How can restaurants present a menu with hundreds of items and be ready to prepare any dish from scratch within 15 to 20 minutes?

Employment and training of specialist departments to raise the efficiency inside the restaurant important study of the organizational structure

Cross-Utilisation is the key! Some basic core ingredients can be used to make many different combinations. Also, the creative use of special ingredients that catch attention on a menu will allow most restaurants to basically prepare a dish the same way as another, but with a different topping, stuffing, sauce, etc... and present it as an entirely different dish.

Firstly, if one looks at most huge menus, they are really mainly composed of relatively few basic preparations that only differ in a few ingredients.

The key factors that underpin an efficient kitchen.

 -- A well thought out menu that is manageable under pressure, given the team and the equipment.

-- 'Mise en place' A french term, meaning 'things in place', it’s a fundamental part of kitchen culture of preparation, especially prior to a busy service. A well organized kitchen is prepped up to the hilt with service fridges full and back up containers of produce stacked ready in the cold room.

-- The layout, division and distribution of labour in an efficient kitchen is well thought out and has the capacity for movement, work load and teamwork to flow effortlessly without bottlenecking on one section.

Any cooking that you do at home, is simply not approached in the same manner as a professional kitchen or done on the same scale. In a professional kitchen the dish is assembled and then garnished at the pass and sent.

The division of labour in a professional kitchen makes the whole operation run on a speed that is unfathomable in a home kitchen. Everything is divided into sections the work done on each section is somewhat repetitive. Most dishes come from a specific section some require multiple sections to prepare elements of it. The repetition allows each section to turn out a consistent product efficiently.

Starters are pretty much universally fast to prepare this allows the kitchen to get ready the main course and seem to be faster than they actually are.