Hotpot restaurant server - broth top-up and potside service SOP: act at the one-third line, announce before pouring, check both sides of a split pot

You are the server team lead at a hotpot restaurant. Write
"broth top-up and potside service" as an archivable
service standard, for training and floor checks.

1. Top-up trigger standard (core: proactive; never on
request)
- Patrol for level: when the broth falls to roughly one
  third of the pot's height, top up proactively - a hard
  standard that requires no guest to speak
- Patrol rhythm: every lap around the zone, sweep broth
  levels; at peak, one lap every [F] minutes
- A guest calling for broth = service already late; count
  it as a miss (no individual blame; the count exists to
  fix zone layouts)

2. Top-up procedure (the safety lives in the details)
1. Announce first: "Let me top up your broth for you" -
   the sentence finishes before the pitcher moves, and
   you confirm the guests registered it (especially
   with chopsticks in the air)
2. Stand to the side: position at the pot's flank,
   never square in front of a guest's arm or sightline
3. Pour slow along the wall: broth goes down the inside
   wall, no splashing; on a split pot, the correct
   broth for each side, never crossed
4. Eyes stay on the pot while the pitcher is in hand:
   confirm the level and that nothing splashed before
   withdrawing
5. Tool home: the pitcher returns to the zone station,
   never parked tableside

3. Parallel potside standards
- Skimming: when foam gathers into sheets on a spicy
  pot, skim proactively with the serving spoon into the
  scrap bowl - before it crusts the rim where guests
  can see it
- Split pots: patrol both sides separately - the clear
  side evaporates faster and usually runs low first
- Sauce dishes: offer a refill the moment one empties;
  don't re-set the whole table
- Spills: a pitcher or bowl tips on the table - people
  first (confirm nobody was scalded), then clean, same
  procedure as reset step three

4. Reverse discipline (the do-not-disturb list)
- During a blanching rush (multiple chopsticks in the
  pot at once): no table tidying, no ashtray swaps, no
  clearing empty plates - wait for the gap
- Mid-conversation or mid-toast: no reaching across
  the table
- Only genuinely parallel tasks run in parallel (top up
  and glance at the sauce dishes); the rest queues -
  never interrupt guests to save yourself a trip

5. Checks and coaching (written for the team lead)
- The metric: top-ups on request ÷ total top-ups, lower
  is better - the only quantifiable read on potside
  proactivity this standard has
- The fix: a zone with a high request share - check
  patrol frequency and the walking path first, people
  second; it's usually too many tables per zone

Output format: a sectioned document with checkbox-verifiable
items; "reverse discipline" gets its own section with the
why stated (restraint is as much a standard as promptness).

Why it is written this way

The crux of broth top-up is its time structure: the level falls continuously while guest attention is discrete - the moment low broth interferes with blanching, the felt experience is "suddenly unacceptable", and the call that follows already carries a complaint's tone. So the standard's core metric is proactivity, not speed: however fast, on-request service is already late; only patrolling ahead of the signal dissolves the problem before the guest perceives it. The request share of total top-ups is the one quantifiable, comparable, trackable number in this standard, which gives the check somewhere to land.

The top-up safety moves are written as five consecutive steps (announce, flank, pour slow, eyes on, tool home) because they only work as a full sequence - skip "announce first" and every later step pours soup past the back of a guest's hand. A real share of minor scald burns at hotpot restaurants happen inside this one motion, not from carelessness but because nobody wrote "speak before the pitcher moves" as an unskippable first step.

The do-not-disturb list is the rarest and most important section a service SOP can carry. Standards spell out everything to do and never when to do nothing - so diligence gets trained into interruption: chopsticks in the pot, and in comes a hand to swap an ashtray. Ranking restraint alongside promptness, with judgment criteria given (blanching rush, mid-toast), lets a server stand still, doing nothing, confident it's correct. That is the precondition for training judgment: first make it a rule that can be checked.

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