If your sides are lukewarm, your steaks wait on remade fries, or your expo spends service shouting “hold the burger!”, you have a timing problem, not a cooking problem.
Where the gap comes from
A ticket arrives and every station sees it at once. Each cook does the natural thing and starts right away. But dishes take different times:
| Item | Station | Cook time | Finishes (all fired at once) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ribeye, medium rare | Grill | 12 min | minute 12 |
| Fries | Fry | 4 min | minute 4 |
| Caesar salad | Cold | 3 min | minute 3 |
The salad waits 9 minutes and the fries 8. That is the spread at the pass: the time between the first and last item of an order being ready.
What it costs
- Quality. Fries go limp, salads wilt, sauces skin over. Guests notice even when they do not complain.
- Remakes and comps. A side remade because it sat too long costs food and a cook’s time in the middle of a rush.
- Stress at the pass. The expediter becomes a human scheduler, holding, calling and chasing stations.
Five ways to close the gap
- Know your real cook times. Not the menu’s guess: the time a dish actually takes on your line. Measure it, or let your screens learn it from cooks’ START and DONE taps.
- Start the slowest item first, and the rest later. Count back from when the order is due so every item finishes together.
- Separate doneness and sides. A well-done steak is not a medium-rare one. Fries ordered with a burger cook at the fry station and must land with the burger.
- Respect station limits. A grill with two cooks cannot start six steaks at once. Plan around it, or the plan breaks in a rush.
- Re-plan when reality changes. A late start, an add-on or a voided item should move the waiting items, automatically and on every screen.
Doing all five by hand is impossible on a busy night. That is the job of a kitchen pacing system: PrepFlow plans every item at every station and keeps re-planning, so whatever goes in comes out together.
Questions
Can the expediter fix this by holding food?
Holding hides the problem: the food that waits is food losing heat or texture. An expediter can call out starts by hand on a quiet night, but on a busy one nobody can track every item at every station. Pacing does that tracking for them.
What is a good target for spread at the pass?
Aim for the items of one order to finish within about 90 seconds of each other. With paced starts most orders land well inside that.