Building a better back-of-the-house: a design for efficiency and quality

Nation's Restaurant News, March 27, 1995 by Alan Liddle

Pride is one of the key ingredients for Outback Steakhouse's kitchen staff

Bigger might be better in some situations, but Outback Steakhouse kitchen manager Don Lakey doesn't apply that standard to frozenfood storage.

Noting that the chain uses fresh foods almost exclusively, he says with some pride, "My freezer isn't much bigger than this [dining-room] booth."

In the Outback system kitchen manager, or "KM," is the highest-ranking back-of-the-house position at the unit level, and Lakey holds that title at a franchised Outback in Cupertino, Calif. He worked five years in company-owned Outback restaurants in Florida before joining Matilda Management Co. of Los Gatos, Calif., operator of the Cupertino unit and three other franchised outlets in the Golden State.

"Pride is an issue here," Lakey says. "Only two things come into an Outback unit prepared: our `bushman' bread and the cheesecake."

"Both those items are made to our specifications," Paul Avery, Outback vice president and director of operations, points out.

To master the high volumes generated by the Outback concept, the prototypical kitchen is designed to be about 3,100 square feet, or roughly the same size as the 220-seat dining room. Operations within an Outback kitchen combine the simple with the sophisticated.

The philosophy about raw product at Outback seems simple: Use quality goods, including Midwestern-raised, corn-fed Choice beef; boned fresh chicken breasts; fresh finned fish, including Ahi and swordfish, from local suppliers; and fresh vegetables.

White Gulf shrimp, in the 16- to 20-count range, is the only top seller handled in a frozen state. Even the fries, or "chips," as they are known at Outback, are cut daily from fresh potatoes at the unit level.

Though trendy in some quarters, wood-fired cooking is not the Outback way, as the Tampa, Fla.-based chain relies on natural gas for most of its cooking-fuel needs.

Outback's menu mainstays are seasoned steaks placed under weights on flat-top griddles to ensure searing on outer edges and even heating throughout. Searing helps seal in juices and fuse the chain's 17-spice seasoning to the meat, company sources say.

Other dishes, including sautes and seafood specialties, are prepared over 12-burner open-flame grills.

Fryers -- two different brands -- play key roles in the Outback back-of-the-house.

One brand, which boasts a quick recovery time, is used to cook the vast quantities of chips turned out by the chain and other foods, including coconut-breaded shrimp. The other make, while slower to recover its heat, maintains a more even temperature during the cooking cycle -- a characteristic that is critical in the production of Outback's signature Bloomin' Onion appetizer.

Convection ovens are used for assorted items, including potatoes, croutons, garlic toast and brownies, and a slow roaster handles prime ribs.

The Danish baby-back ribs sold by the chain as an entree and as part of its "drover's" combination platter are prepared daily in a smoker and brushed with barbecue sauce before being finished to order on the grill.

Aside from an IBM-compatible personal computer used by the kitchen manager to compile reports and generate forms, the Outback kitchen is light in computerization.

"If a piece of control equipment comes in that we think will be detrimental to customer experience, we don't use it," Bob Merritt, Outback's senior vice president of finance, explains. "We don't use kitchen printers, for example, and they've been state of the art for a long time. We want [good] communications between the servers and the people on the line."

That's not to say that some kitchen managers wouldn't appreciate a little more technological assistance.

Kitchen manager Lakey confides "it would be great" if his computer "could make up my scheduling year round." As it stands, his computer's contribution to scheduling takes the form of generating and printing out schedule templates with the preprinted names of his crew.

At company-owned and franchised Outback restaurants, hour-and-wage information is downloaded from the managing partner's computer every other week via modem by an outside payroll-processing firm.

Outback kitchen computers include software that can speed up monthly reporting, create the order forms faxed to suppliers or read to them over the phone, analyze product mix, and automate some inventory tasks.

But the kitchen systems are not networked with the terminals used by servers, meaning that sales reports must be manually entered into back-of-the-house systems before some management chores can be completed. The system does not verify hand-counted inventory by extrapolating sales data and comparing it with purchases, nor does it assist kitchen managers in creating production forecasts.

Daily production forecasts are created by Outback kitchen managers using historical sales-mix data, a calculator and gut hunches about how to adjust for factors, such as increasing customer counts tied to a maturing unit or differing weather patterns.