Ask George: How do restaurants number their tables and why? Evan B. Miami, Fl
The questioner continued…”I was in a small restaurant recently, no more than 10 tables, and I overheard servers talk about taking plates to Table 37 and checking on Table 19. Huh?”
The crux of the answer involves a restaurant’s seating chart, a one-page sheet that both delineates server stations and provides a one-look shapshot of every table in every room. In my opinion, it’s the most important organizational tool in a restaurant.
The chart is laid out very logically because so many staffers (front desk, bussers, servers, managers) refer to it and depend on it.
The numbering sequence begins at a pivot point—usually the kitchen door or the food window—with table numbers increasing from that point---one row of tables is the teens, the next is the 20s, and so on—so on-the-go food runners can literally count tables as they go--10, 11, 12, 13, 14--until they reach the table in question.
Seat numbers are logical as well, all of them pivoting off the same point and then usually working clockwise around the table. (As a reminder, many seating charts mark Seat 1 with an X.)
The system is both simple and brilliant: the food expeditor hands plates to a runner and says “Table 33, 1 and 2,” and the runner knows exactly where (s)he’s going and which seat gets what item.
Properly executed, there will never be any “auctioning of food,” as in “Um, who gets the salmon? ...and the strip steak?” Should auctioning occur, at least one person is being inattentive and/or lazy. In a nicer restaurant, it should never occur.
