, the prep charts are hanging, everybody’s immediately productive and everybody’s going to work. And then the other part of that answer is, for me, I kind of always assumed that whatever was on the cooks line, I assume that that is used. So, I never really counted what was on the cook’s line. I focused on what was in the walk-in coolers or the refrigerators, and judge based all of my pars of production on what was in there, not worrying too much about what was on the line because that usually gets used relatively quickly anyway. So easier, more accurate to count the walk-in than to count a half a pan here or half a pan on the line. Just assume that’s gone and you’re starting fresh, and it’s easier to count.
And the other thing I always like, again, it gets down to training and empowering people. I used to have various people in the kitchen create the prep chart so that I can review it the next morning and if I had to true it up or modify it. And that was good training for them, again, to progress through the system, to maybe become a shift leader, assistant kitchen manager, sous chef, or whatever it is. But short answer is, I never counted the line so I could just focus on the big areas where I had to produce and base all of my pars on that.
Eric: Yeah, so it’s an interesting concept, right? And I worked at a corporate restaurant where every manager had to work different varying shifts, so you would have your service manager, bar manager, host manager, all working an opening and writing a prep list. So, what I would do is, during a manager meeting, I would send each of them into the walk-in separately, count me the walk-in like you would every morning for prep. And then when they came back, we would show all of the four or five different count sheets and see the variance in that. So, then we would talk through, why did you count this as one? Why did you count it as two? We could get to where we were all counting consistently.
Because that’s the key. It’s not just about if you counted as one and I counted as two; we need to make sure that we have enough product to make it through either the shelf life par or to make it through the day, if it’s a daily prep item. So, that was what was important to me, is getting everyone on the same page, everyone counting correctly, and then moving forward so the guest doesn’t have a negative experience.
Danny: Yeah, and I think when you have a prep chart, if you put the unit on the prep chart, so I know if it is ranch dressing and you’re counting it by pans, it’s on the prep chart so everybody knows you’re counting pan so there’s no ambiguity. They know how many or how much or how you want it counted. You know, and I know that’s not part of our topic today, but when you’re taking physical inventory for accounting purposes, it’s the same thing. If everybody counts everything differently, your inventories are going to be way off financially, in addition to production as well. So, having that information on the sheet so there’s no ambiguity of what you’re counting and how you’re counting it, right, it can be really important.
Amanda: And since we’re still on the topic of prep, labor has been a big concern for most operators out there. They’re trying to figure out how to save as much labor dollars and create a great job for their team members, but that being said, prep lists, the prep people kind of work on an island by themselves. How do you maximize efficiency and know exactly how long prep should take, say on a Monday versus on a Friday? Are there any systems that we could potentially recommend to people?
Danny: We talked in previous in our leadership about timelines. I only know one way for a prep cook to work, and I’m sure there are others, but for me, you come in, you clock in, you get into uniform, you set up your station with all your tools, scale, measuring tools, knives, spatulas, whatever that is. So, I have my little zone set up, and then ideally, the prep chart is ready. I go to the prep chart, or if I checked in with my manager or chef, and they tell me, “Hey, we had an emergency last night. We sold more of this than we thought. You got to make this first.” Then I just go to work.
So, I’ve got my timeline established, I know what I have to make first work, to Eric’s point, based on what’s fresh daily, and I know what I have to do if there’s an emergency. And I just go to work. And then I think the other big part of it is getting people think before they walk. I spend a lot of time fetching for ingredients to make something. And you know, you’d be amazed how many seconds or how many minutes of time you spend just walking around.
And if storage is organized, if your kitchen is organized, you’re not spending 20 minutes walking around to find a whip, which amazingly happens quite often, right? And we actually, many years ago, did a system where we had a cook that sort of pre-set recipes, pre-measured things, sort of like a storeroom clerk kind of a position or a steward position, so when a high powered prep crew came in, they basically just cooked. They didn’t get ingredients. They didn’t go shopping. There was a cart with what they needed to make Alfredo sauce, either in the cooler or in dry storage, depending.
They just went straight to cooking and you maximize their time and you maximize your equipment. So, you know, you’d just be working one thing after another in the kettle or on the stove, very, very highly efficient. And again, now you’re training a lesser-wage employee how to be a prep cook. So, they go from being the steward to the actual production, and so there’s always succession planning in mind. So, eliminating fetching, organization, timelines, all of that stuff makes everybody tremendously more efficient.
