Oof. It’s been a minute since most of us had to deal with a holiday. This might be your first of the season!

I wanted to share some tips that operators have developed over the years that made their holidays go more smoothly. The lynch-pin to a successful holiday is proactively planning for your rushes. The second that your kitchen gets backed up, it might mean chaos for the rest of the day. I’m focused on To Go since that’s my specialty. What are some Dine-In tricks you’ve used?

1. Prep front of house for rushes. Do you have a To Go area or an easily accessible part of the dining room? Consider setting out tables with printed out letters (A-D, E-J… etc.) above them to indicate the first initial of the last name. That way people can grab and go. Schedule at least one person for each shift to help customers find their bags. Make sure they have access to a tablet or other device where they can find orders in case a customer can’t find theirs.

2. Label piecemeal orders. If there are multiple bags for an order, make sure they’re labeled IN LARGE PRINT indicating what else the customer needs. Bag 1/3, 2/3, 3/3 for example. Consider color-coding items that they’ll need to grab separately. Attach the Expo chit to a bag. Highlight gallons of lemonade in yellow, for example, and cake in blue. Or if they should get different amounts of cake, put that number, in blue, on the chit. Just a simple “2” or “4” should suffice. Make sure they’re not similar colors in case you have a color-blind team member.

3. Split your customers up. If you’re expecting different behavior from different people as they enter your restaurant, consider handling them separately. If people have already paid, it’s not worth having them stand in the line where other people are paying. Open up two lines - “Prepaid” and “Order Here”. Not only does this condition pre-paid customers that your process is smooth and they should come back again, it informs your customers who have not ordered ahead that they could be in-and-out next time. Oh, and separate your dine-in customers too. Don’t make them stand in either line.

4. Use signage to instruct customers. If different customers need to do different things, use holiday signage to your advantage. You don’t need to print new signs for holidays, just use your everyday branding and ask teams to tuck them away for the next one. Consider refreshing every so often (or make them available to order a la carte). Put signs above the terminals/registers/Host Stand that tell people what each line is for. If they’ll need to do something much different, put a sign on the door. “Please see attendant for pre-paid orders”. If they need to get their cake or lemonade separately, put notes above each table. Consider using colors on those signs that match the colors on the bags. Need Cake? (in blue letters) See Attendant. Also consider putting signs with QR codes to order in the “Order Here” line for line-busting.

5. Pre-package what you can. Consider not just bulk beverages, but other things too. For pre-orders, maybe just have a couple of people prepping sides for the next 30-minutes of orders. If your holiday LTO has either 2 or 4 pieces of cake, consider pre-bagging them and writing the numbers on the bag. Or just bag them as two each and let your team know to grab 2 bags for larger orders.

6. Print pre-orders first thing. If you can get your online ordering system to fire kitchen chits/tickets before everyone gets there in the morning, consider it. Or some managers will pre-fire orders manually anyway. Organize them by hour or half hour (I’ve heard people organize them by highlighting the time, by paperclips, or envelopes). Then put them in the rail when the team should start those orders. They don’t see the tickets firing non-stop, so they don’t get anxious. They just know that the manager will provide the orders when they’re ready. Also, store them somewhere away from heat if you’ve got thermal printers. If you put them near the heat lamps, you’re going to have a bad time. Don’t risk it and give them a home. Oh, and remind your team the night before to replace the rolls in the printers with new paper. Better safe than sorry.

7. Ditch the KDS. This is going to be controversial. If you’re mainly or ONLY doing a limited number of options on the holiday, consider having your IT team remove KDS from print-routing for the day or just for specific items/LTOs. Your KDS is going to get overwhelmed OR your pre-orders will overwhelm it before you even open. Yeah, someone can clear it out, but maybe save them the trouble? Talk to your kitchen manager or team first to figure out how much it’ll mess them up. This isn’t for every kitchen or scenario, so use with caution.

8. Train your team. Make sure your team knows what their role is, and what everything means. If your lobby attendants should be pointing out the QR codes to people in the “Order Now” line, make sure you tell them. If you land on just using color-coded numbers on each bag for cake and lemonade, come up with a silly way to remember if the colors don’t make sense. “Remember - people are going to be really BLUE if they don’t get their cake.” Yeah, it seems silly, but sometimes that’s all you need to make something work.

   Good luck this weekend. YOU GOT THIS. Planning ahead and being proactive will give you and your team something to focus on, rather than the onslaught of hungry customers. I hope this helps.