I spent a day at Quartier Libre, a restaurant in Brussels near the European Parliament. With many office workers wanting a fast, high-quality, meal for lunch, Quartier Libre aims specifically at providing that. You walk in and seat yourself and pick up a small piece of paper from the table. Each person chooses four items from the paper by circling them and then putting them in a clip on the side of the table. The categories include meat, vegetable, grain, and other, but the only rule is that you get any four items for 13 euros. That includes tax and there is no tipping in Belgium, so that's the final price except for your drink. The server picks up the orders and takes them to the kitchen.

In the kitchen, they have spent from 9am to noon preparing anything that can be prepared in advance. This includes things like carrot soup, salads, carpaccio, meat loaf, potatoes, risotto, tabouleh, pasta, goat cheese with herbs, gazpacho, smoked salmon rolled with dill and goat cheese. These are variations on things you might eat in fancier restaurants, but with speed in mind. When the lunch rush comes, they might add a dressing to the item and set it on the tray. Or they'll microwave it to heat it up just before serving, like with a risotto they made that morning. Or they will pop something in the oven for 30 seconds to make it hot and crisp, like with their bread. Whatever they do, they do it fast!

And they are able to do it fast, and still have high quality food, because they thought about what recipes will work in this way when designing the menu. It also works well for them because they are in a great location to serve a lot of people, so the food doesn't sit around for long despite the amount of prep work they do in the morning.

When opening the restaurant, they came up with lots of ways to keep the costs down. They bought a restaurant that was not doing well, so the kitchen was already in place. They use terra cotta dishes which are very cheap, but still look nice given how they are serving the food. They made the serving trays themselves out of two layers of plywood and painted them. They painted black "chalk board" paint on plywood instead of buying real chalk boards. They run a motivated and efficient team of 5 (including themselves), getting more work done in a few hours then some people could get done in a whole day.

Here are some photos of their restaurant which should give you a better idea of what I'm talking about.