My prep station finally clicked after 3 years on the line

I used to take at least 20 minutes just to get my mise en place sorted for a Friday dinner rush. Last night I had everything laid out and ready in 8 minutes flat. The difference was finally ditching the sheet tray system and using 6-inch hotel pans for everything. Anybody else find a weird container swap that saved your setup time?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_anthony15d ago

My buddy Marco at the old place switched to using those little red sauce cups for his shallots and garlic and it completely changed his flow. He had this whole system of labeling everything with blue tape and a sharpie that was honestly more complicated than just grabbing the right hotel pan. But yeah, the dish pit war over pans is real. I started keeping my own stash in a milk crate under my station with my name scratched into the bottom of each one. Nobody messes with the scratched pans because they know you'll track them down during the rush.

the_alice15d ago

The 6-inch hotel pans thing is pure genius until you realize you now have fifteen of them in the dish pit at closing time and the dishwasher wants to fight you. I did the same swap about a year ago but my sous chef kept grabbing them for cold line backups so now I hide a stash in the walk-in behind the fish tubs. Took me two years of watching my station look like a bomb went off in a sheet tray factory to figure it out too.

the_alice15d ago

You know a guy who did something similar with those little deli cups for his herbs and garlic? @the_anthony made me think of him actually. This dude was so paranoid about losing his prep containers that he started marking them with a big red X using a paint marker. One night the new dishwasher saw the X and thought it meant they were ready for the recycle bin, threw the whole stash out. He spent the next shift digging through trash bags in the alley. Never saw those cups again but he still talks about it like it was a war crime.