It’s always been fashionable to compare restaurants to theater. After all, every establishment has a cast (the chef, the wait staff, the patrons) and an intricately designed, carefully lit stage (the dining room). The meal unfolds in three acts (appetizer, entrée, dessert), often with a musical score playing in the background, and the price of admission, when drinks have been included, often exceeds that of a Broadway show. But in reality, a successful restaurant is less like a stage production than an old-fashioned factory. The kitchen is a processing plant that takes in raw ingredients, fashions them into a product, then pushes that product out the other side. The front of the house is a showroom (yes, your friendly waiter is a salesman), designed to move the maximum number of customers through in the minimum amount of time. The trick is to make this prosaic, bottom-line business seem like entertainment. To pull this off in a small setting is harder than it looks. To do it night after night, on a grand, industrial scale, is as close to Broadway, in restaurant land, as you’re likely to get.
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