In this article
Behind every evening where nobody was forgotten and nobody was interrupted stands a structure, not a mood: the brigade de salle. It is the dining room's answer to the kitchen brigade, it is a century older than the word "front of house", and most restaurants run a half-remembered version of it without ever having named the roles.
Ask who is responsible for table twelve tonight and the honest answer in many restaurants is "whoever is nearest". That is the absence of a brigade. The brigade de salle replaces it with one idea: every table belongs to one person, every person belongs to a section, and every section reports to one head of the room. Everything else — the runner, the commis, the sommelier, the host — exists to keep that one idea true when the room is full.
This guide walks the seven roles one at a time, in the order the room actually uses them: what each one owns, who it reports to, how many seats it can hold, and when a restaurant needs it and when it does not. Then it sizes a real 60-seat room four ways, from bistro to tasting menu, so you can see the same floor go from three people to twenty-one — and what each version costs per cover.
At the bottom you put in your own seats, your style and your hourly cost, and the calculator returns your brigade role by role, its payroll per cover, its share of your net revenue and the average spend that brigade actually needs. Everything computes in your browser; nothing is sent or stored.
Where the brigade de salle comes from — and why it still runs the room
When Auguste Escoffier took over the kitchens of the Savoy in London in 1890, César Ritz took over everything on the other side of the pass. Escoffier organised cooks into parties; Ritz organised waiters into rangs — the French word for a row, a rank, a section. The two systems were designed together, for the same dining room, and they only work together: a kitchen that fires a course in perfect time has failed if nobody on the floor was responsible for that table when it landed.
The classical brigade Ritz ran was steep: a directeur de restaurant, a first and second maître d'hôtel, maîtres d'hôtel de carré for each quarter of the room, chefs de rang, demi-chefs, commis de suite, commis débarrasseurs, a chef sommelier with his own commis, a trancheur to carve at the table and a chef de vin. That is a hotel dining room of 1900 with two hundred covers and labour that cost almost nothing. Nobody should copy it.
What survived is not the headcount but the principle, and it is the same principle that made the brigade de cuisine outlast every management fashion since: one person is accountable for one thing, and everybody knows who. A modern floor runs a lean version of Ritz's ladder — seven roles, some of them folded into one person on a quiet Tuesday — and the rest of this article is that ladder, rung by rung.
The ultimate guide Restaurant Staff Guide: 6 Steps to Hire, Train & Retain From the job ad to the roster to the exit interview: everything about a team that stays, in one guide. Open the guideThe seven roles, from the door to the pass
The order below is the order a guest meets them, not the order of rank. That is deliberate: a brigade is a division of responsibility, not an organisation chart to hang on the wall. The question at every rung is "who owns this?", and where two rungs are held by the same person on a given night, that person owns both.
Read the seven with your own room in mind. A 40-seat bistro needs every one of these responsibilities; it needs about three of these people. The calculator lower down does the folding for you.
1. Host / réceptionniste — the first and the last face
The host owns the door: the reservation book, the seating plan, the walk-ins, the wait, the coats, and the goodbye. In the classical brigade this was a clerk with a ledger; today it is the person — or the system — that decides which table a party sits at and when, which is the single decision that sets the pace of the whole evening.
In most restaurants under about 40 occupied seats the host is not a separate person at all: the maître d'hôtel takes the door, or the reservation system takes the book and the seating plan and the maître d' only takes the greeting. That is why the calculator below folds the host into the maître d' below 40 seats and gives it a post of its own above. Either way the work exists on every night; the question is only who carries it.
2. Maître d'hôtel — the head of the room
The maître d'hôtel runs the service. Not a section, not a table: the room. He or she sets the sections before service, briefs the brigade, greets and seats (or delegates it), watches the rhythm across every table at once, steps in before a problem reaches a guest, talks to the kitchen when the pass is drifting, and takes the complaint that a chef de rang cannot resolve. Every other role in the dining room reports here.
The classical brigade split this into a first maître d' (the room), a second (his deputy) and maîtres d'hôtel de carré, each responsible for a quarter of the floor. A modern room keeps one: the largest sections in fine dining are small enough that the chefs de rang carry what the de carré used to. In a bistro this role is usually the owner or the floor manager — and it is still the role, whatever the title on the payslip.
