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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: Welcome back, folks, to The Restaurant Roadmap. I have two of my kitchen experts here. We have Danny Bendas, managing partner of Synergy Restaurant Consultants—he just said, hello—
Danny: Hey.
Amanda: —and Eric Lauer, one of our senior kitchen consultants. Eric, say, hi.
Eric: Hey, y’all. How are we doing?
Amanda: Awesome. If you tuned into our last episode, we wrapped up our conversation on building vendor relationships. We talked about receiving, storage, recipe consistency, and we had a great conversation about how to train our teams to respect these systems and processes. So, today we’re going to jump right back into where we left off. We’re going to start with one of my favorite topics, which is pre-shift meetings.
So, for me, a pre-shift meeting is like a pilot doing his pre-flight checklist. Even if they’ve flown that plane a thousand times, they still start out the same way. So, some of the best leaders in the industry do the same thing. So, I wanted to turn to my experts and ask them, how do you run your—how did you run your pre-shift meetings and what are some components that you think are critical to leading a great pre-ship? Eric, I’m going to kick it off with you.
Danny: You want to start off?
Eric: All right, sure. So, for me, pre-ship meetings always included the basic stuff, right? How many covers do we have on the books for tonight, you know, what’s the specials, what are we talking about, what do we really want to sell, and then really work through that and talk through what I would always call the golden standard, right? So, we would make a dish, we would present it at pre-shift, it was perfect, the exact way we wanted it plated. We had it set up so everybody could see it, the front-of-the-house could taste it after we were done with our part of it in the back-of-the-house, and it really set the tone for picture-perfect food for the entire shift.
And we went through the ingredients. Hey, this is how much, this is where it’s from, this is the brand name. And we really gave everybody involved in a pre-shift all the knowledge they needed behind one of those dishes. And then people were comfortable to sell that dish to the guest, they were comfortable to make that dish if they were in the kitchen because they knew every little nook and cranny of that dish.
Danny: Cool. Yeah, just to add a couple of things. You know, oftentimes a pre-shift meeting only involves the front-of-the-house staff, so I think it’s really nice either to have a front-of-house and a back-of-house pre-shift because, you know, we want everybody to be, you know, part of the team. Ideally, if you could have everybody at the same time, you know, that would be great. And then I think just checking uniforms, making sure everybody’s ready to go, pointing out things that somebody did really great, rewarding in front of the team. We’re not really big on criticizing in front of the team; you do that separately, but anytime you can point somebody out, “Hey, you did a great job yesterday,” or, “Hey, we have some problems with this yesterday, let’s see if we can do better today.”
And I love your idea, Eric, on the food thing. And I think you do a pairing, you know, hey, this goes great with this wine or this beer or let’s try to sell a cocktail or, hey, we’re doing a contest on desserts today, you know, whatever that is. And then the other point just real quickly to make, I actually did a project in Saudi Arabia where oftentimes a manager does a final pre-check to make sure the dining room is ready, lighting is ready, parking lot is ready, and they used to assign various team members to do those things, and then they would report back during the pre-shift on, “Hey, this is good. Hey, table 23 needs this or that.” And so, the team did the pre-check to make sure that we were a hundred percent ready to go when we opened the doors.
And I always thought that was pretty cool. So then, again, the manager is delegating that down and empowering the team, you know, to be involved. So, last thing, real fast—I always say last thing, it never is, but what the heck, right—short, sweet, concise, get people jazzed up. Get the energy built up. You know, good energy to pre-ship results in good energy during the shift.
Amanda: Fantastic. I have a quick question, did either of you gentlemen do a post-shift meeting to kind of go through the shift and talk to the team about what went really well and what you can improve for the next day?
Danny: We’ve recommended that on a few occasions. You know, that goes back to, you know, the old days in the restaurant business, where there used to be a round table after the shift, like, all the cooks and the chefs used to sit, and you know, that’s when they had their meal because they served the meal and then that chef’s round table after the shift was when he talked about what went well, how did this go? We’re short on this for the evening shift or whatever. But I think that’s a great idea, and I think if you can execute that as a group, you know, it’s hard, obviously because your people are leaving, coming, you know, the shifts are flexing, but I think where you can that would be really good. So, yeah, good idea, Amanda.
Eric: I know that back in the day, a really long time ago, all of those chef round tables and those post-shift meetings all happened in the same spot. It was always on the back dock, always with a couple cigarettes. People used to really hone in on what happened during the shift, talk through what went wrong, what went well, and how they could be better the next time. I know, as our industry has gotten more and more health conscious, those have kind of gone away, but what I’ve really seen with it is now, during cleanup and while people are cleaning the line at the end of the shift, they’re really talking through it and going through it. When you and I were in Wisconsin, Amanda, we saw that at the end of the shift. The cooks were going through it at that point when they were cleaning up and I thought that was really cool.
Amanda: I agree, and that’s kind of what prompted my thinking on that.
Danny: The worst case is that, you know, we always talk about the importance of checking out the team before they leave. You know, that’s a good time. If you can’t do a group, you know, you can do a quick one-on-one with somebody to make sure that if there’s any lessons or, you know, a pat on the back, that’s a good time to do it before they go home. So.
Amanda: I agree. So, we’ve set our team up for success with a great shift meeting, and so we’re prepared when the kitchen gets busy. So, when the tickets start rolling in, and we’re ten screens back, if we’re digital or we have 30 tickets hanging, how do we manage the pass-through? So, some of the best leaders lead from that pass-through station. So, they’re watching the cooks, and they’re engaging with their front. What are some things that you guys have done in a past life where you recommend to do to keep that communication flowing, keep the food coming out, keep everybody on pace, and then keep the shift calm? I’m going to ask Danny because then I’ll keep switching it up a little bit.
