Running a large restaurant

I love to cook and have managed and worked in kitchens of several restaurants -- everything from dishwasher to lead chef and general manager. Here is a wonderful write-up of one day at Balthazar in New York City. That day, they served 1,247 people (a slow day). From the New York Times:

22 Hours in Balthazar
It�s 5 a.m. on a Friday morning, and I�m looking at the �vault.� It�s not actually a vault, but it used to be, back when this was a bank. Now it�s used to store wine, glassware and plates for Balthazar. Erin Wendt, the restaurant�s general manager, took me here, rounding off a tour of its underground hinterland, a warren of storage rooms that have been colonized, piece by subterranean piece, since the 180-seat brasserie opened in 1997. Beneath the dining room on Spring and Crosby Streets, and moving west, there is a cavernous prep kitchen, the chef�s office, six walk-in fridges and one walk-in freezer, a bakery prep station and delivery room, a laundry area, a rather bleak staff break room, kegs and soda lines, managers� offices, a room seemingly dedicated to storing menus and menu sleeves and, finally, beneath Broadway, a half-block away from the dining room, the vault. You can hear the N, Q and R trains trundling by with remarkable clarity.

For now, everything is quiet at Balthazar. The last guests from the night before left just a few hours ago, and the nighttime porters are still finishing their thorough scrub of the restaurant. But the delivery trucks are starting to arrive all over again, idling on Crosby. Men in lifting belts wheel hand trucks stacked high with food from across the globe: 80 pounds of ground beef, 700 pounds of top butt, 175 shoulder tenders, 1 case of New York strips, all from the Midwest; 5 pounds of chicken livers, 6 cases of chicken bones, 120 chicken breast cutlets; 30 pounds of bacon; 300 littleneck clams, 110 pounds of mussels from Prince Edward Island, another 20 pounds from New Zealand, 50 trout, 25 pounds of U10 shrimp (fewer than 10 pieces per pound), 55 whole dorade, 3 cases of escargot, 360 Little Skookum oysters from Washington State, 3 whole tunas, 45 skates, 18 black sea bass, 2 bags of 100 to 120 whelks, 45 lobster culls. That�s just the fish and meat order.

Produce comes in, too � 50-pound cases of russets from Idaho stacked head high and six deep; spinach, asparagus, celery, mushrooms, tomatoes � as do dry goods, dairy and some 500 pounds of insanely expensive peanut oil for the French fries. The restaurant employs six stewards to deal with deliveries and storage alone; they weigh goods and check them against invoices, putting everything in its proper place, keeping the Health Department happy. At a typical restaurant, as much as one-third of the overhead goes to food costs, and so efficiency is an imperative. �Monday, you�ll see,� Kelvin Arias, the head steward, tells me, �all the walk-ins will be empty.�

A long and wonderful meditation on food, business and management. Much more at the site.