One test of a real maître d': during service he or she is the person who is not carrying plates. A head of the room with hands full has stopped seeing the room, and that is the moment two tables get forgotten at once.
3. Chef de rang — the owner of a section
The chef de rang is the rung the whole brigade is built on. He or she owns one rang — a fixed group of tables, from about 8 to 28 occupied seats depending on the style of service — and is responsible for every guest in it from the moment they sit to the moment they leave: the welcome at the table, the order, the timing with the kitchen, the wine where there is no sommelier, the check on every course, the bill. A guest in a well-run section knows exactly who "their" waiter is.
This is the role most restaurants think they have and do not. "Everyone takes every table" feels flexible and is in fact the absence of ownership: nobody is late to a table that is nobody's. The moment sections are fixed, three things change at once — the guest is never forgotten, the kitchen gets one voice per table, and the tip, the compliment and the complaint each land on one person who can learn from them.
How many seats a chef de rang can hold is the number everything else on this page follows from, and it is not a personality trait but a function of what the service style asks per table. The section on the rang below gives the four figures; the server-ratio article turns the same idea into a peak-hour staffing count.
4. Demi-chef de rang — the section, with a safety net
A demi-chef de rang is a chef de rang in training: somebody who runs a section alone on a quiet night and runs it under the eye of a senior chef de rang on a busy one. In the classical ladder it was the grade between commis and chef de rang, and it still is; on a modern roster it is how a brigade grows its next chef de rang without paying a full one before the person is worth it.
The model on this page gives one rang in three to a demi-chef from brasserie level up. That is not a rule of nature but a sensible pay mix: it keeps the wage bill honest, it gives every commis a visible next step, and it means a sick chef de rang on a Saturday is covered by somebody who already knows the section. A brigade with no demi-chefs has no bench, and a brigade with no bench loses its best commis to the restaurant across the road.
5. Commis de rang — the hands of the section
The commis de rang is attached to a chef de rang and works the same section: clears, resets, fetches, pours water, brings bread, carries the plates the runner does not, and — this is the part that matters — learns the section by standing in it. In the classical brigade there were two kinds, the commis de suite who ran between the table and the pass and the commis débarrasseur who cleared. A modern room usually has one, and gives the running to a runner.
When does a section need a commis? When the service style asks more of each table than one person can give at the pace the guest expects: synchronised placing of plates, crumbing between courses, a full reset for the next seating. From fine dining upward it is one commis per rang; in a brasserie one commis can serve two sections; in a bistro the chef de rang does it all and the model gives none. The mise en place of the floor — the side station stocked, the cutlery polished, the resets laid out — is the commis's job before service too.
6. Runner (commis de suite) — the bridge to the pass
The runner carries food from the pass to the table and nothing else. It sounds like the smallest role in the room and it is the one that most changes what the others can do: a chef de rang who no longer walks to the kitchen stays in the section, which is exactly where the guest wants them. The runner is also the person who hears the kitchen call "hands!" and answers, so every course leaves the pass hot and the aboyeur is never shouting at nobody.
The rule of thumb in the model is one runner per three sections from brasserie level, one per two sections on a tasting menu where every course lands on every table within the same minute, and none in a bistro where the sections are big and the plates go two at a time. On a floor where the kitchen is far from the room — a first-floor dining room, a terrace — the runner is worth more than the arithmetic says.
7. Sommelier — the wine, and a third of the spend
The sommelier owns the wine: the list, the cellar, the buying, the pairing advice at the table, the opening and pouring, and the training of the chefs de rang who sell wine when the sommelier is at another table. In the classical brigade it was the chef sommelier with commis of his own; today it is one person, and the decision is whether to have one at all.