Danny: Yeah, there you go. Yeah, I mean, I always liked when I was either a chef in a restaurant or operations, I always liked working the expediter station from the front because if it was laid out correctly, you have direct contact with every position you’re correcting as you go. You can literally watch something being cooked on the grill and give direction or compliments, and then obviously, you’re one of the last checkpoints when the food hits the counter to make sure it’s assembled right, you have all the right service gear, it looks right, you know, if you have tasting spoons there, you can taste things before it goes out, and then you are the point of contact between a server and the kitchen. And I always—cooks’ lines can be very dictatorial, so usually there’s only one person talks to the kitchen. It’s usually the expediter, rather than the server talking to the pantry cook or this person, where it gets very confusing; there’s one point of contact that keeps everything going.
So, the only other thing, I would say is—the other thing, when you’re doing your checklist, kind of a funny story, is, if you’re still using printers, make sure the printers are turned on because I’ve actually worked restaurants where we’re standing there waiting for tickets to come in, and everybody’s going, “Man, what’s going on? There’s nothing happening.” And so, they saw that the printer is off, and they’ll suddenly, like, 20 tickets print, and you’re automatically in the weeds before the shift starts, right?
Eric: [laugh].
Danny: So, kind of crazy the way things work. So, the last thing you think to check, but always make sure you check to make sure everything is ready to go, right? So, Eric, anything you want to add?
Eric: Yes, I think I’d add, when I’m working on that side of the line and I’m communicating to the cooks, I like to give out, you know, ticket times periodically. “Hey, the lead checks at 17 minutes. It’s a steak midwell. Let’s make sure we pump that out next.” Those types of items. You want to also, as they’re putting food in the window, coach them. I know you spoke to it briefly, give them that feedback they need in the moment. There’s no better time than that to really correct a behavior than in the moment.
And I’ve always had great luck with coaching cooks while they’re putting food up, “Hey, remember, this goes at six o’clock. You got it at three o’clock. Make sure we’re getting it in the right spot.” Those are the things we’re looking for as the expediter and the QA and making sure everything’s perfect before it goes out. So, just communication on ticket times, communication on how the food looks, and you know, don’t be afraid to give them some props, get them riled up on during the shift because when they have high energy, the food comes out, everybody’s having a good time, and the kitchen just runs a lot better.
Danny: Yeah. I used, actually, when I was either the inside or the outside expediter, when it wasn’t busy, if an order came in, rather than echoing back, you know, ‘heard’ or whatever, I used to make them echo back to recipe, just to constantly reinforce portioning and stuff like that, right? So, you can teach a lot from the expediter stations, you know, both front-of-house and back-of-the-house. So, it’s really—it’s a fun position to work. It’s where all the action happens, right?
And really, if you think about it—last thing—in many instances, that position dictates the entire flow of the restaurant because if the kitchen gets behind, the dining room gets behind, tables don’t turn, you create a nightmare in the dining room as far as seating. So, the better the expediter, the better the whole restaurant flows in my experience.
Amanda: I love it. And I think I’m on an airline kick today, but I tend to think of it as air traffic control. Like, you are controlling everything from that central point. You know, at the end of the day, if the food’s not coming out, I don’t care how great your service is, nothing in the restaurant is firing. So, a very, very important role.
I used to love to expedite, but Danny, sadly, I couldn’t see everything because I’m too short, and I would be, like, the Home Improvement guy, like, trying to, like, look through the window, and so, you know, I couldn’t reach everything. So, sometimes I felt when I worked that position, I was at a little disadvantage.
Danny: Yeah. Well, it’s a fun position to work. It was my favorite place to work in the restaurant.
Amanda: Definitely, I agree. So, shifting gears a little bit, scheduling plays a massive role in not just profitability for restaurants, also in team-member morale, right? So, if you’re overstaffed on a Monday, we know what happens. They just stand around and they talk. If you’re understaffed on the weekend, it can cause people to get frustrated, guests to have bad service. So, how do you approach, like, volume-based scheduling, and how do you make sure that your schedules match the business volume that you’re expecting to do? Do you have any tips of the trade, Eric? What say you?
Eric: Oh, absolutely. So, with the POS systems everybody’s going to now, be it Toast or Clover or any of the other number of ones you could get, they all have great reporting. So, you can see your sales volume, you can go back week-over-week, month-over-month, and you can dial in, hey, every Tuesday at, you know, that four to five hour, we do $670 on average, so this is how many people we need. That six to seven o’clock hour, we going to do $1,800, so this is the amount of people we need. So, you can really dial in the exact amount of people you need per shift, and you just bring them in when you need them, that way, they’re efficient, they’re not coming in, standing around doing nothing.
Because there’s the give and take. You talked about too many people on a Monday. At the end of the week, guess what? You’re going to be cutting labor because you need to make that number. And then Saturday, Sunday, you’re going to have a problem with, you know, not enough people on because you blew the labor early in the week. So, you want to make sure that you’re looking at week over week, month over month, on a per shift basis, and you can dial it in, hour by hour by hour, and then it really helps making your schedule much easier and better for your team members and better for the bottom line.
