Last Friday was especially interesting. Thankfully, a lot of people had made reservations, so we knew roughly how busy we would be, and when the staff should be arriving. We had a total of seven people working, which seemed a lot since we used to do our busiest Friday nights with only two servers and two people in the kitchen. However, it turned out that seven people were necessary.
The night went exceptionally smoothly, for the most part, although meals were coming out 5-10 minutes slower than we preferred. However, one important table (a large group of our regular customers who had a reservation for 5:30pm) had to wait FAR too long for their food. The problem was that five orders came into the kitchen within the space of about three minutes, and theirs happened to be the last (and quite complex, because it was a big table).
We sat down the next day and tried to analyze the reservation pattern and the times that all meals went into the kitchen (we record all of this information to the minute), and started to work on some process efficiencies which will hopefully mitigate this sort of problem in the future. We can never eliminate the problem entirely, but we are making some changes to ensure that this happens far less frequently.
Every day is a new learning experience. Friday turned out to be our biggest sales day ever, but we still have to learn to be able to handle even larger crowds. One of our first priorities will be to improve a few key bottleneck areas in the kitchen.
