Surviving half seven.

Stand and watch one Friday without touching anything. Where do tickets pile up? Almost always one place: the fryer, the person entering phone orders, or the pass. Everything upstream and downstream is running fine and the whole night is limited by that one point. Fix the constraint, not the average.

Every decision made during the rush costs time and creates errors. Set the specials, the prep quantities, the station assignments and the rota before service starts. A kitchen making decisions at eight is a kitchen already behind.

The pass is where an ordinary night becomes a bad one. One person calling it, with a clear view of every ticket in order of arrival, and nobody else touching the sequence. Kitchens that lose track of the order tickets arrived in produce the two things customers actually punish: long waits and wrong food.

The cheapest thing you can do at seven o'clock is extend your quoted times. It costs a small number of orders and it protects every order you take. Restaurants that hold optimistic times through a rush end up with cold deliveries and bad reviews, which cost far more than the orders they refused.

Some nights exceed capacity and no amount of process fixes that. On those nights the correct move is to pause online ordering or extend times sharply rather than accepting orders you cannot serve. Turning away an order is cheaper than serving it badly.