Danny: Yeah, and I think it’s something that is often overlooked, especially if you’re building a new location, creating a new concept, the design of the line and the kitchen in general is really critical. And you know, Eric, you and I work on kitchen design and stuff like that, and I always try to design a line where people are working more in circles versus lines, and then also designing stations and the kitchen so it’s easy to add labor and it’s easy to take out labor without people running into each other. The efficient kitchen, when it’s really slow, one person can do it all. You gradually add another position that does half and half. You add a third, somewhere, or a fourth, or whatever you need.
Then as volume slows down, you start pulling those people out. And it’s a very efficient way to manage labor, having to do with how efficient the design of your physical spaces. And I think the other thing, if you have people that are waiting, I always teach people, there’s two ways to manage productivity: you can either take away time, or you can add work. So, if it is slow and people are waiting around, there’s always something for somebody to do. Everybody knows the old saying, “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean.”
So, if you’re waiting or you’re between rushes, restocking, prepping, cleaning, you know, there’s always something to do to keep people busy, and that keeps people productive. And yeah, it makes the time go faster, and then people don’t get in trouble because they always have something to do. So, it’s just another way of looking at it. If you have the people there because you have to, at least keep them busy and maximize the productivity of everybody while they’re on the clock.
Amanda: I agree. We’re all, you know, everyone’s fighting the labor battle. Not only are wages continuing to rise, but the pool of skilled people that want to work in the industry is shrinking, so I think we have to be really creative, keep them engaged. What’s your philosophy on cross-training? How do you do it, how do you approach it, and then how does it benefit everybody on the team?
Danny: Something that we preach a lot, we collectively as a team, is succession planning, and cross-training is a big part of succession planning. So, if you’re writing a prep chart, I always had a dishwasher have a certain amount of production to do. And it’s very basic things that you don’t have to pay a more expensive employee to do, but they’re learning the way you want to do things. So, they may just be something as simple as peeling onions for you or shredding cheese or washing lettuce, but then, as they’re doing that, they’re learning. Same thing with the cooks’ line. If it’s slow, having the fry cook learn a little bit about saute and then gradually you begin to learn recipes.
And then the other thing that we’ve talked about is doing these quality assurance where the entire line watches the chef or a manager make a dish. So, if I’m a saute guy, I’m watching how a broiled item gets made so eventually I can actually cook it. So, I think engaging everybody and people want to learn. And I think we would all agree that, you know, we don’t just give out raises because somebody’s been here for six months. Raises oftentimes are given based on your knowledge, so if you can master this station and move to another station, you should be entitled to compensation because now you have more value to the organization because you can work multiple stations and do a great job and be more flexible in where you can work and how often you can work. So, just a few ideas. Eric, I’m sure something you want to add.
Eric: I love that you brought up raises and how cross-training interacts with that. And my thing was, I always told people, hey, I can pay you $30 an hour, but if you can only work one station all by yourself, you can’t go over, then you can only be there when the station is busy, so that $30 an hour doesn’t do you any good, right? My biggest thing, and I always told my people, work across the line. Once you get all the line, your hourly wage is not as big a deal anymore. Now, you can get those in-between hours, and you can get those early shift hours, you can get the late shift hours, whatever works in your schedule because you have the flexibility to work all the stations when I can’t have three people on the line, I can only have one.
That gives you those hours, and it’s by and far over the top of what everybody else is getting. So, you’re going to get paid more money at the end of the week anyways. So, that’s how I always talk to them, and I always think it’s important, right, we train you fully on one station, give you a hundred percent everything you need, then it’s on you to kind of work yourself across the line. We’ll give you time and we’ll give you space, but I need to see the want to, I need to see the motivation from you. I’m not just going to push somebody across the line because I need somebody to work across the line. It doesn’t help me. I need you to be motivated and want to do it. Or it doesn’t help at the end of the day.
Danny: Yeah. Yeah, and I think another thing just to add, very quickly, like, we used to try to, like, if we had somebody working in the prep kitchen, we would just budget their time or their schedule to come up and jump on the line to help out during those crunch times. Or, you know, if you have, like, one—if you have a dishwasher, just teach them how to cook french fries so that they can take pressure off the rest of the kitchen to manage your quality, manage your ticket times, and all those sorts of things. And then they’re learning, too, so they’re getting that exposure, and that’s their stepping stone to their next promotion and their next learning. So, and you know that helps you with labor, it helps you with scheduling, helps you with cross-training, and it helps you with motivation because if people have a sense that they can learn, they’re going to want to stay with you. Because I think people [unintelligible 00:19:43] living and working in an environment where they can participate and they can offer enhancements. I think it just creates a better working environment and a better culture for everybody. A lot of ways you can do it.
Eric: Just to add on to that, right? So, you hit the nail on the head with the prep guy coming up, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, what—you know, there’s not a ton of prep to be done on those days, and I can’t really afford to have as many line cooks as the line cooks want standing next to them, typically. So, if I can teach that prep person to sneak up there for an hour during volume and really just help out, maybe they’re making salads, maybe they’re dropping burgers on the grill, they can cook all the meat somebody else’s plating and going, whatever they can do to help the kitchen be more efficient during volume, that gets them that extra hour, hour-and-a-half, two hours during volume that they otherwise wouldn’t get. Come the end of the week, that’s an extra six hours on your paycheck. That adds up over the course of a year, right? So, I think those types of conversations with everybody in the restaurant can really help you be more efficient as a leader and get you better scheduling at the end of the week.
Danny: Yeah, and that’s their ticket to a promotion, you know? That’s their ticket to a raise. It’s good for everybody, you know, adds value to everybody, which is great. So.
