How Do Restaurants Make Food So Fast? (Tricks Revealed)

Fastly-served delicious food can truly boost anyone’s mood. Waiting for hours for the food can ruin a restaurant’s reputation. So, making food fast should be your priority if you are planning to start a restaurant business. Before going ahead with your plans, you must know the answer to the question.

How do restaurants make food so fast?

Most restaurants have a high-quality equipped kitchen with preheated ovens. Besides that, multitasking professional chefs can easily speed up the cooking procedure. Other than that, restaurants make sure to already prepare ingredients for most of the dishes, especially the popular ones.

Moreover, there are a lot of factors that allow restaurants to be as fast as possible with orders. It’s not something every restaurant can achieve easily. It needs years of experience and practice in busy kitchens.

The most obvious factor in making food fast is having an expert chef. A good chef can make it possible by handling more than one dish at a time. Besides this, there are more points you better know to get your restaurant game faster.

Let’s have a deeper insight into restaurants’ secrets and tips that they follow to improve their serving timing. Get into things a little deeper.

How Do Restaurants Make Food so Fast?

The restaurant kitchen and house kitchen are completely different in many ways. The restaurant kitchens don’t work like the ones in the houses. In restaurants, there are expert chefs for special or popular dishes and they know what they need to do.

In addition to that, restaurants don’t have to rush to the grocery store to get the required ingredients.

But these aren’t the only points restaurants practice. Get ready for those tricks because we are going to reveal the secret in this section.

1. Prepared Ingredients

Have you heard of the French saying “Mise en Place“? Most fast-serving restaurants follow this saying which means having prepared ingredients before starting the actual cooking procedure. This can be done at the beginning of the business day.

Having cut veggies, prepared sauces, seasoned meat, and every ingredient just in access can certainly decrease the food preparation time. Also, restaurants do all of this ingredient preparation before starting the cooking, especially for high-in-demand recipes.

2. Multitasking Chefs

Highly trained and experienced chefs can handle two or three dishes at the same time. A multitasking chef can certainly make a huge difference in the serving time of any restaurant. Handling more than one dish is something that can be learned after years of working in busy kitchens. Moreover, effective communication between chefs and other employees can also do a part to decrease the cooking time.

3. Restaurants Use High-Quality Cooking Equipment

Not to forget that restaurants have well-equipped kitchens. A restaurant’s kitchen is incomplete without an advanced oven, microwave, modern fryers, grills, and whatnot. So, advanced cooking equipment is one of those factors that go in favor of restaurants and make restaurants able to cook food faster.

4. Not Making Mess

Imagine your guests are coming over and you have to cook 2-3 dishes from scratch but your kitchen is an example of a huge mess. If that’s the case then you, my friend, are in deep trouble. So it’s better to keep your kitchen organized and clean all the time.

The same goes for restaurants. An organized and mess-free restaurant kitchen is one of the primary yet important points every restaurant should follow. Having utensils in place, knowing where the sauces are, and well-placed spices can surely enlighten the chef’s mood.

5. Preheat Ovens

Another common practice in restaurants to reduce cooking time is preheated ovens. Almost all busy restaurants keep their ovens and stove preheated to serve food faster. Now imagine, the chef has already prepared ingredients before starting to cook but the oven or grill isn’t heated enough. Will it help make food faster? No. It won’t. So, preheated ovens can never go wrong.

6. Sharp Knives

Cutting vegetables or meat faster can also play an important part in cooking food faster. Having a dull and old knife won’t do any good to cooking preparation. It will only make things worse. So, restaurants do have sharp knives in the kitchen so that chefs won’t have any trouble slicing meat evenly or cutting veggies.

7. Appropriate Use of Foil

Wrapping certain food items with foil after cooking can keep the food fresh and warm for a longer time. So the use of foil can help restaurants serve faster than expected time, thanks to its moisture-trapping ability. You must have seen foil wrap on your food order at least once or twice. The reason is to decrease the cooking time and keep the food warm.

How Do Restaurants Keep the Food Fresh?

Every restaurant needs to keep the food fresh if they don’t want to lose their loyal customers. There are a lot of ways that can be opted for keeping the food fresh.

• Walk-in freezers can come in handy to keep the prepped salad. Also, putting fiber cloth or a lasting wrapping on them can keep them fresh for a longer time.
• Not forgetting about regular monitoring of each ingredient and throwing expired ones.
• Every single drawer needs to be monitored once in a while to serve fresh food.

Do Restaurants Make Food from Scratch?

No, restaurants don’t make food from scratch all the time after getting the food order. Restaurants have prepped ingredients for almost all of their popular dishes. Besides, they have ready-to-serve salad plates, sauces, dips, and other important ingredients.

If a restaurant got a pizza order, for example, they already have prepared dough, cheese, pizza sauce, and other ingredients, this will make it easier to serve as fast as possible. At the same time, there are food items that need to be made from scratch such as Chinese. Chinese food items should be fresh and must be made from scratch to taste good.

In addition to that, few dishes are canned or preserved in the refrigerator and just need to be fried to make them serveable. Preserved food is another method to decrease cooking time. But high-end restaurants don’t practice it much.

How Do Restaurants Know How Much Food to Prepare?

Clear menus with a mentioned number of servings help restaurants with getting the idea of food quantity. One person would order something according to his/her hunger. On the other hand, 5 or 6 people would certainly order 3-4 dishes in good quantity.

Also, sometimes some deals are going on in the restaurant such as two-person deals, three-person deals, and so on. This provides restaurants with a clear idea about how much food needs to be prepared. Prepared menus are the key to keeping things running smoothly.

Do Restaurants Serve Microwaved Food?

Restaurants that want to be in the business would never serve microwaved food to the customer. The main reason for having a microwave in the restaurant kitchen is to melt the butter and reheat some ingredients such as baked potatoes.

Serving microwaved food should be banned because nobody pays only to have a microwaved meal. Well-reputed restaurants don’t commit this sin.

Conclusion

Restaurants can perfectly handle a bunch of orders at the same time. Effective layout of the kitchen, organized drawers, regular monitoring, preheat ovens, and prepped ingredients can surely help in making food faster.

Fast cooking needs years of practice and the multitasking abilities of the chef. Not only that, but smooth and clear communication between the chef and waiter is one of the important factors that should be practiced in each restaurant.

I hope you get some useful knowledge and value from this blog post. It’s time to reduce your cooking time by following the above-mentioned tips and tricks and utilizing that time in other productive activities. These tricks would surely help you if you’re going to open a restaurant. Happy Cooking!