How Peter Chang’s Legendary Restaurants Handle the Christmas Rush | Eater

"This Fairfax outpost is the chain’s busiest Christmas anchor: on a normal Saturday night the restaurant will do ~150 covers over three hours, but on Christmas its busiest location will do about 500 covers. For December 24 and 25 the operation deploys 18 to 20 cooks—many starting as early as 6 a.m.—and the prep work is staggering: according to Chuck Ye, manager, “the week of Christmas, the prep cooks at each restaurant must finely dice 30 pounds of ginger and 60 pounds of garlic,” roughly 3,600 cloves. The seasonal scale forces tradeoffs—no evening staff meal (teams grab pizza where they can), massive towers of takeout containers monopolize the pass, and the whole crew works overtime so those two days are “nonstop.” Financially, the stakes are huge: a typical busy night might bring in about $15,000, while Christmas can reach $50,000, which is why closing for the holiday remains a fantasy despite the toll. The team copes partly by turning the holiday into a competition across the 18 restaurants—each location strives to outdo last year’s net sales—so the chaos becomes, if not pleasant, at least team-driven." - Samuel Ashworth