Busy Kitchens
Meals that people love
What starts as a casual conversation for where to get brunch, ends up at a friend’s place on the couch eating leftover tater tots from a greasy pan. But occasionally you find a great place to get brunch because it comes up multiple times in recommendations from friends. What is it that makes these places so good that people were willing to wait over an hour for it?
We ended up going to a local brunch place in Berkeley after multiple friends put in a good word. When we arrived, I noticed how fast everything was moving around me — people are ordering, being served, and paying their bills. After ordering a crepe, I realized what made this place special. I loved the food. And I loved it enough that I was going to tell my friends about it and come back.
Customers love the crepes. They taste amazing, and there was a product-market fit from the minute the chef served this deliciousness to one hungry customer. What you make should work without a network effect. Someone should realize the value in this brunch without anyone telling them. Once that’s proven, then you can grow and make this available for everyone.
This brunch spot is a busy kitchen. I can tell they’re hustling hard and moving everyday to serve all their customers and sometimes they even fail to serve everyone. They can’t quite churn out product fast enough. Even after building their own state of the art furnace, there’s always room for improvement. That’s a good problem to have. It means that you have to grow, hire more people, and find ways to quickly deliver. Time and resource constraints force innovation and it certainly helps that there’s a line out the door.
Everyone wants to be at the ‘busy kitchens’ of the world and its apparent where these busy kitchens are — it’s where the greatest ‘chefs’ are. People who ship, deliver, execute. If you wanted to start your own busy kitchen, you’d want to hire these people.
Busy kitchens give life to the concept of moving fast. And as a builder, the options are simple: go start your own ‘busy kitchen’ or go join one and make something people love.
Zuhayeer Musa is a third year computer science major at UC Berkeley. Follow him on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/zuhayeer
