how do restaurants track orders? (Another table got our order first!)

usignuolo

This is really a for information question.

OH and I eat out quite regularly and the other day we were going to a show, so popped into a nearby restaurant and ordered a couple of fairly basic choices from the menu. After a long wait a waitress emerged from the kitchen carrying what we assumed were our orders (the two meals we ordered). However she whisked past our table and deposited them on the table of a couple who had come in some time after us.

We called over our waiter and pointed this out and he disappeared into the kitchen and came out 5 minutes later and said our meals would be out shortly. No other explanation.

So I assume the waitress serving the other table had taken an identical order, after ours, and somehow picked up ours and delivered it to her table. This is not the first time this has happened to us.

Can anyone in the know explain a) how restaurants make sure they cook meals in the right sequence to match when customers place their orders and b) how they make sure they do not deliver the meals to the later arriving customers first, when more than one table orders the same menu choices.

Itismehonest

It really depends on how the order is taken.
In restaurants it's usually by a waiter/waitress writing on a pad with numbered sheets. It may have a more modern equivalent now but the principle is probably the same.

When the waiter/waitress takes the order they go into the kitchen & the numbered sheet with your order on is added to a board or spike.

The sheets are then taken off (hopefully in the right order) & the dishes normally shouted out to the chefs who start cooking the various items.

Mistakes like the one you describe usually happen because someone has got the slips of paper in the wrong order. Alternatively, it happens if a waiter/waitress saw what they thought was their order (but was actually an order previously placed by another waiter/waitress) & they delivered it to their table by mistake. They would be waiting to take 2 dishes to a certain table, see the served dishes waiting to go out & presume it was their order when it wasn't.

However, as different meals take different lengths of time to cook, sometimes people will be served out of order because that's just the order in which the meals can be served.

usignuolo

Thanks for that I thought that was what happened.

In our case it was clearly a case of another waitress seeing our order in the servery and taking it to her customers because it was definitely what we ordered - (OH ordered cod and chips while I had seafood spaghetti as we were at the seaside). After quite a wait, we saw these two exact dishes go past and be served to people who had sat down 15 minutes after us....

I can see how orders would get muddled up if the food is just put on the counter in the servery for waiting staff to collect. Surprised it does not happen more often in places like the fish restaurant we were in, where they serve lots of the same food. For example what happens if several couples all sit down over a 30 minute period and nearly all order cod and chips.

On previous occasion it has been made worse by the fact that when two identical orders come into the kitchen, they sometimes get merged into a single order and the staff only cook one set of meals.

This happened to my sister and I a few years back. We were in Cornwall, and ordered lobster, and were told there was a bit of a wait. Fine. Then half an hour later just as we were expecting it, another couple sat down at the next table and ordered lobster. Five minutes later lobster duly appeared and was served to them. I pointed out politely that I thought it was ours, but they said lobster was what they had ordered and what they were going to eat. Refused to give it up.

Ten minutes later I asked the waitress where our lobster was and she went into the kitchen and said that the lobster order had already been cooked and served - I pointed out not to us - and she went into the kitchen and came back to say they were now sold out................Grrr