Amanda: A lot of golden nuggets there. So, I have one last question with labor. Have you guys ever heard of anybody writing a schedule or have you written a schedule based on your high-powered, high-paid cooks and how you strategically place them? Do you have all high-paid cooks on your busiest night? Was there any strategy involved in how you scheduled those folks?
Eric: So, for me, a lot of times I wouldn’t have them in there on the busiest shifts at the end of the day, right? So, a lot of times I would have them in there when I could only afford one person on the line because I know that they’re going to produce and get everything out the right way by themselves. And typically, a lot of those folks, I hate to say this, they work better by themselves. They’re high performers, they’re very well versed in the entire kitchen, so they get in there, they get it done. And if there’s somebody standing next to them, typically at the end of the shift, they’re coming to me and going, “Hey, can you not put Pete on this shift next time with me? He’s always in my way. Pete’s a disaster. Get him away from me.” Right?
And then now, you’re having one person there, so your efficiencies are right. You can only afford a certain labor dollar during those slower times, so you’re meeting that with only having one person as opposed to having two or three other cooks. And then when you’re busy, busy, you can have that extra person on the line, so it doesn’t need to be your highest-powered, highest-skilled person; they have multiple people that can really step in and do the little pieces of the puzzle that they’re not fitting into themselves.
Danny: Yeah, I think for me, there’s sort of an attitude sometimes, of you go out as a guest versus you’re working. If I go on Monday, you know, the B team is working because the A team is off. And, you know, I don’t like that philosophy, so I kind of like having some of the A team people working on Monday because they helped make the B team A teamers, right? So, you know, if all the good guys only work Thursday, Fridays, Saturdays, who’s really working with the other guys to make the team better, right? So, that’s one thing to consider.
Also, we did work with a pretty large client many years ago with a time and motion study where each cook on each station was responsible for producing everything on their station, which has its benefits, but then you have a very high-priced saute cook who’s doing potentially a lot of menial tasks, chopping parsley, let’s say. So, labor you can manage a lot of ways, and one of the ways is by putting the right prep with the right talent level and the right hourly wage. So, A, you’re manipulating your schedule where maybe a high-price cook doesn’t have to come in at eight they can come in at nine to work longer in the day, obviously, without sacrificing their hours because they want to make a living. You don’t want to cut their hours so much that they’re going to leave. And again, somebody that’s a B cook, let’s say, that does some more of that basic prep is learning to become an A.
So, you can manage your labor. You know, it’s not necessarily all about hours, but also dollars. So, you can pay a $22 an hour cook to chop parsley, or you can train a $15 an hour dishwasher to chop parsley, and everybody wins all the way around. So, that’s another way to, again, to manage labor and get the right people in the right places at the right time.
Eric: Also, Amanda, one last thought. I think you have to have conversations with your people too, right, because not everybody wants the same thing. So, talk to them, find out what their desired schedule is. Because somebody who’s working their desired schedule works better for you, right? If you take a night owl and you put them on the morning shift every day, they’re not going to be the best performer that they can be. Some people just work better in the evening, some people work better in the mornings, so have those conversations, meet people where they are, and they’ll meet your needs where they are as well.
Amanda: I love that. You bring a morning—you bring a night cook in and try to get them to come in on time in the morning, all you’re going to do is cause a huge frustration. That’s a great point.
Danny: Yeah. And one other thing—and you know, I don’t know how you guys feel about it, so we’re going to find out—one of my first restaurant experiences, one of the first things I did was, before service started, I let each cook, every day of the week, had their own turn to decide what kind of music they wanted to play in the kitchen. And having music playing, it certainly was not symphonies; it was, you know, rock, you know, high end, high energy. And I can’t prove it, but I think productivity increased by, like, 20% because the energy was just there, people were having fun.
And again, people worked harder. They worked faster. They had more fun, they had a better time and the morale was really great. So, I’m a firm believer in music in the kitchen to get the people energized. At the right times and at the right volumes, obviously. So, what do you guys think?
Eric: Love it. I love music in the kitchen. I think it’s very, very upbeat and gets people flowing in the right direction.
Amanda: I love music that is playing over the speakers because one thing I hate is ear pods. Even if they’re wearing one, it’s like, “I’m not going to pay attention to you. I’m going to be in my own little world, and I don’t care about you,” and it’s just such a me, me, me thing. It used to drive me crazy when they first came out, and, you know, I had some pretty hard and fast rules on it because it was just sort of that person disconnecting and disengaging with the rest of the team.
Danny: Yeah, it can be dangerous too because you don’t care what’s going on around here, right? Yeah, I agree. I agree with all of that.
Amanda: Awesome. We’re going to shift gears to a really sexy topic in the restaurant business. I want to talk about the unsung heroes of the restaurant. So, think about the cleaning schedules, the dish area and equipment maintenance because we all know that if our equipment is not running smoothly, we know that the backups that can cause. So, what’s one cleaning hack or maintenance hack that was a non-negotiable for you guys when you were running kitchens?
Danny: Well, first of all, dishwashers are people too, right? So, being courteous to them, helping them, not just throwing stuff at them. And I could tell you a really—I think, a funny story, but I won’t because it was kind of not a very good moment in my career—but anyway, one of the things—it had to do with spray-hosing somebody because they threw flatware into the sink and totally splashed me, right? So, it was like, after a 13-hour day. So, I’ll leave it at that.
