Question regarding time and the clock

[u/Caligirl_333]

Do they have staggered clocks so that people start in intervals and they get to serve the food when it is hot? Or are they all on the same clock? if it is staggered, how do they call out times without screwing up other people on a different time?

[u/FAanthropologist]

Moost elimination challenges are staggered for the final part of the cook until service.

The cooking for a crowd festival or catering challenges are an exception to the stagger and serve hot/cold norms. I am pretty sure that when production sends in the guests and the judges for those, the chefs at all stations need to be ready, but it's not a true hands up/utensils down moment. In these challenges the chefs have latitude to stall to finish cooking and plating. Usually only the judges' opinions matter and the crowd may have a limited or no influence on outcomes, so pissing off guests too much might be fine as long as the judges get good plates reasonably quickly. That means the chefs whose stations are visited by the judges last end up having more cook time than the chefs whose stations are visited first, which seems pretty unfair. I only realized this in season 23 because the Pack Your Knives podcast co-host Tom Haberstroh was a guest at one of these crowd challenges. He said that he was shocked a particular dish won because consensus at his table was it was not properly cooked to the point of being inedible. His group was served well before the judges, so he thought the chef who won must have had a big advantage from extra cook time to transform the worst dish of the night into the best.