Expediting

By Vince Basehart

May 16 -- Executive chefs the world over are required to expedite as well as they cook.

"Expediting" is chef talk for standing in the kitchen barking orders at other chefs as orders come in, ensuring a table’s dishes are ready at the same time for pick up, and barking at the waiters to do so before the demi-glace congeals.

Expediting is to a professional kitchen what choreography is to a ballet, as intense as launching planes from an aircraft carrier. It's not easy.

When it comes to expediting, none of the big celebrity chefs have anything on Santa Monica’s Cindy Kim. She is the co-owner, with her husband Jay, of Big Joe's, and she is a multi-tasking, expediting machine.

Big Joe's is the unabashedly mom-and-pop burger joint at 20th and Broadway, which has been spewing char broiler smoke from its chimney like a steamship for the past 50 years. The Kims are the establishment's seventh owners and took over in November of 1999.

While Jay can be found in the back slicing tomatoes or flipping burgers with a handful of other cooks, Cindy is working the register, greeting customers, taking cash, giving change, taking orders, calling them out to the cooks, announcing to the waiting customers when their orders are ready.

The small counter where customers place their orders is always busy any time of day. Typically, a line of office workers, nurses and construction workers winds out the door of the well-worn building and onto the cracked asphalt of the parking lot.

Cindy is unphased by the unending stream of hungry humanity. She is in the zone, engaging in a unbroken auctioneers-like patter communicating between the customer, herself and the cooks:

“Hello sir double cheese burger everything fries five dollars please your change sir thank you your pastrami’s ready thank you two chili fries diet Coke carrot salad okay thank you two fifty please hello ma’am hamburger no pickles three-fifty please thank you sir your grilled cheese hello how are you tuna salad wheat bread toasted no mayonnaise side cole slaw thank you sir your hamburger.”

On it goes, a kind of Korean-accented, short order cook’s Gregorian chant, for a couple of hours during the midday rush. During this monologue she is counting cash and counting back change, and marking the cardboard carry-out boxes with a Sharpie and sliding them to the end of the counter. In less than a minute the fresh-made order is placed into the box and is ready for the customer. This is the kind of operational efficiency Henry Ford dreamed about.

On top of it all, Mrs. Kim’s preternatural ability to remember a regular customer’s order is unnerving. She is calling out your order -- “cheeseburger well done extra pickles no onions” -- to the frazzled team of line cooks behind her before you have even stepped to the counter. It’s not unusual to serve well over 500 customers a day.

“I paint portraits,” says Cindy explaining her gift for memorization, “so I am used to concentrating on the faces of people. I guess that helps me remember their order by linking their faces to their orders.”

She may make it look easy, but she admits that when she and her husband first took over the restaurant a handful of years after they immigrated from Seoul, she was terrified.

"I was very scared for the first three months. I would tell my husband, ‘There are too many customers!’ I didn't know how to work the register. I would shake like this." She illustrates how her arms would tremble from stage fright.

"Some times she would cry," says Jay about his then overwhelmed wife.

Cindy was a homemaker for over twenty years. She and Jay raised a son who they are proud to announce works at internet giant Yahoo. Expediting orders at Big Joe’s is her first job outside of the home.

The Kims kindly spoke to me in Big Joe’s onion-perfumed combination storage room-office on a recent cool morning. Jay explains he was a long time Quality Control technician for Hyundai Motor Company in Korea, and later, Tijuana, before being talked into opening his own “American-style” business by his brother, who was already in the US when he and Cindy arrived.

It’s clear that if Jay is the business end of the operation, the once-terrified Cindy is now the talent. When Cindy and I were talking, Jay covered the counter for a moment. He quickly dashed back in, frazzled, and tapped Cindy on the shoulder, who rushed back out to handle the counter.

From the storage room I heard a chant like this:

“Good morning sir egg sandwich bacon crisp black coffee thank you sir four dollars hello pancakes sausage orange juice thank you ma’am your toast is done large coffee scrambled eggs potatoes well done yes sir thank you four dollars please ma’am eggs over easy…”