The model uses one plain test: from fine dining upward the room always carries a sommelier, and a brasserie carries one when wine is at least 30% of the average spend. Below that the chefs de rang sell the wine, and the money for a sommelier is better spent training them — the hire-or-train decision has an article of its own. Above it a good sommelier pays for the post out of the bottles the room would otherwise not have sold.
| Role | Also called | Reports to | Owns | Span |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maître d'hôtel | Head waiter, floor manager, restaurant manager | Owner / restaurant director | The whole service: sections, briefing, seating, pace, escalations, the link with the kitchen | The room — every section |
| Chef de rang | Section waiter, station waiter, captain (US) | Maître d'hôtel | One section of tables from welcome to bill: orders, timing, courses, wine where there is no sommelier | 8–28 occupied seats, by service style |
| Demi-chef de rang | Junior section waiter, senior commis | Chef de rang | A section on quiet nights, a chef de rang's section under supervision on busy ones | One section — about one rang in three |
| Commis de rang | Commis waiter, back waiter, busser (US) | Chef de rang | Clearing, resetting, water, bread, side station, floor mise en place; learns the section | One rang (fine dining), two rangs (brasserie) |
| Runner | Commis de suite, food runner | Maître d'hôtel / the pass | Every plate from the pass to the table, hot, to the right seat, at the kitchen's call | Two to three rangs |
| Sommelier | Chef sommelier, wine waiter | Maître d'hôtel | Wine list, cellar, buying, pairing advice, service of wine, wine training of the brigade | The room — from fine dining, or from 30% wine share |
| Host | Réceptionniste, hostess, maître d' at the door | Maître d'hôtel | Reservations, seating plan, walk-ins, the wait, coats, the goodbye | The door — a post of its own from 40 occupied seats |
The rang: the unit the whole brigade is built on
Everything above scales off one number: how many occupied seats one chef de rang can hold at once. Not covers a night, not tables — seats with a guest in them at the peak of the service. The number is not about how good the waiter is; it is about how much the style of service asks per table. A bistro plate goes down with one hand; a fine-dining course goes down on four tables at the same second with a commis on the other side of each one.
The model uses four figures, and they are ratios you can check against your own floor: about 28 occupied seats per rang in a bistro, 18 in a brasserie, 12 in fine dining and 8 on a tasting menu where every table gets seven to twelve courses in one evening. Divide your occupied seats by that figure, round up, and you have your number of rangs — and with it your number of chefs de rang, which then sets how many commis, runners and demi-chefs the room needs.
Take the room on this page: 60 seats, 90% full at the peak, so 54 occupied seats. As a brasserie that is 3 rangs and a brigade of 7. Dress the same room as a bistro and it is 2 rangs and 3 people; as a fine-dining room, 5 rangs and 15; as a tasting-menu room, 7 rangs and 21. Same walls, same tables, same 54 guests. The graphic below is that room, four times.
60 seats, 90% full at the peak. The only thing that changes from column to column is the style of service — and with it the seats one chef de rang can hold.
Bistro3 people on the floor
97 covers on a full service
€387 floor payroll per service
Brasserie7 people on the floor
81 covers on a full service
€752 floor payroll per service
Fine dining15 people on the floor
59 covers on a full service
€1,581 floor payroll per service
Tasting menu21 people on the floor
54 covers on a full service
€2,145 floor payroll per service
The covers differ per column because a bistro turns its tables and a tasting menu does not — the model gives each style its own realistic turn on the same 54 occupied seats. Read the payroll per service against those covers and you get the ladder further down: from a few euro per cover in a bistro to well over thirty on a tasting menu, on a room that has not changed at all.
The service styles a brigade has to master
The style of service is what sets the seats per rang, so it belongs in this article even though each style has a literature of its own. Five are worth naming, because a guest, a job ad and a job interview all use these words — and because most rooms run two of them at once without saying so.
