process design in a chinese restaurant
there’s a chinese restaurant nearby where i work in downtown chicago that makes okay food and sells it on the super cheap (well, cheap for the loop). it was one of the first places i went when i started working downtown. i tend to go back once or twice a week.
fortunately, when i started going there it was less than a month old, so i’ve had a great chance to witness all the changes it’s gone through when growing and understanding its capabilities. unfortunately, while the food remains good (and still cheap), it continues to have some faults.
fault 1: its menu is very large. this isn’t uncommon for chinese restaurants. my favorite chinese restaurant in chicago unceremoniously plunks down a book in front of you, which daunts newcomers. my other favorite isn’t much better. you basically need to go to these places with veteran friends, who can all sherpa-style navigate the menu and get you to the delicious things; that, or you spend fifteen minutes fumbling through a new menu. i can drop 15 minutes doing this in chinatown or university district, but i can’t in the loop. neither can anybody else who comes in, because they’re all doing so on their lunch break and hardly have time to waste. so i think having a traditionally long menu doesn’t work so well for a nascent place like this - they need to find the best-selling items, and sell those. if they want variety, they can serve a different (and still limited) set of food every day, but then they run the risk of alienating people who want to come in as a routine. another way to get variety would be through removing the ready-made trays entirely and devoting that area to more kitchen equipment and staff, where food would be made to order - and it would taste fresher.
this restaurant also sells korean food, which is managed by different people. they only have nine korean items. there are over four dozen chinese items.
fault 2: they have to custom-make many entrees. if i walk in and want chicken and broccoli, i can walk out in two minutes because they have a tray of it sitting out, ready to scoop into a to-go box. if i want beef and broccoli, they don’t have that premade, so they ask me to wait five minutes. this issue comes out of having a menu that’s too large to fit premade trays of every single stirfry that they offer into their small facility.
fault 3: they sometimes don’t have ingredients. i asked for string bean chicken one day and was told that the price of string beans was too high, so they weren’t offering that. so why not remove it from the menu? put a strip of paper over the entry. or why not charge fifty cents more and buy the string beans? maybe someone will want them anyway.
fault 4: the place is organized awkwardly. the place is narrow, no more than 14’ wide; and in order to get to the rear of the line, you have to move down a narrow aisle that’s occupied, in part, by the line itself and a set of tables. rather than put all the business/food-making operations on one side of the restaurant, and all the seating on the other, they are intermingled in a confined space. this makes getting (and especially waiting for) food much harder.
so basically all of this prolixity, all of this niggling criticism, is to say that i came in during the lunch rush today, asked for beef and broccoli, heard them call it back six separate times, and then - a half-hour later - tell me that they forgot. i left and went to chipotle. that’s what i was supposed to do, right?