But anyway, we used to always have the first person in the restaurant set up the dish area, and if you were taking some basic utensils or a pan that wasn’t that dirty, rather than throwing it on the dish table so the dishwasher comes into, like, this mountain of stuff, we used to have them rack it and wash it, and then it was so much easier for the dishwasher. And they didn’t walk in and go, “Oh, my God, look at this mess I have to clean up.” And it just created a teamwork scenario where then the dishwasher helped the kitchen staff with peeling onions and stuff. So, I think if you look at just the courteous factor, and you know, they’re doing probably the most important job in the restaurant, and oftentimes they get the least amount of credit, and they get probably some of the worst treatment that they can possibly get. So that, to me, is just a really great way to motivate help and create a team, and then everybody works harder to the benefit of all. That would be my first thought.
Eric: So, I’m going to bring this up on the screen here, and this is something that I think definitely makes it so much easier, right? So, you set it up, it’s a weekly cleaning schedule. You put it in there. You got an AM side, you got a PM side, you got initials for whoever takes care of that item there, and then a manager signs off on it. Every day, you should have the same amount of projects to do, and there should be something to do every day of the week.
And if you do something daily by shift, then at the end of the week, your restaurant’s pretty clean, right? If you just leave it and you have that, je ne sais quoi, you don’t care, hey, it’s going to get done. Somebody will clean it. Anybody will do it, right? Who ends up doing it? Nobody, right? So, that [crosstalk 00:29:41]—
Amanda: So, Eric, I have a question on that. So, I hate to interrupt you, but you just triggered something. So, what’s one cleaning or maintenance task that most kitchens skip, but absolutely shouldn’t? Something that’s really critical?
Eric: Filtering the fryers. Like, come on, it’s horrible. Then pulling the fryer out, cleaning behind it, right? So, every day, you do one piece of equipment, right? So, you work yourself down the line. Monday, you do something on the left-hand side of the line. You pull it out, you clean all around it. You clean behind it, you push it back. It’s clean, right? The next day, you do the piece of equipment next to it, and you just go down the line, both sides of the line, hot side, cold side. You work yourself through your kitchen. And this even works in a dining room. Don’t just push this on the kitchen. I know we’re just talking about back-of-house operations today, but you can do this in the front-of-house, you know? Server area 1 gets cleaned on Monday, server area 2 gets cleaned on Tuesday. We’re pulling the booths from 61 to 63 on Wednesday, right? Everything gets done every day, so that way, it’s a routine. It’s a schedule. Everybody’s working through it. Everybody knows, “Hey, on Monday, I’m pulling the fryers. I’m cleaning behind the fryers Monday night.” So, what this also helps with is there’s no confusion, right? So, if they’re slower at, you know, an hour before close, they can get started on this project, as opposed to when the manager walks by and goes—after they lock the door and say, “Hey, I need you to clean behind the fryers tonight.” Then everybody’s all upset, they don’t do a great job on it, and it doesn’t get done to the fullest of their ability. So, cleaning list, cleaning schedule, get it written down, get it posted in the kitchen. Follow it, work through it. Everybody will love you.
Danny: Yeah, I have what I think is probably the most overlooked piece of equipment that I don’t know, that anybody ever cleans them and that’s the ice machine.
Eric: Ohh.
Danny: Has anybody ever—you know, I’ll tell you a quick story. We were doing work for a client. We’re doing an ops assessment, and we were walking in, like, eight in the morning to get started watching, and I was walking down the hallway, and right in front of me was the ice machine, and somebody literally came out of the bin who was in there cleaning it and absolutely scared me to death, right [laugh]? I’ve never had anybody jump out of an ice machine in my life. But he was literally, he was inside the machine, cleaning it. So anyway, point is, I don’t know of anybody that ever cleans our ice machine, which they really should because obviously, ice touches so many things, and who knows how much bacteria there can be.
Eric: You know, one way to make sure they get it clean, Danny?
Danny: What’s that?
Amanda: Put it on a list. Put it on a checklist. It gets done.
Danny: Yep, yep.
Amanda: I love it. You guys are experts. So, I want to go back to something Danny said. So, the dish area doesn’t always get the glory it deserves. I think you said it, Eric, like, it’s just everything—or no, Danny said it, everything starts with the dish area.
So, how do you build a culture that values and supports the dish team as the backbone of the operation? Firstly, thank you for not saying dish pit because that is my—I hate when people refer to that as a dish pit because, like, who wants to work in a pit? I used to hate that. So, anything about building that culture?
Eric: I think it starts with the leaders, right? So, if you go back there and you just throw things all over back there, people are going to emulate your behavior. But if you go back there and it’s something that has, you know, a little bit of baked on nastiness, you pre-soak it, you get it in a spot where it’s soaking, and it’ll be easy for the dishwasher to do it, your people see that you do that and they’ll follow your lead. Also, don’t be afraid to go back there and maybe run a rack through the machine every once in a while. And then when they see you do that, when they have a minute, maybe they go back and they do it.
I think it’s always what you do as a leader, your team will follow. And it’s very basic human decency to each other, right? If you make a mess of somebody’s station, they’re not going to want to work there. And then what happens on a Friday night when they walk out? Guess who’s cleaning? Either the cooks, the managers. So, take care of your dish guys. Go back there, make sure they’re all taken care of, and really treat them the way you want to be treated, right?
Danny: Yeah. And I think I told the story before—if not, I’ll tell it now—the president of a company one day walked up to a dishwasher in the restaurant where I was the chef, and handed him two tickets to a football game and just said, “Hey, I really want to thank you for everything that you do. Here’s a couple of tickets to Sunday’s game. Have a nice time.” So, you know, recognition and caring, I think, goes a long way.
