“Too Many Orders in My Bar Restaurant Spain”
Too Many Orders in My Bar Restaurant Spain
What To do when Food Orders Start to Block-Up the Kitchen?
You can easily find yourself in this situation, especially during July and August.
It is very bad for your restaurant to accept too many orders at any one time. Too many orders flowing into the kitchen can only mean two things:
- Customers will have long waits for their food and you will loose valuable return trade. (Customers with small children hate to eat in places where the service is slow.)
- When a kitchen gets too busy mistakes get made, the food quality drops-off and incorrect orders arrive at the customer’s table. Result, the loss of valuable return trade.
How do you deal with this situation, once it has occurred?
If the situation has already occurred, it is too late to stop poor service becoming the result i.e. customers waiting too long and getting fed-up and even angry.
All you can do in this situation is a bit of last minute damage control:
- Instruct staff to tell all customers that there will be a wait involved in preparing their orders and in the case of customers who haven’t ordered also stress the unavoidable long wait.
- Instruct staff to stop taking orders for main courses for as long as it takes for the kitchen to unblock.
- Staff must slow everything down. Take more time on drinks orders, chat to customers.
- Only where customers refuse to wait to have their order taken, do everything you can to get them to have easy to prepare or pre-prepared starters.
The Proper Solution to Back-up of Orders in the Kitchen:
Correct Training
All staff should know to control the kitchens work flow
When you know that it’s really busy:
- Clean the table as guests arrive and strike up a bit of chat. Tell them you’ll be right back to take their drinks order (slowing things down.)
- Serve their drinks 5-10 min later and apologise (slowing things down.)
- Give them the menus 5 min after you have served drinks (slowing things down.)
- 5 min later take order for starters.
- As they finish their starters take the main orders and Tell Them There Will Be a Delay and apologise.
If you follow these simple procedures everything will flow smoothly, your customers will feel that they are important to you. They will realize that the wait is unavoidable and maybe they wont even notice that you have strung everything out. A lot of customers enjoy this more leisurely continental approach and the end result is that they’ll probably become Return Customers.
