Kitchen workflow: order routing, the KDS screen and prep time

Most of the noise in the dining room begins in the kitchen: the dish came out late, went to the wrong table, the side went cold. Almost none of it is about the cook's skill — it is about the path the order takes. Build that path badly and even a strong brigade runs late.

What the order path is

The chain from the moment a waiter rings in an item to the moment the plate is in front of the guest:

1. The order enters the system
2. Each item goes to its own station
3. The station cooks it
4. The dish is marked ready
5. The waiter runs it

In many venues step two does not exist: the whole order prints in one place and who cooks what is decided on the fly. At forty bills a day that works. At a hundred and fifty it does not.

Routing: a ticket per station

Routing means each item is sent automatically to the station that cooks it. Typical stations: grill, hot line, cold line, bar, pastry.

Running everything through one printer creates three problems:

• Cooks hunt for their lines on a long ticket — that costs time and creates errors
• The bar ticket stays in the kitchen and drinks arrive late
• Dishes for one table come out at random intervals

In a proper setup every menu item is assigned to a station, and every station has its own printer or screen. The room matters too: an order from the second floor can print on that floor's printer.

Three types of kitchen ticket

There is not one kitchen ticket but three:

• New order — the items sent first
• Add-on — what the guest added later; earlier items must not reprint, or the dish gets cooked twice
• Void — important enough that it deserves its own sound alert

Paper ticket or KDS screen

A KDS is a screen in place of a kitchen printer. How it differs from paper:

• Voids are instant. A paper ticket is already in the cook's hand; on a screen the line simply disappears.
• Time is measured. Every item records how many minutes passed from received to ready.
• Tickets do not get lost. Paper falls, smudges and sticks together.
• No consumables — but the screen has to be bought and wiped down constantly.

In practice many kitchens run a mix: a screen on the hot line, paper at the bar and the grill. The one rule is never to run both in the same station, or the two sources will start contradicting each other.

Prep time and coursing

A salad for one table is ready in 4 minutes, a skewer takes 25. Start them together and the salad goes cold. Start them in sequence and the guest waits too long.

The answer is coursing: dishes are grouped into courses and each group starts at its own moment. That requires a prep time recorded against every item.

How to establish prep time

1. For a week, record when an item hits the station and when it is ready
2. Take the typical value, not the average — one long outlier distorts the mean
3. Look at peak hours and quiet hours separately

That figure earns its keep twice: when calculating the start of the next course, and when answering a guest asking how long it will be. A guest will happily wait twenty minutes, but only if told up front.

Preparing for the peak

In most venues the flow concentrates into two or three hours of the day, and that is exactly where the system breaks. What helps:

• Prep work. Cutting, marinating and stocks must be finished before the rush starts.
• A shorter menu. Rarely ordered, slow items slow down the whole station.
• One person, one post. Moving cooks between stations during the peak costs overall speed.
• An expeditor. Someone who assembles the full order and decides who runs what.

What to measure

• Average time from received to ready — broken down by station
• Time from ready to picked up — that one belongs to the dining room, not the kitchen
• Voids — split by reason
• The five slowest dishes — menu cleanups usually start from this list

Where to start

1. Print the menu and write the station next to every item — the blanks show up immediately
2. Split printing by station
3. Give voids their own ticket format
4. Measure prep time for a week and flag the slow items
5. Build a prep list for the peak

The technical side of all this is getting each item to the right point and recording the clock. In VKassa every menu item is assigned to a station, tickets are routed by room and station, the kitchen screen shows order status in real time, and the received-to-ready time is kept in the reports.