You know, it’s a high turnover position, so everything you can do to create a culture to keep really good people. And you know, having nothing to do with dishwashers, but you know, Amanda, that barback we saw last week, we [were all discovering 00:34:36], right? Look at how hard that guy worked, and he made the bartender’s job so much easier, just like a dishwasher can make the kitchen people’s job so much easier by washing, putting things back where they belong, helping out. They deserve that respect and that reciprocal treatment goes a long way.
Amanda: I love it. And I used to always say. Give them the tools they need to do their job. Like, give them a leather apron, help give them the right gear that makes their job easier, set them up for success with a sprayer that actually works. You know, I would hate to go into some of my restaurants in the past and things weren’t working right, and it’s like, man, this job is hard enough when things work right. Just give somebody the tools that they need to do their job. Awesome.
Let’s talk about health inspections. So, health inspections can be stressful. Some of the best kitchens get stressed out when the health inspector walks in. But how do you instill the mindset with your staff that the health inspector could be a partner to us and not the enemy?
Eric: If you do this every week by yourself, it’s kind of your own little self-health inspection. And you just go through it, and you’re doing it with your people; you’re not doing it to your people. That’s the key right there. You do it, you go through it with them, you say, “Hey, this is what we saw. This is why this can’t happen.” Or, “Hey, this is what we saw. You did a really great job.” Both of those items, right?
You spend time with them, you go through it, you make what the inspector is going to look for known. And it takes a lot of stress and problems out of that person’s mind. Because they don’t know what’s going to happen during inspection, a lot of times. They come in, the inspector is there, and they’re like, “Oh goodness, what do I do? What do I do?” So, they’re nervous.
So, the more you spend time giving them these types of tools and systems, they know what’s going to happen when the inspector comes. And they’re not nervous, it’s business as usual, and they just do what they always do, and it makes it easy for them. So, that’s what I teach. Use this. Do it once a week. Don’t do it every week at the same time. Do it to different cooks on different shifts, so everybody gets it a little bit of an exposure to it, and then they’ll learn what needs to be done during the health inspections and prior to the health inspections to keep your restaurant looking good and in compliance with all the items.
Danny: Yeah. It’s like, you notice a lot of people, if you’re driving down the freeway and there’s a cop near you, all of a sudden, you freak out because there’s a cop near you. Well, if you’re driving the speed limit, you’re not changing lanes dramatically, you don’t have to worry about it, right? Except for me because I always speed, but that’s a different story. But you know, so if you’re running a clean kitchen and you have good food safety standards, you’re doing temperature control checks, and the health inspector comes in, you have nothing to worry about because you’re going to exceed their expectations, right?
And I often ask for a copy of the health inspection, the report that they use, and if you do your own self-inspection, and you’re compliant with all those things, and you exceed it, then I think you’re in good shape, right? Or, in the old days, we always made sure the inspector got a free meal or a free piece of dessert while they were there, too.
Eric: [laugh]. Yeah, they don’t do that anymore.
Danny: Yeah, you can’t get away with that anymore. But hey, you used to be able to.
Eric: Right. So, I’m going to tell a story about myself real quick. So, this was way back and a very young executive chef running a kitchen, a very busy kitchen, we were doing almost $100,000 a week—and this was back in the ’90s, so that was real—a lot of covers back then. And we had [an air director 00:38:26] who required us to do something similar to that every week. And one week, I was—we were busy, and I didn’t get it done as well as I should have.
And I wrote back, you know, “Everything’s great,” right? And I shot this report out—and it was fax back then, right, so you fax it to them. And it was at the end of the day, and the next day, I wasn’t open, and I came in the next day, and somebody took his returned fax and taped it to my mailbox in the office, and it said, “Great work, Eric. Maybe you can fix the common cold next.” Because he knew I pencil-whipped it. So, it was pretty funny. You know, I learned my lesson. Don’t pencil-whip these things, they’re important, and work through it. So.
Danny: I’m sure there are a lot of people right now at this moment looking at Eric, going, “What’s a fax?”
Eric: [laugh].
Amanda: Exactly. Hey, Eric, I remember you were telling me a story about your team and how you used to do, like, health inspector drills, that everybody sort of had a lane they stayed in to make sure that, you know, you always had a home run even though you were doing your checklist. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Eric: Oh, yeah. So, you have your tools and systems in place, but we all know in restaurants, as soon as you unlock the front door, everything goes wrong. So, when the health inspector would come in, somebody would come into the kitchen, say, “Hey, the health inspector is here.” Then we would have one person would just stop what they were doing, and they would temp all the hot food and make sure all the hot food was in temp, and we wouldn’t get hit on that. We had one person go through and do all of the cold food.
Then we had one person head into the walk-in, and they checked labels in the walk-in, they checked the cooling zone, make sure everything was being completed in the cooling zone correctly, and then we had somebody go down the line and check labels. We changed sani-buckets and towels, and then made sure the dish machine was operating correctly as well, and all the titration was where it was supposed to be. So, everybody had a job, everybody knew what they were doing. We called it the fire drill, and, you know, it really helped at the end of the inspection. And the inspector really knew what was going on, but they appreciated it, right because then they knew that they could come in and go, boom, boom, boom. And the inspections in a lot of my restaurants didn’t take as long as inspections in a lot of other restaurants because everything was set and ready to go.
