The problem

A kitchen scheduling problem — and why getting it right is hard.

One grill. One stove. A New York City lunch rush.
Which order do you cook next?

Every plate at Le Petit Renard is cooked to order. Get the sequence right and the night flows; get it wrong and the plates run late. We need to discover a simple groundrule that lets everyone in the kitchen make the best possible call on what to cook next.

The goal

Our goal is simple: a single groundrule for our kitchen so that every table is served on time — and all together, so no one sits watching a friend eat while their own plate is still in the kitchen.

The fewer minutes anyone's left waiting, the better the night — technically speaking, we want to reduce the latency to, ideally, zero.

The problem

Get the order of cooking wrong and it shows — here are four nights a careless groundrule mis-scheduled, plates stacking up behind the busiest station and landing minutes late.

Four service nights the kitchen badly mis-scheduled, each piling up minutes of lateness — Four nights gone wrong: every × is a table served late — and the lateness adds up fast.

What we can't change

We don't touch the kitchen, the recipes, or the concept — Le Petit Renard stays exactly what it is. The only lever is sequence: the order we cook things in. This is the line we have to work with —

each is one cook or pan working at once — the fewer, the tighter

Cold prep & miseburgerfriessaladsteaksoupsalads, starters, all the cold work

The grillbottleneckburgersteakevery steak and burger has to pass here

The stovebottleneckpastasouppasta and soup share the single burner

The fryerfriesfries and anything fried

The ovenburgerfinishing and melting

The passburgerfriessaladsteakpastasoupevery dish is plated here, one at a time

Holding shelf∞steakresting and cooling — no cook tied up

How we solve it

One simple groundrule, found by search rather than written by hand. Our approach lays out how.