The wine you bought for $15 at a local shop is $45 at your favorite restaurant. The waiter knows exactly who gets what appetizer. And six entrées miraculously appear in one fell swoop.
We take these things for granted when eating out, but think about it: Why is the markup on wine so high? How does the waiter know who gets what? And how does the kitchen get all the entrées ready at once?
“If they know all the secrets, it’ll take the excitement out!” protests Tom Williams, co-owner of Rock Creek Restaurant in Bethesda.
We hope not.
There’s a bit of mystery and a lot of theater in dining out, but this exercise isn’t meant to be a spoiler. It’s simply a Q&A about how restaurants work—the pricing, the policies and the procedures you don’t see from the diner’s seat.
Keep in mind that the restaurant industry is quite diverse, so the responses to every “how do” may not be universal. In any event, if you’re the type of person who has to know how the card trick is done, read on.
What happens after you place your order?
Nowadays, most restaurants are equipped with point-of-sale (POS) computer systems. Like all information technology systems, a POS can be customized to fit the needs of the restaurant.
In general, after a server takes your order, he or she keys it into a computer (or a handheld device as they do at Cava in Rockville). The information gets relayed to different preparation areas in the kitchen, either on monitors or by a printer, so the staff sees what it has to cook. Drink orders are transmitted to the bar. 
During a recent lunch at Oakville Grille and Wine Bar in Bethesda, waiter Tirdad Moeeni took an order for a table of four—jotting down indecipherable notes on a piece of paper. No matter, because he then went to a computer alcove and punched in the order. First, his server number (1943). Then the table number (9). Then he selected from a screen that listed each menu item in a little box. He punched the “salad” key, then the “position 1” key, indicating the seat position of the diner. Then he hit “hearts of palm,” then “addition,” then “grilled chicken.” The diner wanted the dressing on the side, so he hit the “modification” key and selected “sauce on side” from the list of options. After entering each order, plus the drinks, he hit “send.” In the time it would have taken to walk into the kitchen, the order had been printed in duplicate at the hot and cold stations and placed in eye-level ticket holders.
This particular party didn’t order appetizers, but if it had, the courses would have been separated by a line of asterisks on the ticket. Then, shortly after the table had been served its appetizers, Moeeni would have gone back to the computer screen and hit the “fire” key, telling the kitchen to start cooking the main courses. In some kitchens, the chef verbally tells the cooks when to “fire” the dishes.
These POS systems do far more than tally orders. Restaurants can mine them for a load of data, including sales and inventory, as well as assign them tasks such as staff scheduling. At Oakville Grille, the system also is used to rank the wait staff each week: The server with the highest tip and sales average gets his or her choice of schedule for the next week—and a free pizza.
How does all the food get to your table at the same time?
For many home cooks, the most nerve-racking aspect of a big meal is making sure everything is ready simultaneously. Now multiply that by 40 tables with two, four or six people at each—all getting different combinations of appetizers, main courses and desserts. How do restaurants do it?
First remember that chefs aren’t chopping garlic for your crab cake’s tarragon aioli while you’re sipping an aperitif. Restaurant kitchens use an organizational system called mise en place, which literally means “put in place.” That means that all the sauces, stocks, condiments, chopped vegetables, salad dressings, garnishes and any partially cooked foods are ready well in advance and within easy reach of the responsible cook before service begins.
Once things start hopping, many restaurants assign a person to the tricky task of pulling it all together. Called the “expediter,” that individual may be the executive chef, the sous-chef or someone hired solely for the job.
Chefs like to compare the pace of a kitchen to a concert, with the expediter acting as the conductor. The expediter has the order for each table, or the complete score, and knows how long it takes to make each item on the menu. He or she directs each cook to start preparing the component at the appropriate time—similar to how a conductor may direct the trombone player to chime in, says Francesco Ricchi, owner of Cesco Trattoria in Bethesda.
“Everybody has to be playing on time and at the same skill level,” says Jeremy Hummer, executive chef and co-owner of Nest Cafe in Bethesda. “If one person is lacking or behind, it throws off the whole orchestra. The music isn’t pretty.”
