HOW TO HANDLE A BUSY FRIDAY NIGHT

clownhair: We have a delivery/carryout pizzeria. Since COVID19 hit, our sales have doubled, going from $3,000 on Fridays to $6,000. I’m looking for some advice on how to handle rushes. With our setup, an order comes in and gets printed at two stations: the make line (station 1) and the cut table (station 2). At station 1, we have one person making the pizzas and a second person assisting with accessory items, like subs, salads and stuffed-crust pizzas. At station 2, we have one person pulling most of the items out of the ovens and a second person finishing the items, such as adding lettuce, tomato and mayo to the subs, while also pulling items out of the oven as needed. But we are running way behind on fulfilling orders. It’s just chaos. How can we get a handle on this?

UncleNicksPizza: When I ran a store for one of the national chains, we routinely had $5,000 to $6,000 nights, mostly between 4:30 and 7:30 p.m. During this time, we had three team members up front, two dedicated to the phones and one working counter service. We had two team members slapping out dough, one saucing the skins, and two or three working the topping station in assembly-line fashion. We had two people on the oven—one primarily handling pizza and the other assisting in packaging side items. We had one expediter/router for deliveries and one runner bringing items called for by the line. With all those people, it got pretty hectic, but it was doable. brad_randall: I just did some consulting for a new operation that had four stations—pizza maker, grill, fryer and cutter. A manager stands at the printer and expos the tickets, coordinating and timing everyone so the appetizers come out together first and the entrees come out together second. On the busier nights, they schedule a second or even a third person on the make line, with a “captain” keeping the speed rack full of pizza skins and saucing and cheesing the pies, then passing them on down to be topped. That captain makes sure every pizza/salad gets made and that different styles are properly timed. Busier nights also require an additional person to make appetizers and desserts and assist on the fryer. Also, an expo was added to the waitstaff to help the cutter make sure everything gets made, plated properly and sent out to the correct server.

Now that sales have doubled for this DELCO pizzeria, the owner seeks advice for staffing his kitchen during rush periods.

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Along For The Joyride

As kids in Boston, Jesse and Joshua Jacobs grew up on a macrobiotic diet—brown rice, lentils, tofu, seaweed and the like. As the owners of Joyride Pizza, they opened their first two restaurants on the same day in San Francisco without a chunk of tofu in sight. Joyride Pizza is all about Detroit-style squares, featuring as many ingredients from Sonoma County as possible—we’re talking meats like pepperoni, chicken and bacon, plus organic Yecora Rojo wheat, which yields a bubbly, delicate dough with naturally sweet and malty notes. Jesse has never forgotten the day he chomped into his first real pizza at a birthday party in the 7th grade and discovered true gustatory joy. It was a welcome departure from his mom’s homemade pies featuring a quinoa cracker crust, sauce made from beets, and crumbled, fried tofu substituted for mozzarella. Stuck at home during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, Jesse, who also owns Samovar Tea with his brother, started tinkering around with sourdough starters in his home kitchen and decided to get into the pizza business. “Homemade pizza has brought so much joy to my family over the past year that my brother and I ultimately decided to go all in and develop the best Detroit-style pizza we could imagine,” Jesse says. Read the Jacob brothers’ full story at PMQ.com/joyride-pizza.

Showdown On The Softball Field

The competition for best-pizza honors is stiff in Fairport, New York, but Perinton Pizza and Pizza Chef settled a different question—who has the better softball team—on Labor Day, and Pizza Chef won the pennant. After Perinton Pizza owner Kevin Peters issued a fundraising softball challenge to his friendly rival on social media on August 15, Pizza Chef owners Derek and Amy Averell quickly reached for their bats. “Pizza Chef is the best at everything,” Amy told Spectrum News 1, with a laugh, before the game started. “We got our players out there, and we are going to take them down.” She wasn’t just talking smack—Pizza Chef won the game 26-7. Each pizzeria picked a favorite nonprofit and pledged to donate all funds raised to the winner’s favorite. The game racked up $715 for Golisano Children’s Hospital in Rochester, New York. Peters didn’t mind the loss and hopes to make the game a Labor Day tradition. “It’s nice to take a day off, after what we’ve been through for the past year and a half, and not have to worry about flipping pizzas today, but instead get out and have some fun on the diamond,” he said.