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A restaurant is a promise: Walk in and we'll be ready. Select anything on our menu and we'll cook it for you quickly and well.

Because of that promise, chefs and cooks can't wing it. They must have all the resources (ingredients, tools, and personnel) to fulfill it. They must know the actions (recipes, procedures, and skills) needed to honor it. And this all must happen before the first order comes in, because once it does, they will have no time for
anything
but the act of cooking. Thus, for chefs and cooks, the act of planning takes precedence; it must
precede
cooking. Chefs become planning machines so they can become cooking machines.

Planning is primary for chefs in another way: It takes longer to
plan and prepare than it does to cook. As a result, the mind-set of a chef toward both his personal planning and the planning of his entire kitchen is different from yours or mine. Because planning is “first thought,” chefs invest much more time in the action of planning.

Chefs don't plan well because they are better than us. They plan because if they don't, their career is dead. We customers play a significant role in the chef's drama because we will wait patiently for almost anything but food. In restaurants, 1 minute can seem like 10 if we're hungry enough. Our blood sugar lowers and our temper flares. We actually
can't
wait for food without some kind of physiological reaction. We, alas, are the people with whom chefs must deal.

A chef can't change human physiology. She can't change the laws of physics. Cooking rice takes a specific amount of time. Heating a steak to medium-well will take a certain amount of time. Better and quicker processes may speed things up, but those processes also follow the laws of nature. Second, while human motion can be accelerated with mastery—chopping, carrying, sorting, flipping, and so on—those motions, too, take a certain amount of time, and a chef must be honest with both her abilities and her limitations. Because cooking takes time and because dinner starts on time, planning becomes imperative and forces chefs to develop a painfully honest relationship to time.

Being scrupulous with time means more than creating a list. Making a list is only half the job of planning. To complete the other half, the chef must square that list with the clock.
How much time will this take? How many things can I do in time given my resources? When, exactly, will I do them, and in what order?
Chefs cannot afford to take too many chances in the careful balance between time and tasks. Time forces them to make decisions.

It's hard to decide—literally, to kill off one thing in favor of another, as the word
decide
comes from the same Latin root as
homicide
and
suicide.
Chefs make good executives because they are executioners, killing off the nonessential.

The scheduling of tasks, negotiating between the list and the calendar, is at the center of the chef's approach to planning.

When new students enter the kitchens of the Culinary Institute of America, their chef-instructors present them with a blank form with which they'll become intimate over the next couple of years. Entitled “Mise-en-Place (Timeline),” this form will be their primary tool for learning the work of planning.

What's interesting about the mise-en-place form is that it's no simple “to-do” list. “Steps,” the breakdown of tasks, takes up only a quarter of the page. Another two sections ask the student to list
resources, “Equipment” on the left and “Foodstuffs” or ingredients on the right. But the most prominent of the four areas of the form is the daily “Timeline.” It isn't enough to simply list the tasks. From their first days at the CIA students have to
order
those tasks in a timeline, deliberating how long each step will take and when to do them.

Sequence is everything. You can't make the sauce until you've made stock; you can't make the stock until you've roasted the bones and cut the vegetables; you can't roast the bones until the oven is hot; and you can't turn on the oven until you're in the kitchen. Experienced students unpack nested tasks and break them down into their component actions. Then they put them in sequence.

New students aren't used to thinking this way. They wrote their high school term papers the night before they were due without scheduling either a trip to the library beforehand or time for revision after. Most kids don't properly sequence their actions because nobody teaches them how.

For chefs-in-training the timeline becomes an integral part of their culinary coursework. When they find themselves running behind or missing things in the kitchen, their chefs refer to the students' timelines. Usually, the chef can point to the error in the students' planning that caused the error in behavior.

By the time they reach their turn in one of the college's restaurants, students have caught the planning bug. They stay up late and spend hours designing their own, more detailed timelines. They divide prep into lists of things they need to do, things they can prep well ahead of time, and things they've already done. They distinguish the equipment they'll need before service from the things they'll need during service. For their stations, they make maps showing where they'll place their ingredients and tools for the different phases of service. They draw them on paper and color code them with markers, print out spreadsheets made on their computers, or write them on a stack of index cards.

Students also come prepared with a binder containing special checklists of equipment and procedures for each specific dish. Chances are you have a few of these in your home as well: They're called recipes.

