Chapter 14 — Exercises

Items marked † have worked solutions in the answers appendix. Everything else is yours to defend. Where a question needs numbers you do not have, say what you would need and why — half of operating judgment is knowing which number is missing.

Reference figures for this chapter (all from the Bellwether plan, a constructed teaching example): hearth sustained ceiling 28 items an hour · one fire slot = 2.14 minutes · entrée split 44% hearth / 34% plancha / 22% sauté-oven · entrée attachment 0.90 · plan week 62 / 78 / 92 / 120 / 123 = 475 covers · ticket-time standard 14 minutes for entrées, 22-minute not-to-exceed · Hearth Chicken cost card \$8.52 against a \$29.00 price · fully loaded prep wage \$19/hour.

A. Recall and definitions

  1. Define mise en place in a way that a person who has never cooked professionally could act on, and explain why the chapter insists it is a system rather than a virtue.

  2. What is the difference between a prep list and a production sheet? Name the one column that, in the chapter's argument, "earns the paper."

  3. Define ticket time, and state the two measurement boundaries most often set wrongly.

  4. † What does an expediter mean by ordering a table versus firing it, and why does a kitchen need both words?

  5. Define all day. Give a two-sentence example of a call an expediter would make on a rail holding four tickets.

  6. Name the three legitimate reasons to 86 an item, and say which of the three is a management decision rather than a consequence.

  7. What is batch cooking, and what two things does every batch-size choice trade against each other?

  8. What is a pre-shift / stretch, what five things does the chapter say it covers, and why is its length capped rather than open-ended?

  9. Explain the difference between the statement "44% of Bellwether's entrées go to the hearth" and the statement "peak fire utilization is 67%." What is the denominator in each?

  10. In one sentence each, state what §14.3 means by the binding constraint and why the chapter argues it is the fire rather than the dining room.

B. Applied reasoning

  1. † A kitchen's ticket-time report shows a median of 13 minutes (standard 14) and a 95th percentile of 34 minutes. The chef says "we're fine, look at the median." Write the three-sentence response you would give as the operating partner.

  2. A chef proposes putting the hearth's lighting on the grill cook's opening duties "so the person who uses it owns it." Argue against, using the Friday scenario, in under 150 words.

  3. Bellwether's garde manger runs at roughly 56% utilization on a plan night while both hot stations run near 76–78%. Give two operationally different explanations for why a chef would not simply rebalance the menu to even those numbers out.

  4. The chapter claims that "an hour is the wrong unit for a station that behaves like a queue." Restate that claim in your own words and give a second example, from any part of a restaurant, where an hourly average conceals a failure.

  5. A manager wants to add the flatbread back onto the menu permanently as a bar snack, arguing that bar guests have nothing to eat. Identify the operations objection, the revenue argument on the other side, and one design change that would resolve the conflict without 86ing anything.

  6. † Explain why the garde manger station, not the hearth, was the first thing to break at 6:30 on the Friday, and why the fix was made at 4:05 rather than 6:25.

  7. Why does the chapter argue that a station going down degrades a kitchen non-linearly? Name the specific capability that is lost beyond the cook's hands.

  8. Your ticket times have fallen for three straight weeks while comps and remakes have risen. State the likely mechanism, the two reports you would pull, and the conversation you would have — with whom, and in what order.

C. Cost this

  1. † Cost the labor overlay on a Hearth Chicken. Butchering, brining, par-roasting, and chilling takes 4.5 minutes of hands-on prep per whole bird; a bird yields two portions; the fully loaded prep wage is \$19 an hour. Compute the labor cost per plate, the labor-loaded plate cost against the frozen \$8.52 card, the resulting food-cost percentage at a \$29.00 price, and the contribution margin. State clearly what does and does not change on the cost card.

  2. A kitchen par-roasts 46 half-birds for a Friday and uses 38. Whole birds cost \$11.20 (3.5 lb at \$3.20/lb). Compute the committed product left over. Then compute what that leftover is worth in two scenarios: (a) Friday into a 123-cover Saturday, and (b) Saturday into two dark days and a 62-cover Tuesday.

  3. † Compute the salsa verde batch decision. Weekly need is 96 portions at \$1.05 of product each. A batch yields 20 portions and takes 25 minutes; five smaller daily batches take 18 minutes each. Assume quality waste of 6% at weekly cadence, 2% at twice-weekly, and 1% at daily. Prep labor is \$19 an hour. Rank the three cadences by total weekly cost and state the annual difference between best and worst.

  4. Cost the stretch. Ten minutes, five people, \$21 an hour fully loaded, five services a week, 52 weeks. What does the pre-shift meeting cost a year? Now argue whether it is worth it, using at least one number from elsewhere in the chapter.

  5. Cost the flatbread 86 on the Friday. Twelve units were not sold. The flatbread is \$16.00 with a \$4.35 plate cost; half of the affected tables substituted a \$14.00 cold starter with a \$3.60 plate cost. Compute the contribution margin actually forgone, and state what capacity it bought in fire slots and minutes.