Amanda: Anything to add, Eric.
Eric: Very little. Danny was very concise and hit on most things. What I would always do, though, as a leader, is I would walk the prep kitchen during prep time, and I would count how many items he was making on the day. Then periodically throughout the day, I would go back and I would say, all right, there’s ten left. All right, there’s seven left, all right, there’s four left. And write the timeframe down, so that way you could go back and say there was ten left at 10 a.m. and you go back at noon, and there’s ten left, you know, there’s something wrong there. You spent two hours, you didn’t complete anything. What happened, right?
So, you can have those readjustment conversations right then, and it doesn’t happen at three, four o’clock in the afternoon, when that person should be clocking out, and then, you know, now we’re getting two three hours of overtime, and it’s really impacting the end of the week. You have to manage that labor line in a different way. So, I always like to make sure that I was sitting upon that throughout the day, every day, to ensure we were getting the most efficient use of the prep cook throughout the day. I also like to use what Danny spoke of earlier, maybe the dishwasher has his own prep list, too, right? And he’s taking care of bulk work items that the high paid prep cook should not be working on: diced tomatoes, stuff like that, stuff that’s not super difficult to do, and it doesn’t take a lot of talent or skill. And then we’re teaching this person. We’re beginning the knife skills. We’re beginning the ability to fill a pan to the right spot and make sure we know—and telling them to taste the recipes when they’re done. So, we get the basics in there, and then the succession plan takes over from there.
Danny: Yeah. And I think the other thing to add, which is really important, is you can also assign time per batch of product. Like, if you did a little basic time and motion—we did work for a pretty large restaurant chain many years ago, where for every item that was made, there was a time assigned. So, if I had to prep 15 scampi boats, I had this amount of time to do it. And so, there was a labor expectation was then tied to your scheduling and your staffing.
And if that could not be accomplished legitimately, then there was either training or, hey, how can we do this faster? Or maybe that person just isn’t suited to that type of work. So, attaching some time value to everything that’s produced can really help you manage your labor, manage your schedule, and hold people accountable for getting stuff done when they need to get it done. So, it can really be valuable.
Eric: Just to add on real quickly to that, when I’ve had that issue where the prep guy wasn’t being as productive as I wanted him to be, and then I came to him and I sat him down out in the dining room, nobody was around, I said, “Hey, you’re not as productive as you need to be. I’m either going to have to move you to the line and you’re going to have to work varying shifts, or we’re going to have to figure out a way to get you more productive and get through these recipes quicker.” You’d be amazed how many prep cooks are terrified of the line, and if you go and say, “Hey, you’re going to have to go to the line,” because now everything’s time bound, right? It takes three minutes to cook those tenders if you’re not hitting it. I know exactly right then and there. There’s a different level of expectation. So, they will learn a way to get faster to get the stuff done so they don’t have to go to the line, and they are more in tune with what you need them to do at that point.
Danny: Yeah. And there’s also, you know, you’ve all had experiences where, no matter how many batches of whatever it is you’re making, somebody has to prep, it always takes the same amount of time, right? So, work fills time allotted, right? How do you get people to understand and give them the tools, but also the accountability of hey, I got to get I got this much time to get this done, and you adjust it based on the volume Tuesdays or Fridays or whatever. But letting people know that they have an accountability for time versus it doesn’t matter. I’ll get done when I get done, kind of a thing, right?
Amanda: Great shift—segue for me to talk about accountability in prep because the worst thing about running out of prep is finding out at eight o’clock on a Saturday night when you’re the only manager on duty and something is not there. So, what are some ways that in, you know, your past or with clients that we’ve worked with, systems that you’ve recommended for validating that all prep was completed?
Eric: I always like to do during the PM line check. My PM line check starts in the walk-in, and I’m going through and I’m counting up everything that’s in the walk-in before I even hit the line. I want to make sure I have enough to get through that night. You know, every… something happens all the time. You may run out of something here and there when you do this system, but if you go in, you do your prep check in the back, you make sure you have enough to get through the night, then you go through the line, and you check the quality, and you check the temperatures and you go through there when you do your line check, that is, I’m not going to say it’s a hundred percent but it’s about as foolproof as you’re going to get in our industry.
