Many of us go to all you can eat sushi restaurants. Ordering food could become a headache when the table is too big. There are over hundreds of items in the menu, everyone has different preference, but we only got one ordering sheet. So what is the most efficient way to order food?
One obviously approach is going through the list one item at a time, ask people to raise their hand and vote on how many dishes of each item should order. This approach is very inefficient, it takes forever to go through the list while we are starving. When the food comes, people forgot what they have ordered, so they just grab whatever they feel like eating regardless whether they have ordered it or not. This approach forget that we can submit order more than once. Regardless what we order in the first round, we’ll have to order the second or the third round. Why being so picky on the first order?
A better way to order all you can eat sushi is using pipeline and narrow it down approach. The goal of the first round is minimize the turn around time instead of getting an accurate order. Someone just order something everyone loves, like the most expensive item on the menu, sashima or popular sushi rolls, the lowest common denominator. Get the order into the kitchen to get the ball rolling, so that the food can show in the shortest amount of time. While we are waiting for the first order to show up, we have more than enough time to vote on the remaining items in the menu. Using this approach, everyone gets to eat what they like within the shortest amount of time waiting with an empty stomach.
I don’t know if you have noticed – the kitchen doesn’t serve the numbers we order precisely! If you take into the chef’s shoes and think, there is a table of 23 ppl per say, what would you do? (=WWCD? What would chef do?) Well, you want to make a communal dish that presents nicely and fills the stomach of everyone. If the order comes in 5 for one item, which means people would only want to try and see if it is good. If the order comes in 20 for one item, which means everyone wants to have a turn to fill up the stomach. Taking the pyramid of nutrition, everyone wants good portion of carbos, good food (ie. fish, salad) and junk food (ie. oily chicken wings, fried stuff)… Sometimes, it is interesting to see how people approach an issue and can find out the idiosyncrisies that each of us have. Certainly, putting into the restaurant boss’ perspective, things might come up a bit different. I agree that we were served pretty well that night, it may be the boss knows one of our friend there who may do significant reputation to the restaurant (food licensing?).
I really hope that we were taking some psych courses in UBC when we firstly knew each other.
The problem with Horace’s approach is that the group will spend most of their time figuring out what to eat instead of chatting on interesting topics such as Horace’s idea of efficient ordering. I guess to some eating is filling the stomach while to others eating is about having fun with the conversation.
When you are hungry, eat first, talk later.