| Style | Who plates, where | What it asks of the floor | Where it fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plate service (à l'assiette) | The kitchen plates; the floor carries the finished plate to the seat | The lightest: one chef de rang can hold a large section, a runner adds a third to it | Bistro, brasserie, most restaurants — and every tasting menu course |
| English service (silver service) | The kitchen sends platters; the waiter serves each guest at the table with spoon and fork | A trained hand per platter and time at every table — sections shrink | Banquets, classic hotel dining rooms, some tableside mains |
| French service | Platters are presented; the guest helps themselves, the waiter holds the platter | Slow and formal; a commis per section becomes necessary | Formal and ceremonial dining, a few classical houses |
| Guéridon service | Finished, carved, flambéed or mixed on a trolley beside the table | The heaviest: a skilled chef de rang, a commis and floor space per trolley | Fine dining as a signature moment — see the guéridon article |
| Family style / sharing | The kitchen sends dishes for the table; guests serve each other | Light per cover but heavy in clearing and resets; commis earn their keep | Casual concepts, groups, sharing menus |
Two practical notes. First, a style is a promise: a room that advertises silver service and delivers plate service on a busy night has broken it, which is why the seats per rang in the calculator sit on the conservative side. Second, the pass does not care which style the floor runs — but the aboyeur does, and every one of these styles has its own séquence de service, the fixed order of moments at the table that the brigade rehearses until nobody has to think about it.
Size and price your own brigade de salle
Pick your style of service and enter your seats, how full the room is at the peak, the covers on a full service, the hours one person is on the clock for it, what a chef de rang costs you all-in per hour, the share of your spend that is wine, your average spend and its VAT. The fields are prefilled with the brasserie from this page — overwrite them with yours.
You get your brigade role by role, the payroll of one service and what it comes to per cover, that payroll as a share of your net revenue, the average spend your brigade needs to stay under your target share, and what one more section would cost you.
Brigade de salle calculator
Ten figures about one room, and the seven roles that room needs tonight.
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The model prices every role off the chef de rang's hourly cost (maître d'hôtel 1.35×, sommelier 1.3×, demi-chef 0.88×, commis 0.78×, runner 0.72×, host 0.82×), gives one section in three to a demi-chef from brasserie level, and folds the host into the maître d'hôtel below 40 occupied seats. It does not know your kitchen's payroll, your rent or your tips: the share it returns is the dining room's wages only. Everything computes in your browser; nothing is sent or stored.
Two things to know when reading it. The share it returns is the dining room's wages alone, on the covers you entered. Total labour — kitchen, floor and dish pit together — is usually the number an owner watches, and a floor at 16% of net revenue leaves room for a kitchen at roughly the same; a floor at thirty does not. The staff cost calculator puts the whole payroll together.
And the spend the brigade needs is the number to read twice. A fine-dining brigade on this page's room costs €26.80 per cover; at a 18% floor share that needs an average spend of about €169. That is not an argument against fine dining — it is the reason fine dining has the prices it has, and the reason a brasserie that copies its brigade without its prices does not survive the winter.
Floor payroll per cover and the faces a table sees, for the four brigades above — same seats, same 90% peak, same hourly costs.
Bistro28 seats per section · 2 sections
Brasserie18 seats per section · 3 sections
Fine dining12 seats per section · 5 sections
Tasting menu8 seats per section · 7 sections
The bistro at €3.99 and the tasting menu at €39.72 are the same 54 guests served by 3 and 21 people. The faces count is the quieter number: a bistro table meets 2 people all evening, a fine-dining table meets 6. Every extra face is a hand-off, and every hand-off is a place where a guest can be forgotten — which is exactly why the roles have to be written down.
The pass: where the two brigades meet
The brigade de salle and the brigade de cuisine touch at exactly one place, and it is the place most services go wrong: the pass. On the kitchen side stands the aboyeur — the chef or sous-chef who reads the tickets and calls the courses; on the floor side stand the runner and, behind the runner, the chef de rang who told the kitchen when to fire. A course that leaves the pass on time and sits under the lamp for four minutes is a kitchen success and a floor failure, and the guest only sees the second.
Three habits keep the pass honest. The chef de rang, not the runner, owns the call-away: the kitchen fires a course when the section says the table is ready, never on a timer. The runner answers the kitchen's call within the minute or the aboyeur stops calling. And the maître d'hôtel stands where he or she can see the pass and the room at once — the moment the pass is out of sight, the two brigades are running two different evenings.
None of this is a fine-dining luxury. A bistro with one aboyeur and two chefs de rang runs the same handshake at a faster pace, and the ticket-time article shows what those minutes under the lamp cost in covers a night. The pre-shift briefing is where both brigades hear the same plan before the doors open.
