The Power of a Setup Checklist
I spent the last week in San Francisco, helping to put on a 500 person seafood event.
It was the largest budget event I've ever been apart of, and the second largest from a guest count perspective. Total seafood flown in: 1,100 lbs 🦀🐟🦐
The guests in attendance were tech founders, owners of 9-figure product companies, and most notably, the Crown Prince of Norway (a clip of his speech at the venue, here).
Anytime I jump back into the kitchen these days, I get this incredible opportunity to road-test and refine new frameworks I've been working on for you folks.
One thing I spent time pondering: at that scale, all tasks reach a kind of "critical mass".
NOTHING is a "quick job" when you need to do it 500 times. It's not even because tasks become more complex, it's just math.
Tasks you wouldn't normally put as a line item on your list now require planning around.
Need to plastic wrap your hotel pans? 45 seconds times 11 hotel pans is nearly 9 minutes.
Gotta portion the fish? 6 seconds times 500 portions is nearly an hour.
We even came to the realization in the 11th hour that the way we cut the asparagus for one of the presentations wouldn't "eat" quite right. It took one chef on the team over 90 minutes to re-process all of that asparagus, just hours before guests arrived.
For those of you that work in high volume, this might feel like a "duh" no-brainer.
But for some of the chefs I was working with at this event who were used to 20-40 person dinners, it was a rude awakening for them to realize how much time needed to be allocated for tasks.
To account for this, because I was pseudo-managing the culinary team, I experimented with a new type of task management system I wanted to share with you here. I don't quite have a name for it yet, but for today let's call it the "Setup Checklist".
This meant I was operating with two lists:
My standard Prep List (free template available) would manage daily tasks, and I would re-write it every day (we prepped for 3+ days in anticipation for this event)
The Setup Checklist would serve as an "ideal outcome" snapshot. I would reverse engineer the Prep List based on what actions were still left to do to get us there.
Take a raw trout dish we did. The Setup Checklist was:
Portioned trout
Blended sour cherry & porcini oil sauce
Smoked trout roe
Bamboo bowls on trays on speed racks
Picked cilantro flowers from the farmer's market
Plating tools out
To create this list, I would attempt to "time travel" to just before service, and picture myself walking around to each station and asking: "what do we need to execute this dish?"
Each of these could be "toggled" open to reveal prep tasks. For example, Portioned Trout is really:
Get trout out of shipping boxes
Setup butchery stations
Skin trout filets
Clean fat off of filets
Separate tail sections, loins, and belly pieces
Slice loin pieces for service
Cure remaining trout
Cryovac trim for tartar
etc.
If I just had a singular "all encompassing" Prep List for EVERY task, it would've been overwhelming. Just doing the math on my example above, if 1 component had 5-7 sub-tasks, times the 14 dishes on the menu, that'd be a Prep List with over 500 tasks on it 😳
Said another way: right before service, I don't really need to know about the fat being trimmed off of the trout. I need to know: do we have the portions ready?
Another reason this helped our execution is because certain parts of the Setup Checklist are necessary, but not able to be done in-advance.
Take "fryers on" as an example. That can't be done a day before the event, but it can destroy the service if you forget about it.
With the Setup Checklist, I could add Prep List tasks to ensure that someone staged the fryers, tested the power supply, stocked the fryer oil, and more to ensure that they could be ready, but I wouldn't have "straggling" tasks on the Prep List itself.
If you haven't already done so (and I'm speaking to both the managers reading this, as well as the folks running stations), creating a Setup Checklist for yourself allows you to benefit both in the planning process as well as in the moment right before service to ensure nothing has been forgotten.
Then, you can focus on delivering an incredible experience and doing your best work 💪