Switched my mise en place from quart containers to sheet pans and my ticket times dropped 4 minutes
Six weeks ago I was watching a cook on my line at the restaurant in Portland spend 20 seconds digging through stacked quart containers for chives during a Friday rush. I moved all my cold prep to half sheet pans with everything laid out flat, one layer, nothing buried. Now my hand just grabs and goes, no digging, no label reading. Last Saturday we did 180 covers and my average ticket time went from 19 minutes to 15. Has anyone else made the switch, or do you think quart containers still win for keeping stuff cold?
The digging is what gets you, right? Watching someone root around in a stack of quarts while tickets pile up is its own special kind of pain, and it always seems to happen at the worst time. Six weeks of flat pans and a four minute drop on a 180 cover night is real, that is not a small change. I feel you on the cold question though, because flat single layers do warm up faster than a deep quart, so the win depends on how fast your line moves through stuff. If your chives sit out for three hours either way, the pans are still fine, but you have to keep them rotated and not overfill. Feels like you traded a little hold time for a lot of speed, and on a Friday rush that is the right trade.