KITCHEN ORGANIZATION EMERGENCE AND DEVELOPMENT

Introduction tot he Partie System:

Partie is a French word meaning "part ( of a whole) or section." A Partie system

is one in which an operation's space equipment, and jobs are divided up into sections.
The Partie system for chefs evolved in the Escoffier era from an analysis of the tasks
needed for production and then a grouping of those tasks so as to maximize production
speed and efficiently. The original system lasted up to the 1930s and was designed
primarily for large restaurants, especially those in major hotels providing extensive a la
carte and table d'hôte menus in the classic French tradition. As the task of
the professional kitchen came to involve serving more customers in more and different
ways, it organization inevitably became more complex. Highly elaborate dishes required
highly specialized experts rather than general chefs who must handle all types of cookery
at once.
Modern restaurants and other foodservice systems with quite different styles and
sizes of menus cannot adopt the original Partie system in its entirety, but they can apply
the same basic principles of organizing to their own production systems. Such a systems
analysis approach should take into account the type of menu and style of service desired,
the people (staff and customers) involved, and the physical resources (equipment and
layout) of the kitchens to be used. It must organize all of these for efficient meal
production. The quantity and quality of work skills required will be determined by the
menu; the aim is to assign skilled work to the most skilled individuals so that their
abilities are fully used. Repetitive jobs, such as those on the grill or griddle, may be
broken down into simplified elements and assigned to staff with lesser or no skills. Many
jobs may be considered for "deskilling" in this way.
Each type of operation will naturally need its own unique organization for best
results. The organizational charts used in this chapter to describe the Partie system are
therefore for illustration purposes only. They should not be implemented without
extensive revision adapting them to precise actual purposes an needs. Nevertheless, the
way in which traditional luxury hotel kitchens originally developed their staffing is worth
considering in order to grasp the principles of their approach. Such historical knowledge
also gives insight into the various customs of the kitchen that have evolved over the
years.

Basic Divisions of Kitchen Work

Even in the earliest times and in the simplest kitchens catering to the public,
cooks probably divided the work of preparing and cooking so as to minimize effort. The
broad features of a kitchen organization soon began to emerge in divisions such as:
The storage of commodities, both perishable and nonperishable
The preparation of meat, fish, and poultry (larder work)
The preparation and cooking of pastries andesserts(the pastry)
The preparation of vegetables
The assembly and cooking of prepared food (the general stove section)
In small kitchens today, this basic arrangement can to some extent be contracted
and simplified. As kitchens increase in size and volume of work, this basic arrangement
can be expended as needed.

Historic Overview
Careme was typical of the great chefs who served royalty and nobility rather than
a larger public. After him, the organizational pattern that developed in the kitchens of the
large private clubs of London was emulated in much of Europe and North America,
especially at the modern hotels that began to develop near the end of the nineteenth
century. The great writer-chefs of this period, however, tended to write with a view to the
domestic cook of the private house. Most of the left behind little information about how
to organize work on a large scale. But the greatest chef of the Victorian era, Alexis
Soyer, did include kitchen organization in his book, The Gastronomic Regenerator,
written and published in the middle of the nineteenth century when the author was at the
height of his fame. In fact, this book, ;subtitled A simplified and entirely New System of
Cookery, included, in Soyers' words, "correct and minute plans how kitchens of a royal
palace to that of the humble cottage, are to be constructed and furnished.
 Soyer's kitchen plan provided for a larder department with specialized subsections
for each type of meat, a separate pastry and confectionery room, and an L-shaped kitchen
with different sections for roasting, cooking, and so on. The exact details of Soyer's
designs are unimportant now because they were based on methods such as open -fire
roasting and physical constraints such as nonrefrigereted storage that are now obsolete.
But the principle of designing the physical layout of the kitchen to use one's available
methods to best advantage remains.