There’s no magic wand that’s going to say, boom, I have all the food I need. You never know, right? You go on a run of ribeyes, and then you’re in the back slicing ribeyes one night. It is what it is. But you want to take advantage of that timeframe before the shift starts to go through your walk-in, count the products, ensure you have the product before you go to the line and do your line check.
And take detailed notes, right? That’s a big key because if you’re on the fence, right, say, hey, I got 24 ribeyes going into this shift, typically on a Friday night or a Saturday night, we sell 22. I'm going to let this run. That’s a, you know, almost a 10% buffer. We’ll go through, and then you run through them, now, you know, hey, I had 22, we sold 27, so maybe that par next week needs to be 25 not 20. So, that’s where I would go.
Danny: Yeah. And, you know, there’s so much technology now in terms of being able to look at your data. And you know, again, we do a lot of operations work, and a lot of people like don’t look at their product mix to determine their production or their purchasing, and it’s readily available. And you know, I think we generally advocate, like, once a month, go back and review pars, and again, having pars on your production sheets so that you know what you have to build to, whether it’s daily, three times a week, or whatever that is, and continually updating those pars, whether that’s seasonally, what’s going on during that particular time or promotion or whatever it is, but using data to make informed decisions. And then to your point, Eric, taking laps through the kitchen, see where people are, check on them, follow up, and just kind of encouraging, “Hey, how are we doing? You know, we got to get this done.” And, “What’s going on?” And just, you know, the energy level, keep the energy going.
You know, I always have music in my kitchen because when I put music in a restaurant kitchen, my productivity went up, like, 20% because people had a good time, they had fun while they were working, right? And then lastly, I think it’s important to always make sure you check people out before you leave, to make sure everything you thought was supposed to get done actually got done, and you’re ready for your shift, right? So, just a few other things to add on to it, Eric.
Amanda: Yeah, and I know we spent a lot of time talking about prep, but prep drives everything in the restaurant. Like, if you don’t have foundationally great-tasting prep and the right amount of prep, I don’t care what you do, like, it’s going to be a bad shift. You are not recovering from a prep situation.
Eric: That’s a great point. I don’t know who said it, but food doesn’t magically taste better just because it moved to the line, right? It has to be good and correct before it gets to the line. Or garbage in, garbage out; it’s not going to be good. And I wanted to add one more point onto what I said about those prep walks. When I first go in and count the walk-in, typically when that happens, the prep guy is still there, so if I notice that something’s—I don’t have enough, I can add that onto his list and make sure we’re ready to go into dinner because, if not, I’m doing it at eight o’clock when I’m there by myself.
Danny: Yeah, and I think again, part of that checkout is making sure the kitchen is put back together when they’re done for the day so that whoever’s coming in next is—again, it’s amazing how much time people spend walking around looking for stuff, you know? It just drives you absolutely crazy.
Amanda: I think this is a really good discussion because prep is one of the things that, you know, is typically people believe that it’s on autopilot and I don’t ever have to pay attention to it. My prep person’s been here for years and I just kind of let them do their thing. But you brought up a couple good points that I want to really touch back to is looking around for a whisk or tools. And buying—I don’t even know, how much does a measuring cup cost, Eric?
Eric: Five bucks at most.
Amanda: Right? So, because they don’t have a quarter cup, they’re using a half cup, and they’re eyeballing it on how many times they do that. So, I think just having a great system in place to make sure you have all of the measuring tools that you need, they’re exactly in the same spot every single day where the prep cook or any line cook, knows how to find them, and then having a great system of monitoring prep throughout the day, making sure you have enough, making sure it tastes great, and then making sure we’re set up for the night. So, I thought that was really, really great discussion.
Danny: Let me say real quick before we move on, is making sure you take care of the tools, too. When’s the last time you saw somebody sharpen a slicer as an example? Or the knives are sharp, or just stuff like that? That’s just, it makes your life so much easier when things work. Like, I do a lot of work at home projects, and I don’t have the tools to do it really well like a professional carpenter does, let’s say, so the better your tools, the better your efficiency, the better the finished product is going to be at the end, right? So, that’s why I hire maintenance people.
Amanda: There’s dollar value associated with aggravation, Danny, and sometimes it’s better to just pay somebody to do it. I want to shift gears to line check. Line check is by far one of the most important things that we do in the restaurant, minimum of twice a day, if you have two meal periods. Three meal periods, we want to do it three times a day. I would love to know what are some best practices around great line checks, and what are some specific things that you did in your operating days to make sure that the food was great. I’m going to start with Eric. He loves line checks.