Say the grill cook is busy talking to a waitress and overcooks the burger to medium-well—not rare, as requested. Meanwhile, the pasta and salad dishes ordered by that same table are ready to go. Letting them sit while the grill cook prepares a new burger means the noodles will get mushy and the greens will wilt. “In my restaurant, we’d remake the entire order,” Hummer says.
How do servers know who gets what dish?
Many restaurants play a numbers game: The seat facing the door is position 1. Then it goes clockwise from there, with the next seat position 2, then 3 and so on.
At Rock Creek Restaurant, as at Oakville Grille, servers enter each order into the computer by seat number. For example, “seat 1, butternut squash soup; seat 2, shrimp cocktail,” explains Rock Creek’s Tom Williams. Entrées are listed in the same fashion. All the information gets printed in duplicate in the kitchen, and the waiter or food runner has a ticket that identifies which seat position gets which dish.
Diners aren’t necessarily served in order, however. Sometimes ladies go first. At Woodmont Grill in Bethesda, the computer screen even has a “ladies” key to flag female diners. Also, some places have a policy of serving senior women before young things. If you’re really hungry, this may be the one time when it’s good to be old.
What do restaurants do with the bread and tortilla chips you don’t eat?
Nobody would admit they reuse bread as is, but a well-run kitchen doesn’t waste anything. That means bread pudding, croutons and bread crumbs. Or even, at one place, bird food. At Oakville Grille and Wine Bar, a kitchen staffer takes leftover bread to a local park to feed the ducks. Abby Ansari, one of the owners, says she also brings uneaten bread home to scatter in her backyard. “The birds come, the rabbits come and sit there munching,” she says. The critters’ clear favorite: the restaurant’s raisin-nut bread. “They really do love it,” Ansari says.
As for tortilla chips: They dump them, but usually there’s not much to throw away. Both Guapo’s and Uncle Julio’s Rio Grande Café in Bethesda report that most tables polish off two baskets, sometimes more. On a busy Friday or Saturday, Rio Grande can go through 300 pounds of chips.
Does the executive chef do most of the cooking?
No. As for what he or she actually does, “it varies from restaurant to restaurant,” says Damian Salvatore, owner and executive chef at Persimmon in Bethesda. “We’re a small place, so I wear a lot of different hats.”
Salvatore does the scheduling, the ordering, the menu-planning and inspects the deliveries. He works half of the lunch shift (his sous-chefs take charge of the other half) and almost every dinner shift, expediting the orders and cooking at one of the sauté stations.
That contrasts with some other chef-owners who have seen their restaurants expand and now spend less time in the day-to-day operation of their kitchens. “I have never had to cook on the line in my kitchens, except some really crazy days a long, long time ago,” says Geoff Tracy, who runs four restaurants, including Lia’s in Chevy Chase and Chef Geoff’s in Northwest Washington, D.C. Tracy says his main focus now is quality control and menu development.
At Lia’s, his executive chef, Peter Russo, concentrates on preparing the bases of dishes, such as the veal Bolognese, the balsamic reduction, the bacon vinaigrette and the caponata he was working on one recent morning. During the dinner hour, he acts as the expediter, taster and final arbiter, while his sous-chef and two other cooks man the sauté and grill stations, someone else prepares the pizzas and another cook assembles salads and desserts. Though he’s not cooking, Russo is always paying attention, at one point reminding a line cook to sear the duck breast over high heat. (Russo could tell from the sound and smell of the duck hitting the pan that the burner was on low.)
How are servers assigned to various tables?
As you might expect, restaurant managers often assign their most experienced servers to the more difficult sections—those harder to get to from the kitchen, or those that seat large parties. But not always.
Cava, which serves tapas, likes to post its best waiters in sections with lots of tables for two. These tables “ring higher” and want quicker service, according to co-owner Ted Xenohristos. Parties of four may want to share four tapas, but “if you’re two people and you still want to try the same four dishes, you’ll order them,” he says. That translates into a higher tab per person. Plus, parties of two “run out of things to talk about,” Xenohristos says. Once they’ve finished eating, they’ll go. “A party of six will sit all night and talk to each other.”