Amanda: Awesome. I love that. Health inspectors, you know, can be our partners. You know, they’re not there to write you a whole bunch of violations. I love when the best restaurants do think of them as partners and they treat them that way. From the moment they walk in the door at the end of the day, they’re a guest. And they tell other people—you know, they’re people, and they tell other people what our restaurants look like, who’s leading them, so I love that.
Let’s talk about something nobody ever wants to talk about is pest prevention. So, you know, pest prevention is a really important part about running restaurants. I run restaurants down south. It’s hard. So, tell me some things that either you did when you were running restaurants, or that as a consultant, you recommend to your clients in order to keep your restaurants pest free.
Danny: I think organization is critical, keeping the place clean, not having cardboard in the restaurants, if you can unbox things in the walk-in or dry storage. And I think just having a really good, just a good clean kitchen routine, and taking care of your equipment, and being on a good regular pest control contract where they come out at the right intervals to make sure that everything is good, and getting your inspection and getting your service taken care of on a timely basis. But you know, I think it all starts—everything we’ve already talked about leads up to that. So, good cleaning checklist, good cleaning habits, clean as you go so you don’t have a mess all over the place, and then getting your pest control people out on a normal routine. Or if you think you’re having a problem, getting them out early between intervals, and just take care of it before it gets worse, right? So, a few things.
Eric: So, everything Danny just said, I fully agree with. Have a great pest control company. The one thing I’ll add is, a lot of times, your pest control happens on the back dock. Make sure your back dock is clean, organized, set up. I would send people out on the back dock to scrub the back dock every week. Make sure that it’s clean. Because that’s where they come in from, that’s an entry point.
And a lot of times nowadays, everybody’s going to these key drops on their trucks, right? So, you know what happens on those? Those guys come in, they prop that back door wide open. Any pest can run into your restaurant. No matter how clean the inside of your restaurant is, if your back dock’s dirty, they’re hanging out there, they see that door open, ooh, something new. They’re running in, they’re trying to get after it in there.
So, you want to make sure you clean your back dock, keep it nice and organized, and just follow up with your pest control. They give you recommendations, do them. Don’t just think it’s nothing. Follow up on it, take their advice seriously, make sure you do whatever they say, and if they tell you got broken tile underneath your fryers, make sure you get those broken tiles cleaned, fixed, ready to rock and roll because they’ll cause a pest harborage situation down the line that you do not want to deal with.
Danny: Yeah, and have an ongoing, whether it’s UV or pest control devices, you know, fly catchers and stuff in the restaurant, you know, the air curtain at the back door, obviously, in addition to cleanliness, just having some preventative things in place to just keep pests out before they get a chance to come in and create an infestation in your place.
Amanda: I love it. You know, your pest control operator is full of great ideas, but a lot of times, managers are too busy to engage. They’ll walk you through and say, “Hey, this door sweep is lacking. I think you should get a new door sweep.” Or, “I think you should do this.” And a lot of leaders don’t want to take the time to engage with them because they don’t always come in at the most opportune times.
And the other thing I would just add is, guests have access online to all of your inspections. And I can tell you that when a restaurant—like, I live in a pretty small community where there’s a restaurant that recently had been cited several times over six months, and they are now shut down. Like, permanently. And it’s a chain. And everybody knows about it, and it was just pest issue after pest issue. And so, the last thing in the world you want is to have that reputation because it takes years for that reputation to go away.
Danny: Yeah, it’s like the kiss of death. It’s hard to come back from [unintelligible 00:45:09].
Amanda: It is. It’s almost impossible. And for this particular restaurant, they weren’t able to come back from it, so it just goes to show you. So, that leads me to talking about close-to-open systems. So, as consultants, we always recommend really, really strong close-to-open systems. They benefit us in so many ways. So, I’d love to hear each of your perspectives on, you know, why close-to-open is important, and maybe giving some color to exactly what that is, for people who don’t know.
Eric: I’ll pull up a little checklist. We use these checklists on a lot of our projects; we give them to a lot of the operators we work with. But let’s just talk about close-to-open to start. So, when you think about close-to-open and you think about your one opening line cook coming in, and he’s chasing around, he’s looking for seven spatulas, he’s looking for ladles, he’s looking for spoons, he’s looking for scoops, tongs, all the utensils and all of the items he needs to open the station, he has to go chase them around. We call that close-to-open.
So now, at the end of the night, all of those utensils, all of your items that are needed to operate that station the next day, I like to put them in a hotel pan, I color code mine, right? So, if it’s the fry station, I’m wrapping blue tape around a full-size hotel pan, I’m wrapping blue tape around all of my utensils that are needed for that station. They go inside that hotel pan. So, my spider, my tongs, my all my ladles for the sauces and everything, any squeeze bottles that I need, anything that I need for the next morning is required to be back in that bin at the end of the night. So, my guy in the morning, time—or gal—does not need to chase everything around the restaurant.
How many times have you seen somebody just quit because they didn’t want to do that anymore? It’s horrible. It’s the worst part of the job. So, that’s what I like to do in restaurants: set them up, get a checklist, put it on the side of that pan, then everything goes in it. The cook, before they leave at night, they have to get that pan put back together, they put it on the station.
The manager comes through, all of the checklist is on the side of the pan. They can go, “All right, six two-ounce ladles, two four-ounce ladles, three spatulas, and I need a [unintelligible 00:47:34]. All right, you’re good, thanks. You’re good to go.” Right?