Eric: So, the biggest key to line checks is never let your guest be the one who does the line check, right? So, if you don’t do a line check before you open for that meal, guess what? They’re tasting whatever it is first. They’re tasting the ranch, they’re tasting the guacamole, whatever it is, they’re the ones tasting it before you because you didn’t ‘have the time’ to do a line check. So, what made me successful was, I would spend the time. This is the most important time of the shift, so I would spend the time, I would walk down each station with a clipboard with schematic-based line checks. So, you know exactly where everything goes in the cooler top, you use a temperature thermometer. You’re taking temps on every item—
Amanda: Can I stop you, and explain what you just said, a schematic-based line check because that’s probably a new concept for a lot of people.
Eric: Okay, so a schematic-based line check is set up as your cooler top. So, if your cooler top has 18 six-pans in it, it looks just like that on the schematic-based line check. You have 18 six-pans sitting there inside the schematic of the six-pan, it says the product name, it gives you a couple flavor profile identifiers, and it gives you the measuring utensil you need for that item. So, if it’s a two-ounce ladle, it says two-ounce ladle. So, as a line check, you can walk through and see, hey, this is a two-ounce ladle. Boom, I’m good on this product.
You take the temp. You take the thing. When I set up my line checks, too, I put a spoon on the items, like, on the paper, so it’s like an image of a spoon, so they know to taste that product. If I need you to take a temperature, there’s a thermometer image on there, so I know I need to take the temperature of that product. Then those product quality identifiers are on there, so they know when they taste them, hey, this is supposed to have a creamy, buttery finish. It doesn’t have that. This product isn’t correct. I’m going to pull it off the line, and we’re going to go from there.
I also like to count quantity, making sure that everything’s set up. And I know we just talked about measuring utensils and all of that stuff, for me—and the time waster that comes from looking for it—for me, I’d like to wrap a colored electrical tape around each piece of measuring utensil for a line station. So, if you have three stations, you have blue, red, orange, right? So, then they go back in a bucket. All my blue tools go in my blue bucket, all my red tools go in my red bucket, orange tools and orange bucket, and they get brought back to the line before they leave at nighttime.
You’re responsible for your tools. We call it ‘close to open.’ It helps everyone hit the ground running in the morning time, and nobody’s running around. I’ve had cooks quit because they couldn’t find a spatula to work the grill. I’m not lying. They would spend ten minutes, and then they’d just take off their apron and they say, “You know what? It’s not worth it. I’m out.” Right?
So, think about the frustrating part of having to find everything. So, this system is part of your line check system. You know what’s in there. Those are the keys to line check for me. Schematic-based, temperature on the temperature ones, spoons on the ones I want you to taste, and then you’re checking the utensils. Every bit of information is right there on the paper, so you know exactly what you’re doing.
Danny: Yeah. So, if you think about it, the line check starts at the back door, right? So, you make sure the product is right. Somebody checked the product at the back door, whoever made the product hopefully tasted the product and it worked. There are some places where every prep item, the manager or the chef tastes to make sure it’s right before it goes into storage, so there’s another part of the line check.
And then hopefully the kitchen staff, the line cooks, are trained to know what it tastes like and looks like, so they’re doing it as they’re setting up. So, in theory, before you as a manager even go on the line to do a line check, everything should be picture perfect, right? And then if it’s not, you make the employee fix it so they understand what’s wrong, how to fix it, so that next time, they’ll know and it won’t happen. And then it’s hard, if you just follow those steps, it’s hard for a product that’s not right to get to the guest, right, in addition to an expediter that should see the product, hopefully before the server gets it. And the server looks at it before the guest gets it.
So there’s, like, eight checkpoints there to make sure that a product that’s not right never gets out of the kitchen and gets to the guests where they are doing the line check, to your point. So, the other point about line checks to me, is I always emphasize it’s also a setup tool. Again, you look at fetching and how much time people spend, well I got to dice tomatoes. I run to the cooler, I get tomatoes. And I come back and I dice tomatoes. Then I got to do green onions.
And you spend a lot of time running around, as opposed to using the line check as a setup tool, a fetching tool to maximize the efficiency in addition to the quality of the product ultimately that’s going to come out of the kitchen. So, it’s very multi-use. And we also advocate using it after a shift to reset your station to make sure you’re good to go. So, it’s a great checklist tool, in addition to a quality tool.
