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

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

To smooth scheduling bumps, improve the consistency of the food and cover any other contingency that might arise, each person in an Outback kitchen is cross trained for at least two positions. Lakey says he uses that training to shake things up and keep them interesting from time to time by yelling "switch" in the middle of a shift sometimes. That command is a signal for crew members to rotate to a position other than the one they were scheduled for that night.

Avery says on a chainwide basis, the company sometimes organizes unit-level sales contests or other competitions involving teams made up of a mix of front-of-the-house and back-of-the-house staffers.

Lakey says that while an outside cleaning crew handles the floors at his restaurant, the hourly staff takes care of the cleaning and maintenance of kitchen appliances. He says those duties keep individual crew members on the job an additional 30 minutes to an hour after the kitchen is closed.

Outback's practice of holding monthly meetings for kitchen managers is well received by Lakey and others.

Avery says there are actually two monthly meetings: One is for kitchen managers in the Eastern half of the country, and the other is for their peers in the West. He says that each franchisee group or joint-venture-partner organization sends a kitchen manager to represent their group and that as many as 40 kitchen managers will turn up at a single meeting.

"After every meeting I come back here and duplicate it [for other Matilda kitchen managers]," Lakey says. "Someone always has a different way of doing something, and sometimes that way works for others and sometimes it doesn't."

Matilda Management Co. president Carl Hayes' long food-service career has included stints as executive vice president of operations at Steak & Ale and as consultant to dinner-house developer Al Copeland, founder of the Popeye's fried-chicken and Copeland's chains. Like many other franchisees and joint-venture partners involved with Outback, Hayes talks in proprietary terms when discussing the chain and why it is working better than most people ever imagined a steak-house operation might.

"We take a fairly simple concept -- steak house -- and apply some sophistication to it in terms of the spices and preparations and the way we do almost everything from scratch," Hayes says. "We also have a lot of people working for us who take pride in that [approach]. All these things add up."