A few weeks ago, I visited the Prince Regent in Marylebone, and the experience sparked a fresh focus on kitchen efficiency.
I began chatting to the manager, who was perfectly suited to the pub, being a superbly energetic character who invigorated the place while managing the troops and the crowd. She really was impressive. But the kitchen, well, that was a different story. It wasn’t her territory, and she felt as though she was stepping into someone else’s place when she walked in. She didn’t feel the same sense of command as she did on the other side of the doors.
So, my colleagues and I began to educate her on the running of the kitchen – the ebbs and flows of the team, the layout, the process and the movement of equipment and food in and out. She was in fact our trial house for kitchen efficiency, so we spent a long time learning what we needed to do in order to facilitate her drive to run a highly effective kitchen.
We taught her about the six-foot rule, stepping off the line, and all the other key kitchen habits. In time, she became more comfortable with the running of the kitchen, moving from judging the kitchen entirely on the GP, the quality of the food and speed, to having a proper understanding of how the kitchen worked. Prior to this, if the food was slow, she let the kitchen have more labour, which of course led to the team asking for more than they needed as the hours would suit their needs, and not the needs of the business.
The moment the penny dropped for her; she uttered “This is just the same as the bar but with food”. Good enough for me. She was now in command of the kitchen. This was the first great step in our kitchen efficiency consultancy, which we considered when laying out how we could roll this out into over 1000 pubs with varying levels of food, kitchens and skills.
How many of our front of house management team feel comfortable in the kitchen? How many know the processes and can spot when things are going wrong? How many work there on occasion and can step in when we are short? Whoever can and does all of these things has the attributes of a multiskilled manager. My recommendation of course it that every member of the management team should be able to do all of the above in a normal site, except if the food skill required is extremely high. In much larger sites, this might be different, but the smaller you are, the more important it is that your team are multiskilled.
Kitchen efficiency is still, for many, the great untapped opportunity in our industry. One of the more obvious benefits here is ensuring that your team always have something to do. No more standing at pot wash with their phone, going out for another cigarette break, or over-prepping. There are less obvious signs of an inefficient too; a badly laid out kitchen, a kitchen that is not ready for service, a kitchen where the head chef either does all of the work, or none of it. Poorly laid out line fridges and storage are too. And, if you can’t spot them, you are at a big disadvantage. Like the manager at the Prince Regent, you may be reliant on outputs, not inputs. In the end, front of house may suffer, which is the last thing we will want this year, as we are going to have to compete even harder for value.
We all need the energy, passion and organisation skills of the manager at the Prince Regent!
Alastair Scott is CEO of S4labour and owner of Malvern Inns.