Amanda: Is there a set amount of time that you guys think it should take to complete a line check?
Eric: I think it depends on the concept, it depends on the station, it depends on the menu. More complex, you know, more component menus are going to need a longer time for a line check, a hot dog stand, the line check is not going to take as long. So, it varies dependent on the kitchen and the menu. Once you dial that in, just like anything else you should hold whoever’s doing the line check accountable to the time that you set forth for the line check to take place.
Danny: Yeah. I mean, I found that the better you trained your team, the easier the line check was to a point where I did line checks when I worked in operations for a company, the main reason why I did line checks was just to keep everybody honest because 99% of the time, the food was already right before I got there. So, if you don’t train and you don’t follow up, and you don’t coach constantly, line checks take longer because there’s more stuff that’s wrong, quite honestly. So, the better you train your team, the easier a line check is.
Amanda: I think we really touched on some incredibly important things that happen in the back of the house. So, when you think about your relationship with your vendors, having great receiving and storage practices, having great systems to hold your prep cook accountable, having a system of developing your team members in the back of the house to move from dish to prep, and having those great systems in place, and then great line checks, I think those are incredibly important things, and I’m glad we were able to kind of dig deep into that. Before I kind of wrap things up—we’re almost at time—anything on any of those topics that you think we missed or that we should let the audience know?
Eric: I’ll go first. So, when I’m in the kitchen, I look at everything through the lens of what I call the product life cycle. So, it starts with inventory. A great inventory leads to the ability to make a great food order, which leads to the receiving of that food order, and then the storage of that food order, and then on to prep. So, as we touched along all of those things, it moves from prep to production, and then finally to the delivery of the finished product to the guest in the dining room.
So, you follow each of those items down the path, and you’re going to get to a great product going to your guest. So, if you break it down for each person that’s involved in those settings, it makes it so much easier for everybody. Because it’s a big pill to swallow, but if you break it down into small chunks and give everybody responsibility, it makes it much, much easier.
Danny: Yeah, and I think we advocate a lot for process over people. You know, we do a lot of work where you say, “Hey, you guys have a prep chart.” “No, I’ve been here for ten years, I know how much to make. We just want to figure it out.” So then, you know, if that person leaves, then you have no production system left anymore, right?
So, if you have good systems, good processes, you train them, and you hold people accountable, and you constantly follow up with your team to make them better, that the system will help you get there a lot quicker than solely relying on people to know in their head what they’re supposed to do, what it’s supposed to taste like. And the other thing we didn’t touch on in terms of production, to this point, is making sure that people follow recipes, they have the recipe open in front of them when they’re producing something in the prep kitchen and not just making it off the top of their head because they made it 50 times. Because the 49th time they may say, “Well, I think it’s a teaspoon, but maybe it’s not,” and then the recipe is not right anymore. So, just again, systems, process, coaching, training, accountability. It all gets you to the end point of great food, great service.
Amanda: I’m glad you touched on the recipes. That is an important thing. I think sometimes when cooks have been in place—prep cooks—four or five years and they’ve made it a thousand times, it’s much harder to get them to keep that book open, but I think it’s a critical step.
So, that wraps up today’s episode of The Restaurant Roadmap. I want to thank my guests, Eric Lauer and Danny Bendas, for sharing their insights and experience. I think we learned a lot today. We learned that great kitchens run on systems but thrive on people. If you liked what you heard today, you can follow us at The Restaurant Roadmap. We’re all powered by Synergy Restaurant Consultants. If you have a great topic that you’d like us to talk about, feel free to let us know and we would be happy to put that on one of our episodes. So, until next time, we’ll see you out in the restaurants. Have a great day.
Danny: Thank you guys.
Danny: Thanks for tuning in. We hope today’s episode gave you valuable insights you can put into action. If you have questions, want more info on today’s topic, or need support with your restaurant-specific challenges, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out anytime at info@therestaurantroadmap.com, and visit synergyrestaurantconsultants.com to explore our services, sign up for our newsletter, and catch up on past episodes. Don’t forget to follow and subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook so you never miss what’s next. Do you have feedback or a topic you’d like us to cover? Contact us. We’re here to help make the world a better place to eat.