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This month I’ve dedicated this space to focus on Food and Beverage items. Last week we discussed how to properly treat servers. This week will focus on the challenges our cooks face daily.
The restaurants in a large Active Adult Community are unique operations. Different than your normal restaurants like Chili’s, Texas Roadhouse, or Olive Garden, our restaurants offer a wide variety of food choices to a relatively small, captive audience – our homeowners. Businesses like those mentioned above serve a specific set of food every day. They don’t vary their menu and have some items prepared ahead of time. Their cooks can specialize in one style of food. Our restaurants cook to order, have different specials daily, and even change the style of a buffet daily. Our cooks must be nimble to cook made to order items or large catering events – many times on the same shift at the same time!
In addition, the volume of food orders in a short time window are a big challenge compared to our publicly owned counterparts. Those restaurants listed above will have come and go customers throughout the day, turning the entire restaurant over 3-5 times. Our customers tend to come in around the same times each day. At lunch, most of the tickets are rung in between 12:00-12:30pm. Most evenings, around 80% of our tickets will be rung in from around 5:15 to 6:00pm. At Palo Verde, we will basically have one seating of customers all evening. At Cottonwood, with the Ball Room events, the kitchen may be working on two banquets while also working on the regular dining room tickets. While most items on our menu will take 15-20 minutes to cook, your order might be in line behind another 50+ other tickets. This volume will cause an order to maybe take 45 minutes to deliver, so please be patient during busy times.
Keep in mind that what other people order at your same table may affect the length of time it takes to deliver everyone’s meal. A pizza or a filet mignon steak will take much longer to prepare than a simple salad. The staff strives to complete all the items on one ticket to come out hot and fresh together – which can be extremely challenging during the busiest times of day.
If you want to visit the restaurants and are pressed for time, it is best to place your lunch orders before 12:00 noon or after 1:00pm and your dinner orders before 5:00pm or after 6:45pm. We strive to provide the quickest and highest quality service, and a little patience goes a long way towards an enjoyable experience for everyone.
Steve Hardesty, General Manager
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