Chapter 22 — Exercises

Thirty-two problems, graduated from recall to judgment. Items marked † have worked solutions in the answers appendix; the rest are for you, a study partner, or a manager who wants to argue with you.

Unless a problem says otherwise, use the Bellwether figures from the chapter: 68 seats (56 dining in 17 tables — eight two-tops, seven four-tops, two six-tops — plus a 12-seat bar), a five-hour fire window in which the hearth clears 29 covers an hour, a \$46 dinner check, an 0.90 entrée attachment, a week of Tue 62 · Wed 78 · Thu 92 · Fri 120 · Sat 123 = 475 covers, and a 96-minute standard table cycle for a two-top against a 113-minute modeled actual. All Bellwether figures are constructed teaching examples.

A. Recall and definition

1.† Define the sequence of service in one sentence, and give two distinct reasons an independent restaurant should write it down rather than train it verbally.

2. Distinguish turn time from table cycle. Which one determines how many parties a table produces in a night, and why?

3.† What is a table touch? State who performs it, when in the sequence of service it happens, and why "How is everything?" is the wrong question.

4. Bellwether's blended seat turns are 1.40, its dining-room seat turns are 1.36, and its table turns are 1.72. Explain in plain language what each of the three measures and which one a host stand should be looking at.

5. What is the difference between SEND, FIRE, and PICK UP on a ticket? Which of the three requires human judgment, and what is that judgment about?

6.† Define the arrival shape and the peak-to-average ratio. Why is a night's total cover count a poor predictor of whether the kitchen will be in trouble?

B. Applied reasoning

7. A host quotes a two-top "about twenty minutes" and seats them in 27. A second host quotes the identical party "thirty to thirty-five" and seats them in 27. Describe the commercial difference between the two outcomes, and state the rule the second host was following.

8.† Explain, using the sequence of service, why the fire's peak hour trails the door's peak by about half an hour. Then state the practical consequence for a manager watching ticket times climb at 7:50.

9. Bellwether's rule is that no section may be seated twice inside four minutes. Trace what happens to a server, to two guest tables, and to the hearth when that rule is broken. Identify which of the four failure modes in §22.1 is the mechanism.

10.† A consultant tells an owner that their room can "obviously do 150 covers, you've got the seats." Using the three-route argument in §22.5, explain why the floor plan's number is not the operating number, and name the two assumptions that make it unreachable.

11. The chapter argues that a rising ticket time is a door problem rather than a kitchen problem. State the argument in your own words, then name one circumstance in which it would be false.

12. Why does Bellwether hold the twelve bar seats out of the reservation book entirely? Give three distinct reasons, one of which is not about revenue.

C. Compute this

13.† A 90-seat restaurant with a constrained grill that clears 34 covers an hour runs a four-and-a-half-hour fire window. (a) What is the flat-demand kitchen ceiling in covers? (b) If a Friday is booked at 130 covers with a peak-to-average ratio of 1.45, what is the peak fire hour and how many covers over capacity is it? (c) Convert the overage to minutes of backlog.

14. Bellwether's dinner covers are 475 a week over 52 weeks, and brunch runs two services of about 110 covers. Compute annual covers and show that they reconcile to 36,140.

15.† Compute Bellwether's annual dinner revenue at plan (24,700 covers at \$46) and at the managed case in §22.3 (499 covers a week). State the difference, then state in one sentence the condition under which the difference is real.

16. A Friday is forecast at 120 covers. Using the sequence-of-service standard, 96 dining covers must come from 17 tables. (a) At an average party of 2.6, how many parties is that? (b) At a 113-minute cycle and a 240-minute seating window, how many parties do 8 two-tops, 7 four-tops, and 2 six-tops produce? (c) Is the night physically possible? Show the gap.

17.† Figure 22.6 reports 146 seatings occupying seat-slots of 78 two-tops, 53 four-tops, and 15 six-tops, seating 385 covers. Compute the party-to-table fit percentage. Then apply it to a floor-plan ceiling of 123 dining covers and add a 28-cover bar to get the corrected room ceiling.

18. The hearth clears 29 covers an hour. Compute the hearth's minutes-per-cover, then compute the backlog in minutes created by a fire hour asked for 41 covers.

19.† Bellwether's book is 56% reserved and 44% walk-in across 475 weekly covers. Compute reserved and walk-in covers for the week, then for a Friday at 65/35 and a Tuesday at 45/55. Show that the five nights sum correctly.

