A mile a minute. If you never worked as a line cook and want to learn more, this is the first thing you should know. Seconds are precious. Objects of worship. A successful line is an efficient line. There is no such thing as down time. The ticket machine spits out a ticket in four seconds. A burger flips in 45 for medium rare. A pan on high heat takes eight seconds to heat up. There can’t be any down time. While that burger is cooking on the first side, orders are stacking on the ticket machine. There’s chicken roasting and a pork rib just walked in. Macaroni and cheese in a flash to clear room for the pan sauce and seasonal vegetables, you’re resting a burger and a salad just came through “first out” followed by a veggie sandwich and shrimp and grits and you look up and have to scan the tickets searching for modifications to relay to the grill cook. “Alright you got two mid wells one no l no o mustard on the side, both with bacon, one well done plain and dry, a rare plus bacon and avo no mustard, and that first mid well goes with a fried egg sandwich, the rare with a roast chicken. . .” This is typical. Not a busy night. If you feel overwhelmed then that’s okay. Maybe the grill’s not your thing. There’s always saute or fry or garde manger. Gotta learn to walk first right? The point here is one person can’t do it alone. You need to work together. Not only work but communicate. You need to know what everyone else is doing, where they’re at. Over time with the same crew you will get to the point where you just know what the cook next to you is doing, when they will switch to something else, and the right time to fire those chips, plate that mac, fire out that beet salad. But this is all surface, en medias res, the heat of the moment. You wouldn’t be able to do any of this if you hadn’t spent every second of the previous two hours, stocking, rotating, labeling, chopping, slicing. You simply wouldn’t be able to move fast enough. Sometimes it happens. Sometimes it has to be overwhelming. We would all like it to be this way everyday. When it is not, we spend our seconds, our minutes, hours, preparing, planning, cleaning, setting ourselves up for success. Efficiency. Making every second count.
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