Resilience and Restaurants

A friend of mine has a restaurant in the East Village (Grape & Grain — you should go!). It’s a small thing, seating maybe two dozen people. The fascinating part is how the chef — Adam Rule — generates consistently great dishes despite his “kitchen” consisting of 3 induction plates and a convection oven, all tucked into a corner.
I’ve seen him operating when

• • A group books the entire restaurant for dinner, and pre-selects the menu (“Could you serve everyone clams for starters, then pasta, the sea-bass, and pavlova for dessert?”
• • There are never more than a dozen or so in the restaurant, but as one couple leaves another shows up. This from 6pm to midnight
• • A dozen people suddenly show up, and proceed to order everything off the menu.

And in all these cases, the food always shows up like clockwork, the entire party gets their pasta at the same time, newcomers don’t sit around waiting, etc. You get the point, the service is exactly what you would expect at a good restaurant — seamless, unobtrusive, and excellent.

Now, think about that for a moment. Consider what it takes to be able to operate that production line, where you need to be able to — on cue! — generate consistently great output on a schedule that can vary all over the place. All this using tooling that is lacking in all sorts of areas. And let’s not forget the inputs, because they are ever-changing — the tomatoes today are sweeter than yesterday, the fava-beans are tougher, the cilantro is older, and so on.

The interesting part here is when you actually look at what’s happening behind the scenes at the restaurant. You’d like to think that everything is planned beforehand (“12 people showed up and ordered clams+pasta+sea-bass; execute maneuver 17-B!”), but that is just not the case. What you see instead is a constant stream of Just In Time corrections designed to make sure that the schedules stay on track

• • Pasta a bit too al dente? Add some hot pasta-water when tossing in the seafood, and by the time it gets to the table it’ll be just right.
• • Sea-bass got overdone? Chuck it and redo, but send out a plate of focaccia+fava-puree “Chef remembered that you liked this the last time, so here, it’s on the house!”
• • Plums too tart for the pavlova? A quick caramelization with sugar should take care of it

The genius behind the restaurant’s menu is that it allows them to make these adjustments on the fly, keeping things on track regardless of the issues at hand. To use the Cynefin framework (•) as a model , the kitchen staff

1. 1. Has a whole bunch of Obvious techniques at their disposal, that they use to deal with predictable situations (“prep the cheese plates beforehand”, “keep water boiling for pasta at all times”…)
2. 2. Keep their operations firmly in the Complicated zone, where they are constantly analyzing the situation based on changing inputs, and tailoring their solutions based on this.
3. 3. Avoiding the heck out of Chaotic situations, where the connections between inputs and outputs are unpredictable

In essence, the kitchen has built a Resilient system, where the end product (customer satisfaction) is maintained regardless of what’s going on behind the scenes.

Mind you, they’d absolutely prefer a Reliable system, where all the pieces function like clockwork all the time. But that’s also a restaurant that serves burgers, nachos, and so on . It’s assembly line food that is pretty hard to f**k up, but there’s also one of these on every corner, and sometimes two. However, as the menus get more interesting, customer interest goes up, as does unavoidable complexity. The next time you look at a menu in a restaurant, keep this in mind!

(•) Cynefin (/ˈkʌnɪvɪn/ KUN-iv-in) is a way of thinking about situations by slotting them into four categories — Obvious, Complicated, Complex, and Chaotic. I have a writeup about it, do go and read it!