D. Cost this

20. A 40-top private party is booked for 6:30 on a Friday. It deploys nine tables — 32 of the room's 56 dining seats — from 5:45 (setup) until 8:30, and the run is back in service at 9:00. Cost the room's opportunity: (a) how many à la carte covers those nine tables would have produced across the full seating window at a 2.18 table turn and a 2.6 average party; (b) how many they actually produce given only the 9:00 reseat; (c) the difference in dollars at \$46. Then state what the party must be worth per head to justify it, and name the chapter that prices that.

21.† Cost the eleven minutes. Using the seating window of 240 minutes, compute seatings per table at the modeled cycle (two-top 113, four-top 125, six-top 147) and at the standard cycle (96, 111, 133). Convert the difference to parties, then to covers using average parties of 2.0, 3.0, and 4.7, then to dollars at \$46 for a single Friday and for a year of Fridays and Saturdays. Finally, state the assumption that makes the annual figure fragile.

22. A restaurant's check-drop-to-settled segment runs 13 minutes. A handheld payment device is quoted at a monthly cost you should treat as unknown. Using only the cover arithmetic in this chapter, compute the annual revenue the device would have to not cost in order to break even, and say what other chapter you would consult before signing.

E. Design and build

23.† Take Bellwether's 17 tables and cut them into five sections for a Saturday, rather than four. Show your section table, seat counts, and composition. Then state (a) which section you would rotate a new server into first and why, and (b) the one table whose assignment you found hardest and what made it hard.

24. Build a staffing shape — not a cost, a shape — for a Thursday at 92 covers: number of sections, servers, bartenders, hosts, and bussers/runners, with clock-in and clock-out times, targeting the room's four-section structure and a 9:00 cut for one server. State the exact time you would stop seating the section you intend to cut, and why. (Chapter 19 owns the dollars; do not attempt them here.)

25.† Write Bellwether's host stand pacing card — the laminated sheet that lives on the podium. It must fit on one side, contain no more than seven rules, and be usable by someone in their third week. At minimum it must encode the quarter-hour cover cap, the double-seat rule, the seating rotation basis, and what to do when the pass reports a rising ticket time.

26. Redesign Figure 22.3's Friday arrival shape to bring the peak fire hour from 36 covers to 32 without changing the total of 120 covers. Present it as a table of nine half-hour seating slots, show the five fire windows, and state which specific reservations you would call and what you would offer them.

F. Diagnose this

27.† A 70-seat restaurant hands you the following four weeks of dinner data. Find the problem and say what you would do first. (Constructed teaching example.)

Your answer must (a) identify what is being managed and what is not, (b) name the single measurement that is missing from the table and would have caught this in week two, and (c) say what you would tell the owner, who is delighted with the trend in the second column.

28. A server's section consistently produces the room's slowest table cycles — 128 minutes against a 113-minute room average — but the highest check average and the best guest comments. The general manager wants to "fix the turn times." Using Figure 22.5's segment breakdown, describe the diagnostic you would run before changing anything, and name the two segments where a finding would justify intervention and the six where it would not.

G. Write this

29.† Write the large-party pacing policy for Bellwether — one page, addressed to the host team and the events salesperson, that explains why a party's covers must come off the à la carte book when the deposit is taken. It must contain the arithmetic (covers, quarter-hour cap, minutes of book consumed), the specific action required at the moment of booking, and one sentence explaining the consequence of not doing it. Do not exceed 400 words, and do not make a promise about the event's menu or price — those belong to another chapter.

30. Business Plan extension. Write the Service & FOH Operations section of the Bellwether business plan as it would appear in the finished document — three to five pages of prose, tables, and one figure. It must include the sequence of service with standards, the section and rotation structure, the host stand's operating rules, the reservation/walk-in mix with the hold-back logic, and a defense of the 1.40-turn assumption that states honestly both what supports it and what it conceals. Then add a one-paragraph "what would change my mind" note: name the single measurement, available in the first ninety days of operation, that would cause you to revise 1.40 upward or downward, and say which direction each result would push it.

H. Judgment

31.† It is 7:55 on a Saturday. The pass is running 34-minute ticket times. A regular — the kind of guest whose sixth visit this is — walks in with three friends and no reservation, and there is a clean four-top open. Seating them adds four covers to the worst fire hour of the week and pushes six other tables' entrées back by roughly eight minutes. Not seating them means telling a regular they cannot have a table they can see. Decide, and defend the decision in the terms this book uses. Then say what you would do differently in the booking so that this decision never has to be made again.

32. A restaurant discovers it can raise turns measurably by seating parties of two at two-tops adjacent to the kitchen door, where guests eat faster and leave sooner. Nobody is told, nothing is said, and turn time improves. Is this table management or is it something else? Make the case both ways, then state your own position and the principle it rests on.