Three ways to run a smaller brigade without losing the structure
The brigade is a division of responsibility, not a headcount, and the three moves below cut the payroll of the model by folding people together — never by leaving a responsibility unowned.
Give one section in three to a demi-chef
A demi-chef de rang costs the model 0.88 of a chef de rang and runs a section that a senior chef de rang keeps an eye on. On this page's brasserie that is one of 3 sections, and it is what keeps the brigade at €8.85 per cover instead of a few cents more. It is also the only lever on this page that makes the brigade better as it makes it cheaper: it is the bench the room draws on when a chef de rang leaves.
The condition is that the senior chef de rang really does watch the demi's section — which means their own section has to be one seat-count smaller. A demi-chef running a full fine-dining rang alone on a Saturday is not a lever, it is a chef de rang on the wrong wage, and everybody in the room knows it.
Let the runner float across sections
A runner tied to one section stands still for half the evening. A runner who answers the pass for three sections is busy the whole service and saves the model a commis for every two sections at brasserie level — which is precisely why the ratio is one runner per three rangs. On a floor with a long walk to the kitchen, one runner per two.
The trade is that the runner must know every seat number in every section, so the chef de rang never has to leave a table to say where a plate goes. That is a ten-minute job at the section plan before service, and it is the difference between a runner who adds capacity and one who adds questions.
Move the host's work into the reservation system
The host's work — the book, the seating plan, the pacing of arrivals, the wait, the confirmation, the no-show call — is the one rung of the brigade that a system can carry almost entirely. When the reservation system builds the seating plan, confirms every table by message and holds the waitlist, the door needs a greeting, not a desk, and the maître d'hôtel gives it. That is why the model folds the host into the maître d' below 40 occupied seats.
It also solves the quieter problem: a host who seats by feel sets a pace the brigade then has to survive. Ten tables sat in the same five minutes is a floor and a kitchen both in the weeds, whatever the roles say. A system that spaces arrivals to the sections you set is the brigade's first line of defence, and it works the door on every night, including the ones the host was rostered off.
What you do with this this week, this month and this quarter
Nobody rebuilds a brigade in a night, and there is no need: writing the sections down already delivers most of what this page has to give.
This week — write the sections down
- Draw your floor into fixed sections at the seats-per-rang figure for your style, on the section plan, and put a name on each one for every service this week.
- Run your room through the calculator above and note the share of net revenue your floor takes today.
- Ask every chef de rang the one question: which tables are yours tonight? If the answer takes longer than a second, the sections are not real yet.
This month — fill the rungs
- Name a demi-chef for one section in three, and tell them what the next rung looks like and when.
- Give the runner a seat-number map of every section and make the call-away the chef de rang's job, not the kitchen's clock.
- Rehearse the sequence of service for your style until the brigade runs it without a briefing — then brief it anyway.
- Put the sections on the roster so a service is staffed by rang, not by headcount.
This quarter — decide the expensive rungs
- Check the wine share of your spend against the 30% threshold and take the sommelier decision on a number, not on a feeling.
- Move the host's work into the reservation system and let the door be a greeting.
- Rerun the calculator with next year's wages and next year's prices, and read the spend your brigade needs before you read anything else.
The brigade is a list of who owns what — and it fits on one page
The brigade de salle is not a fine-dining ornament. It is the answer to the question every dining room has to answer on every table on every night — who is responsible for this guest? — and the seven roles are simply the seven places that answer can live. A bistro carries all seven responsibilities in three people; a tasting-menu room carries them in twenty-one. Neither is more of a brigade than the other.
What the numbers on this page add is the discipline of the pass: the sections come from the seats per rang, the people come from the sections, the payroll comes from the people, and the spend the room needs comes from the payroll. Read in that order, the brigade tells you what your prices have to be — and read backwards, your prices tell you which brigade you can afford.
Then give it the other half. The dining room's brigade only ever runs as well as the kitchen's brigade it meets at the pass, and both of them run on the séquence de service the guest actually experiences. A brigade is a structure; service excellence is what it is for.