The clock

The real way restaurants fail

When you’re sitting in a fancy New York City dining room ready to drop $100 per person on a meal, you make a few assumptions. One is that the restaurant is fucking ready. Each component for every dish is properly prepped and bulked out. The line cooks are attentive and not hungover. The front of house staff knows the ins and outs of whatever is on special that night. Even if you don’t understand the kitchen orchestra, you trust that it’s humming and in sync.

That’s often not the case. Instead, there’s the clock. The best restaurants — the top 0.1% — have a system to keep the clock at bay. The rest are always teetering up against the clock breaking them.

In the first episode of Season 4 of The Bear, Brian Koppelman strides into the kitchen and hooks up a timer. When it hits zero, the restaurant has run out of money and needs to close. That’s a grand, symbolic, macro clock. And then throughout the next three episodes, you watch the staff fight the daily clock that makes or breaks your favorite spots.

At one point in Episode 2, Tina leaves the pasta station to help Marcus finish plating a punishing number of dessert orders. He’s in the weeds, and she makes the call that she can sacrifice the health of her station for a bit so that the clock doesn’t crush Marcus all at once. When a pasta order quickly follows, Sydney leaves the pass and backfills Tina, like an NBA playoff defense in instinctual rotation following a blow-by.

The Bear is a superhero story. You’re watching people accelerate to god-level abilities in impossible timelines to propel a narrative. Your mileage may vary on how well it all comes together. I enjoy it. But the reality I’ve seen play out more commonly goes something like this: A pastry chef is behind plating a new dessert with far too many components. Or, really, the cook working garde manger has let too many dessert tickets pile up while they bang out more urgent salads and crudos. There’s not enough budget to have a dedicated pastry chef working service. The expediter, having taken their eye off the clock for multiple tables’ final tickets, calls out an urgent fire for eight sundaes. And this is where things get rickety.

Maybe everyone stays put. In a kitchen, you’re responsible for your own station. If you’re working the plancha and sauté is going down, that doesn’t have to be your problem. So you might see the clock only hurt this inexperienced, under-skilled, under-prepared cold-side cook. But a healthy collection of cooks has each other’s backs. They’ll start rotating. The fry cook will drop a round of croquettes into oil, set a timer, and hop over to garde manger to plate two salads. Except he gets there and sees there’s not enough clean lettuce. Or lemon juice. And the station isn’t organized like he usually has it, so he can’t find anything quickly. The clock is now his problem, too. And if you ordered the salad, it’s also yours.

I’ve been thinking about the clock more since

Matt Rodbard

and I talked about it on This is TASTE. It comes up when I watch The Bear and when I sit in dining rooms, especially newer ones. When you dislike a restaurant, sometimes it’s a core issue. The recipes are bad. The vibe is off. The service is distant. But more often than not, you’re the victim of the clock. In ideal conditions — enough prep time, a well-trained staff, reliable food deliveries — many restaurants can thrive. But that’s not reality. Good restaurants build systems to get as close as possible to that fine-tuned flow state, and great restaurants are staffed with killers who know how to slow down the clock when everything turns to shit.

Here’s an example of the kind of back-of-house perfect storm that ends with a diner having a middling experience at an otherwise very good restaurant, leading them not to return:

• An inexperienced cook clocks in right at 3pm, as scheduled, to start dinner prep for their station. Two hours until opening is probably not enough time for them to knock out every component and contribute to family meal, but having them clock in any earlier tanks the margins.

• The cook checks their prep list, left at the mercy of whomever worked the station the night before and how effective the early-arriving sous chef is. The restaurant got lit up yesterday just before closing. In that rush, no one got ahead on the sauces or knife cuts or measurements that happen during lulls. Worse, because the team didn’t prepare for the rush when placing orders, they’re down ingredients. Oh, and someone just called out sick, so their prep list is now on this undermanned crew.

• Service starts and it’s busier than expected from the jump. The absolute essentials are prepped but everything else is low or behind. Rather than working through pre-portioned components that are organized seamlessly across the station, cooks are taking extra time on knife cuts and sauce work that rattle the ecosystem. The food arrives late, overcooked and under-seasoned, and it gets worse from course to course.

I think that’s why

Eddie Huang

is so enamored with watching how well Chase Bray from Eel Bar runs expo. People like him are stars, making sure diners don’t suffer because of the clock. They help their cooks focus and prioritize. They hop on a station and flawlessly execute a plate or backfill prep. They motivate and move. My personal favorite version of this: Watching a dude run expo at St. John on a packed Friday night and shuck every oyster in house. I ignored my table all night just to watch him work.

Eel Bar and St. John are good because the food hits. The rooms are humming. The service is warm and leaves you feeling taken care of. That’s what you remember. They’re consistently great, though, because their teams know how to beat the clock, something you only see when it all falls apart.