After Soyer came Escoffier, the first famous chef to use his cooking talents in a
large modern hotel, where they would benefit the broader public. This presented or the
first time the challenge (which still exists) of how to serve a wide variety of freshly
prepared, excellent dishes to a large number of people. Escoffier met this challenge by
;adding the principle of task organization to that of kitchen layout, ;thus perfection the
Partie system. Escoffier studied the food and cookery work behind the recipes and
allocated tasks to different specialists so as to ;help produce even the most complex
dishes regularly, efficiently, and swiftly. This sometimes meant breaking down processes
ad allocating different tasks to different sections for the production of single dishes. Veal
escalope, for example, might be cut by the butcher, flattened and breadcrumbed by the
larder cook, sautéed in butter by the sauce cook, and then assembled by the chef, using
appropriate garnishes prepare dinother corners of the kitchen.
The Partie system today, however, is simpler than it was in Escoffier's time
because of several historical developments:
The introduction of machinery to do work previously done by people.
Changing public tastes toward simpler menus and meals
Economic factors that encourage the reduction of expensive labor and the
simplification of recipe and service'
The processing of food by freezing, canning ;and dehydration, which eliminates a
great deal of basic preparation work.
The Partie system will undergo ;still more change as automation, method study,
and work simplification are increasingly applied within the kitchen. Understanding the
Partie system will remain useful, however, because further improvements are more likely
to becoveived by those who know both the traditional system and new technological
breakthroughs. This ensures progress rather than haphazard changes which can hurt, or at
least fail to help, productivity.

Adaptation ad Summarization
The essence of the Partie system is the division of work into sections; each section
or Partie is controlled by a chef de Partie, ;who might be regarded as the section foreman
as well as a craft specialist. All the parties come ;under the control of the chef de cuisine,
who is aided by one or more souse chefs. In large establishments, a sous chef has no
Partie duties, although in smaller one, a sous chef may also serve as in important chef de
Partie. The chain of responsibility and the organization of a large kitchen under the partie
system is illustrated in figure 7 -1. In the largest hotels and restaurants, about a dozen
principal parties are established under the chef de cuisine and his sous chefs. The team of
cooks and all their assistants under the partie system is commonly called the "brigade".

Adaptations Due to Size

Only a few of the top luxury hotels still carry a brigade of cooks divided into
paties that include every section that will be referred to in the next chapter. As hotels in
restaurants have become more widespread, smaller, and more specialized, varied
adaptations of the partie system have taken place (figures 7-2 and 7-3) and new but
related systems have developed. Common variation include:
The garde manger - either alone or with a small staff - handling all the different
tasks relating to meat, poultry, and fish
Joining together two or more kitchen parties - for example, soup preparation and
vegetable cookery.
Having a broad three-part division into larder work, pastry work, and the main
kitchen work (even here, in very small establishments, there is often intermingling of the
branches of work)
 The smallest establishments - those employing nor chef and one or perhaps two
assistant cooks - cannot be regarded as operating even an adaptation of the partie system
because they lack sufficient people to apportion the tasks in a meaningful way. Each
person in such small establishments must therefore be prepared to do almost the full
range of tasks.
7-1 Arrangement of large kitchen brigade. From Fuller, Professional Kitchen
Management

7-2Arrangement of medium kitchen brigade. From Fuller,Professional

KitchenManagement
Chef de Cuisine
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Chef Patissier

Chef Garde-Manger Chef de Partie Chef de Partie

(Saucier, Rotisseur, (Potager, Entremeteur)
Poissonnier)
Vegetable and Breakfast
Kitchen Porter /Plongeur Assistants

7 - 3 Arrangement of small kitchen brigade. From Fuller, Professional Kitchen

Management
Chef de Cuisine (working)

Sours Chef working as Saucier and Poissonier combined

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Chef Garde - Manger Chef de Partie

(Potager, Rotisseur,
Entremeteur combined)
Vegetable Hand Chef Patissier
Kitchen Porter /Plongeur

Recipe for Organizing a Meaningful Partie System

Yield: An effective division of space, equipment, and people to perform the job in the
most productive way
Ingredients: Understanding of the establishment's goals regarding menu size and style of
service
Knowledge of the type of clientele to be served
Knowledge of the work skills possessed by individual employees
A detailed list of ;all equipment items and work areas
Understanding of the work procedures required to produce the items offered on the menu
Method:Lay out the equipment so that it can be used efficiently, preventing unnecessary
motion and effort. Items used for related procedures should be kept together, and
different groups ;of items should be kept in separate areas. Assign responsibility for each
work procedure to the person(s) with the most skill in doing it.
Adaptations Due to Modern Trends
Apart from simplification of the partie system in response to size limitations,
other factors increasingly affect the organization of the kitchen. For example, the
widespread purchasing of already prepared foods such as portion-controlled cutlets and
frozen vegetables greatly reduces and streamlines the food preparation workload.
Whereas a good staff ratio in a conventional system is one employee per twenty meals, it
is one employee per thirty-five to forty meals in some of the frozen meal systems. The
development of microwave ovens and other modern kitchen equipment has also
promoted significant progress. New and better apparatuses require continual changes in
the way kitchens are operated. The best future adaptations in kitchen organization will be
brought about by those who make a careful study of the work procedures involved in
light of new facilities, products, and techniques.

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