Pizza Today - August 2018 - 39

* FULL PAR / FULL PREP. Just like the makeline, doing one task

often and the whole way through is much less effort than setting it
up, breaking it down and then coming back to set it up again. If you
slice or do prep in your store, then your ideal prep should be based
on how long the product will last along with how much space you
have to store it. We slice our pepperoni at Andolini's, and no matter
how much we buy we will go through that in days (not weeks). It
makes all the sense in the world to slice it all when it arrives and not
every day with just enough to get by. This is a balancing act of freshness and food cost purchases, and I get that. With that said, if you
could have all your produce and meats that are in your walk in right
now sliced, prepped and ready, would you want it? If the answer is
yes, then do it all in one fell swoop, not a meandering effort every
day. Max out your pars so you don't lose a staff member to doing
prep in the rush. That's the death knell you need to avoid - losing
a table turn to a slow kitchen will always cost more than the extra
hour to get all the prep done ahead of time.
* APATHY AND ADRENALINE. You have all the systems in the
world, but no one uses them. Or, if they do, it's with passive
aggressiveness or just plain apathy. Once one person doesn't care,
all their subordinates zone out. At the same time, when someone
is into it, others want to get into it as well, no matter how hard the
task. Adrenaline starts pumping, staff gets a feeling of purpose and
everyone zones in on getting things done fast and correctly. I've
always found it amazing that a busy restaurant with everyone dialed
in and pushed to their limit will make fewer mistakes than a slow

restaurant with all the time in the world.
* TIME EXPECTATIONS. Running on adrenaline will breed a sense
of urgency. Having a sense of urgency is great, but it only lasts when
everyone understands what's expected. The only way to hit goals is
to have them defined without ambiguity. You need exact definitions
of how long a pizza should take to get made, how long from when a
ticket is printed to when it should be in the oven, to how much time
it should take to cut and ball a batch of dough. All these need to be
known down to the second if you ever want to get movement on
your table turns and your labor costs.
* DRI. You can say every pizza should be in the oven in five minutes
or less until you are blue in the face, but if you don't have a staff
member who is the "Directly Responsible Individual" (DRI) for ensuring that it gets done, then you will have a bunch of staff pointing the
finger when you ask why the kitchen is so slow. The DRI should be
in charge and in the mix on the task. For example, you can have four
people making pizzas, but one should be DRI for double checking
each pizza that goes into the oven to doubly ensure it's made the right
way to avoid a refire. A separate DRI checks for cleanliness, speed of
service and speed of prep. A DRI for everything is a must. Yes, the
buck stops with you as the owner, but as it passes staff members along
the way they need to be entitled to take ownership of those tasks. n

is the owner of Andolini's Pizzeria in Tulsa,
Oklahoma. He is a frequent speaker at the International Pizza
Expo family of tradeshows.
MIKE BAUSCH

http://picardovens.com http://picardovens.com

Pizza Today - August 2018

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