So, in my mind, that’s close-to-open. That’s what we’re doing. Also—sorry, Danny, I know I’m long winded. I’m taking a lot of this, but you can fill in the gaps—another part of close-to-open is when you remove things from the line and you put them in the cooler overnight because the line coolers aren’t the best in the world and we don’t trust them, they’re in the right spot. They’re where they’re supposed to be. They’re in the designated zones, so they know exactly where they are. They can go back, get them, restock the line. Everybody’s ready to roll when opening bell hits and we’re ready to rock and roll. So, that’s what close-to-open looks like to me. I’m sure I missed a couple things, Danny. Help me out.
Danny: Yeah, well, you know, I think it’s a couple of things. The day shift helps the night shift; the night shift helps the day shift, right? Sounds like a song in there somewhere, but anyway—
Eric: [laugh].
Amanda: It’s very kumbaya.
Danny: There you go. It just helps also build camaraderie because I’m sure we’ve all worked in restaurants where the day shift complains about the night shift and the night shift complains about the day shift, right? So, we want everybody to work as a team and we’re setting everybody else up for success as the course of the day. And then the other thing I always tell people, you know, if I’m closing, I know who I have, I’m not necessarily sure who I’m going to have in the morning, so the better I close, the easier it is for me to open. And then there’s also some labor savings potential because if you close right, you don’t need to bring people in as early in the morning to open.
And again, you find downtime in the evening to restock a pen or resupply your paper goods and all those sorts of things. And then lastly, you know, we had talked about a line check in part one of our podcast, and we can always use the line check as a closing or a shift change document also, where, if you put a star by all of the items on the line that need to be restocked before you go home, it’s just that it adds to the checklist to make sure that everything is ready and you’re ready to go for the next day. So yeah, good job, Eric. A lot of good stuff. I learned something there myself, so that’s great.
Amanda: I love that. And, Danny, you know, I couldn’t agree more. The night shift has a belief that day shift doesn’t care. And the more cohesiveness you can create between those shifts by setting them up and thinking, how am I going to make this person’s day better? And I’ll just take it a little step further. I used to challenge managers to do the same thing, right? So, leaving the office clean. As a leader, I hated to come into the office and have to spend the first 30 minutes of my shift organizing myself so that I could think. You know, we used to make it fun, you know? Put the aprons and towels rolled together, set them out, have the buckets upside down, you know? Because that just shows that person that I care about your day and I want you to start on a great note.
Danny: Yeah, exactly. Now, the one thing [unintelligible 00:50:36] up, you got to also be careful, which is where managers have to keep an eye on things. People get so busy closing that they forget about the guests. So, you got to make sure you’re still taking care of the dining room. You know, we recently did work for a client where they were still guests in the dining room, and half of the chairs were up on the tables because they were mopping the floors. I mean, there are just certain things you can’t do when you’re closing to open.
And we actually had a client many years ago that it was the manager’s job to deliver the last order leaving the kitchen to the guests to make sure that they had a great experience, so that, you know, if the kitchen, they were busy cleaning, they completely forgot about the KDS or the printer, and then the guest has a terrible experience. So, you’re still going to manage your guests. So, I just wanted to make sure we bring that up because that’s still job one. Even though you’re trying to get finished, you’re trying to get people home, people want to go home, you’re trying to manage labor, but don’t forget about the guests.
Eric: I was just going to say that Amanda’s a much nicer closing manager than I ever was. I wouldn’t wrap the aprons and the towels together. I would actually put honey on the phone receiver, and then I would call the opening manager as soon as I knew they were in the building, and they put the phone up to their ear and get honey all over their face. So, that’s the difference between me and Amanda [laugh].
Danny: You were [unintelligible 00:52:04]. Well, I’ve been known to, like, if I was opening and I walked into a dump, I would call the closing manager and make them come in and fix everything because then they know they’re not going to let that happen again; they’re going to make sure they do it. Now, those are pretty harsh, but every once in a while, harsh can kind of pay some dividends, right?
Eric: Right. It sets the expectation. And once in a while you have to do it, right? If you coach and teach and develop and they just don’t seem to get that aspect of it, sometimes it’s the wake-up call that they need, literally, in that case.
Amanda: Oh, my goodness. So yeah, Danny, I worked for—I was an [MIT 00:52:42] very early in my career, and I was working with a very experienced GM who had done it for 25 years, and I remember being in the office, and he called the closing manager, and he said, “Hey, bud, I want to know what time you’re coming in to finish your close.” That was it. And I was like, “Wow, okay.” And the manager came in, and you know, they had a conversation that stuck with me.
And I have to say, and I used that one or two times because it looked like they just turned the lights off and left. And then I wanted to also go back to something you said about the guest, and I think that’s a critical thing that we have to remember in restaurants is, I hate when they’ve broken down to the point where food can’t be prepared correctly, there’s some temperature danger things because they’re so worried about going home. So, I do think it’s a balancing act that requires leadership to be very engaged in all those processes at the end of the night. So, I couldn’t agree more.
Well, gentlemen, I have to say, so much information. I think we covered a lot of ground today. So, that’s a wrap for kitchen operations part two. I want to thank Danny Bendas and Eric Lauer for sharing all of their knowledge. And as always, if you’d like us to talk about a topic in the future, or you want more information about this episode, feel free to email us at info@therestaurantroadmap.com, or if you’re looking for some help and there’s anything we can do for you in the future, please feel free to email us at synergyrestaurantconsultants.com.
And as always, we hope you love this episode. And if you want to find us, you can look for us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcast, on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. So, we look forward to seeing you again, and thanks from Synergy and we’re trying to make the world a better place to eat. Take care, everyone.
Danny: Take care. Bye-bye.
Eric: Bye, y’all.
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.