The timelines and the recipes, macro-plan and micro-plan, represent the core of kitchen planning. Still, some of the better students, especially those to whom cooking feels natural, become flippant about planning. For CIA baking student Arbil Lopez, the value of making timelines became clear during her first practical exam. She didn't write out her equipment list, so she spent the first precious minutes trying to figure out what tools she needed to gather. She listed her tasks without the necessary timing. The lack of information made her nervous. Her nerves engendered more mistakes. Lopez's puff pastry collapsed on itself, and her éclair was dry. She delivered on time, but her product was not servable. The chef failed her. Lopez called her mother and cried.

“What could you have done better?” her mother asked her.

From then on, Lopez prepared. The culture of planning is such at the CIA that the students develop a remarkable ethical sense about it. “The only thing worse than failure,” Lopez says, “is passing by accident.”

When culinary students graduate and begin working in professional kitchens, they enter a world that often expects them to internalize that planning. Wylie Dufresne—the James Beard Award–winning chef-owner of innovative New York restaurants like wd-50 and Alder—developed his own approach to “becoming one” with his list. From the time he showed up on the doorstep of Alfred Portale's Gotham Bar and Grill as a culinary student, to working as a sous-chef for another young legend, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Dufresne began a routine. On his way home from work, he'd take out a small pad and pen and write down everything he knew he had to do the next day. He'd finish the list, tear it out of the pad, and crumple the list up. Then he'd go back to his pad and write the list again from memory, and destroy it. The next morning, on the way to work, he'd reconstruct the list again. It became a game. Every day, Dufresne would scorch a list into his brain. Years later, he still has shoeboxes full of notepads containing his old lists. Occasionally, he'll look through them—each list a little movie of what he was doing on one evening, many years ago. Dufresne instructs his chefs to make lists, not only of the things they know they need to do, but everything they
might
need to do—telling them that he'd rather have them cross needless items off their lists than miss an item and realize it only when it's too late.

À la carte
cooking turned the culinary arts into an industry, but it also made that profession a constant gamble. A successful chef must do more than cook well. She must predict what dishes her customers will want and when they will want them. The contemporary chef must stand on both sides of time: in the present, making projections into the future to calculate needed resources; and in
the future, counting the minutes and hours backward to the present to calculate needed time.

One of the first things that Dwayne LiPuma tries to teach his students is the simple concept of menu mix: predicting how much of each menu item to prepare. Every day at American Bounty, students will have to prepare 10 portions of each item per every 100 reservations. For example, if their reservations are at 40, they'll have to prepare to make four of each menu item. All the ingredients that go along with those dishes have to be portioned accordingly. Experienced chefs know that certain days and times of the year favor certain menu items more than others. For off-site events, planning starts with the plate itself: a vision of the finished dishes on the table. Then, a chef counts time backward:
How long will it take to plate and serve those dishes? How much time to finish those dishes for service? How much time for transportation from the kitchen to the off-site dining room? How long will the cooking process for each thing on that plate take before that? How long will the prep be for each of these dishes? How much time do I need to allot to gather those tools and ingredients? And how much time can I shave off these times by adding more bodies, by getting help?

Chefs' backwards planning skills are as applicable as they are enviable outside the kitchen. Before she became an academic and a noted scholar of culinary history, Amy Trubek began her career as a cook and caterer. She remembers the call she got the day her father got a job as dean at a prestigious midwestern university.

“Amy,” he said, “I want to send all the associate deans to culinary school.” Trubek, nonplussed, asked why.

“Because I have noticed how organized you have become since you worked in restaurants and went to cooking school,” her father replied. “You know how to start and finish projects following a deadline.” Trubek credited her transformation to mise-en-place and in particular the idea of working backward from time of service.

The constant for all great chefs and cooks is the effort they put into planning. The result of all that physical and mental energy they devote to planning is excellence and calm execution—in the face of both the expected challenges and the unexpected.

How do
we
greet the day?

Some of us relegate planning to the margins of our schedules and our psyche. We see planning as something that interrupts and delays our work. We plunge into our mornings with a quickly made list, if we've made one at all. We forget to consult our calendars for impending and future events. We make ourselves vulnerable to chaos. We get buffeted about by a timeline that is not of our own making. When we arrive at appointments, we're not prepared. When we're not in meetings, we forget what we should be doing. We neglect to handle the expected and thus have little bandwidth for the unexpected. We are
underplanners.

Still others spend
a lot
of time planning, perhaps too much time. Our lists are sophisticated and endless, our expectations for our days excessive. We pack our daily schedules with back-to-back appointments with others and tasks for ourselves. We do too much and fight to fit in even more. We're disappointed with ourselves every day. We've created for ourselves a different kind of chaos, self-imposed. We, too, have no bandwidth for the unexpected. We are
overplanners.