D. Capacity and throughput

  1. † Derive Bellwether's cover ceiling from first principles. Peak-hour hearth demand is $0.1188\,C$ from entrées plus $0.0758\,C$ from flatbreads and hearth-finished sides, where $C$ is covers. Set that against the 28-item ceiling and solve for $C$. Then re-solve for a hearth entrée share of 50% and state the cost of the difference in covers and in dollars at a \$46 check.

  2. Recompute the peak-hour ledger for a Friday of 138 covers with no private party — that is, all 138 covers arriving à la carte on a normal curve. Does the hearth breach 28 in any hour? What does your answer say about the cause of the Friday failure?

  3. A 40-guest party is booked with a set menu of hearth chicken, hearth-roasted fish, and a hearth vegetable plate — three items, all on the fire. Compute the party's fire-slot demand and express it in minutes of sustained hearth capacity. Then write the two-sentence email you would send the private-events contact.

  4. The dry-aged ribeye dwells 16 minutes against an 8-minute average and rests 6 more. Explain, with arithmetic, why it consumes two fire slots rather than one, and compute the peak-hour capacity cost of selling four of them in one hour.

  5. † A consultant tells the owner that the kitchen can do 151 covers because the floor plan says so. Write the 200-word rebuttal, showing the arithmetic and stating the one condition under which the consultant would be right.

E. Build the system

  1. Write a production sheet for a Wednesday (78 covers) covering six items of your choosing from Bellwether's menu. Every line must carry a par, an on-hand figure, a make quantity, a batch yield, and — the graded column — the forecast and coverage factor the par derives from.

  2. † Write the par-cook policy for the pork chop and hanger steak as a one-page operating document: what gets par-cooked, when, by whom, to what quantity, how it is cooled, how it is labeled and dated, how it is counted before service, and what happens if the count comes up short at 3:00 p.m. Do not write the food-safety limits yourself — state where they come from and who verifies them.

  3. Design the 4:30 mise audit for Bellwether as a checklist a manager could carry: no more than twelve physical checks, each answerable in under twenty seconds, each tied to a station.

  4. Write the closing kitchen log for a single dish that has a par-cook step. Include every field that would let a manager, the next morning, tell the difference between "we ran out" and "we never made it."

  5. Draft the ticket-time standard for a restaurant of your own choosing — real or invented — and derive each number from that menu's actual cook times rather than borrowing Bellwether's. Show the derivation for at least two courses.

F. Read this and find the problem

  1. † A kitchen reports the following week: Tue 60 covers / median 12 min; Wed 74 / 13; Thu 88 / 14; Fri 118 / 21; Sat 126 / 15. Ninety-fifth percentiles are 17 / 19 / 22 / 33 / 25. Friday's covers are the second highest of the week and its numbers are the worst by a wide margin. Name three hypotheses that would explain the pattern, and state the single piece of data that would let you choose between them.

  2. A production sheet shows "salsa verde — par 6 qt — on hand 6 qt — make 0." Service runs out of salsa verde at 8:05. Give three distinct explanations, and rank them by how you would investigate.

  3. Over eight weeks, a kitchen's median entrée ticket time rises from 13 minutes to 17 while covers, menu, and staffing are unchanged. Name four candidate causes and the cheapest test for each.

G. Write the memo, and judge the call

  1. Write the pre-shift briefing — spoken, under 200 words — that the chef delivers at 4:40 on the Friday. It must cover the book, the party plan, the 86s and counts, the station reassignment, and one thing that is not about food.

  2. † The sous worked fifteen hours on the Friday and did it well. Write the note you would leave for the following morning: what you are doing about it this week, and what you are changing about the schedule so it does not recur. Do not promise a hire you cannot afford.

  3. A line cook proposes that on nights the kitchen is behind, the pass should send whatever is ready rather than holding tables together, "because at least people are eating." Write the argument against, and then write the strongest honest version of the argument for — the circumstances, if any, under which they would be right.

  4. Ethics. During the Friday, a server asks the pass to "bump" three tickets in the system so the report will not show them over 22 minutes; the food is going out either way, and the server is trying to protect the kitchen from a conversation with the owner. Explain exactly what is wrong with this, what it would cost the business over six months, and what you would say to the server and to the owner. Then state the system change that removes the temptation.

H. Business Plan extension

  1. † Write the Kitchen Operations section of Bellwether's business plan, two pages maximum, using the checkpoint in §14 as your outline: station structure, entrée production split, prep and production system, par-cook policy, ticket-time standard, capacity, and closing controls. State the capacity as a menu-mix-dependent number and say plainly what the section does not settle.

  2. The plan forecasts \$1,550,000 in year one on roughly 95 covers a night. Using the hearth ceiling of about 144 covers, state whether the kitchen constrains that forecast, and identify the specific circumstances in which it would. Then name the two chapters whose material you would need before answering with confidence.

  3. Write the booking rule that protects a 28-an-hour fire, as it would appear in the operations manual — one paragraph, specific enough that a host could apply it without calling the chef, and specific enough that the private-events contact could quote it to a prospect.