Are you only cooking one menu item repeatedly, or relying heavily on a single piece of kitchen equipment?
Let me show you how I serve five completely different dishes in 15 minutes.
Sometimes it takes 20 minutes depending on my physical condition or kitchen flow,
but the system itself is highly stable.
If you run a small pub and want to increase your menu variety without adding labor,
this might help you reconfigure your kitchen workflow.
1. Core Logic:
- Pre-prep essential ingredients
- Begin with dishes that have the longest lead time
- Use all kitchen appliances in parallel: oven, 5 burners, 1 fryer
- Complete all dishes simultaneously (multi-skilled cell work in Toyota Production System)
- During peak time: Avoid bottleneck dishes or delay their service (Heijunka: production leveling)
2. Essential Tool:
5 kitchen timers. These act as fail-safe mechanisms to prevent overcooking (equivalent to Toyota’s Andon system).
3. My Kitchen Setup
- Oven: 1
- Burner: 5
- Fryer: 1
4. Menu Example (Lead Times)
- German Egg Casserole (Hoppel poppel) – 15 min in oven
- Currywurst – 13 min: boil sausage + sear at 72°C core temp
- Sauerbraten (Svíčková in Czech) – 10 min reheating on burner
- Goulash – 8 min reheating on burner
- Schnitzel – 3 min deep fry (pre-breaded and stored in fridge)
5. Timeline Breakdown
- 0 min: Start Hoppel poppel (oven) – Start from the longest lead time
- 2 min: Start boiling sausage for Currywurst
- 5 min: Start reheating Sauerbraten
- 7 min: Start reheating Goulash
- 10 min: Taste-test stews & finalize seasoning
- 12 min: Fry Schnitzel / Heat bread in microwave (3 min) / Prep Currywurst sauce
- 15 min: All dishes completed and ready to plate
Pro tip: Short-lead items like schnitzel or sausage searing are performed at the very end as “intensive final tasks.” Heating bread is passive and can be done earlier if needed.
6. Buffer Strategy
Execution isn’t always perfect. To absorb variation, I use a psychological buffer:
As soon as the order is received, I start cooking.
Meanwhile, my staff serves beer, snacks, or a mini dessert.
This gives customers a sense of rhythm and buys me 2–3 extra minutes.
This lets me operate solo with low labor costs—a survival tactic in high-labor-cost countries like Korea.
7. Menu Design Tip
Each menu should be assigned to a separate cooking tool.
(1 Dish = 1 cooking tool)
Example: if French fries and fried German cheese sticks are ordered together,
both require the fryer but at different temps and prep steps.
Cheese sticks become a bottleneck.
So I either delay or mark them as sold out during rush hour.
I hope this system helps small pub owners maximize output and minimize labor using smart workflow design—just like Toyota would.
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