At age eleven, James Passafaro, co-founder of opsi, helped plate a dish for the first time during a special dinner at the Perona Farms restaurant. That night, he worked side by side with culinary giants Ming Tsai, Daniel Boulud, Jean-Louis Palladin, and Robert Irvine. James didn’t know enough about the chefs to be star-struck, but there was something about that night that kindled his desire to be a chef. “It wasn't like, wow, this is Jean-Louis, or wow, this is Ming Tsai,” James says. “It was like: wow, these people are having fun. They enjoy this. These are their friends, and like, this environment seems f*#cking cool.”

Restaurant kitchens are dynamic, fast-paced environments where priorities change with every passing minute. Before service begins, chefs spend hours preparing their kitchens and teams for success, and the work of keeping a kitchen efficient and organized does not stop when the last guests leave. Every service presents familiar and new challenges for a chef to juggle, so it's key to control whatever variables you can. 

So how can software for restaurant kitchens improve workflows? Well, when we think of the restaurant kitchen, we romanticize them. We picture a tough yet inspiring head chef and leader who helps to conduct the entire kitchen into an orchestra of efficiency. Most often it's a dynamic environment that can present an array of organizational challenges on a daily basis.