By LARRY KANTER

Senior Reporter

In the restaurant business, there is nothing more basic than getting the food out fresh, hot and in a hurry.

But at Koo Koo Roo, implementing that elementary concept can get pretty complicated.

Rather than simply grilling a chicken breast and tossing it on a plate with a vegetable or a salad, the West L.A.-based chicken chain which operates 36 restaurants nationwide, the majority of them in Southern California has an elaborate system in place for just about everything.

Take the 10:45 a.m. food tasting.

That’s when a Koo Koo Roo manager will grab a plastic plate or two, load up with samples of 17 hot side dishes, seven cold salads, thick slices of roast turkey, a pot pie and assorted pieces of spit-roasted grilled marinated chicken, and check it all for quality.

“Great pot pies,” says David Babbush, a district manager, digging into a steaming turkey pie in the chain’s recently opened Miracle Mile store, as the rest of the 15 or so employees scramble to prepare for the daily lunch rush.

But then Babbush, who has been tasting Koo Koo Roo food on a daily basis for some three years, notices something amiss: the red potato wedges, which swim in the pastry’s creamy gravy along with other sliced veggies, have been cut too large; they’re not quite bite-size.

He carefully jots the fact down in the margin of his ledger “Pots too big” and then informs the store’s assistant manager, Jovino Nevarez, who passes the information on to the sous chef responsible for slicing the potatoes.

The food-tasting ritual will occur at three more times throughout the day promptly at 2:30, 4:30 and 8 p.m. when each menu item is labeled “perfect,” “fix” or “replace.” Should the potatoes remain on the large side, the issue is certain to be dealt with at the weekly staff meeting.

“It’s a small detail,” says Babbush. “But that’s what a restaurant is a collection of small details.”

Obsessive attention to the minutiae is a daily fact of life at Koo Koo Roo, which aims to bring a scientific precision to the often inexact art of cooking.

Former mortgage banker Kenneth Berg started the chain in 1990 after he stumbled upon a Mid-Wilshire chicken joint and found himself impressed not only with the appealing demographic mix of the clientele, but with the tastiness of the restaurant’s marinated, skinless chicken, broiled over an open flame.

Berg purchased a 50 percent stake in the company and began opening new restaurants. Several years later, he took over the entire operation and launched an extensive makeover, replacing the plastic forks and knives with silverware, adorning each table with a fresh flower and implementing a painstaking, at times bureaucratic, system to ensure uniform quality among the chain’s growing network of restaurants.

It begins at 6 a.m., when the first workers arrive to meet produce vendors, who drop off dozens of cases of lettuce, tomatoes, green beens, potatoes and fresh fruit. After inspecting the goods for the proper size, shape and texture, the chopping begins.

At Koo Koo Roo, even dicing vegetables is an act that requires precision.

Placed at stations throughout the kitchen are official Koo Koo Roo recipe cards, which specify the exact thickness of cut required for each ingredient. Such details are vigilantly guarded at the restaurant, which forbids any outsiders from venturing behind the counter or into the kitchen.

In fact, employees at Koo Koo Roo only begin their kitchen chores after being “certified” in their specific tasks upon completion of company training programs, most of which consist of listening to audiotapes and studying flashcards.

“The chicken cook cooks nothing but chicken,” says Juan J. Madariaga, general manager of the Miracle Mile restaurant. “The salad person only makes salad. The ‘hot’ person only makes hot side dishes.”

Consider grill man Rodolfo Armengol. Clad in a white apron, he threads raw chicken pieces onto large steel skewers six to a skewer, never more, never less. The chicken has been marinating in the refrigerator for between 48 and 72 hours. Armengol, a Koo Koo Roo veteran and one of the few employees who predates Berg’s purchase of the company, will do absolutely nothing but prepare and grill chicken for his entire eight-hour shift.

Meanwhile, Elias Ramirez stands above a steaming stainless steel bowl, gripping a foot-long potato masher with two hands, churning and hammering at an impressive mound of boiled, peeled potatoes, pausing ocassionally to add heated milk to the mix, until it reaches the proper cloudlike consistency. And that’s what Ramirez will do for the bulk of his day nothing but prepare bowls of mashed spuds and trays of roasted garlic new potatoes.

Such specialization may seem a tad obsessive. But Madariaga says it is essential if the restaurant is to achieve its stated goal of serving customers their food within four minutes of ordering and getting it to them while it remains hot and fresh.

Unlike other fast-food and cafeteria-style restaurants, where items are assembled ahead of time in large batches and reheated, Koo Koo Roo chefs cook in small batches throughout the day. The idea, says Madariaga, is not to let food sit for more than 10 minutes after it has been prepared. If it sits much longer than that, it is replaced with a new batch. Leftover chicken or turkey is diced and used in salads. But the bulk of the food is wrapped up and refrigerated until it is picked up by a nearby food bank after the restaurant closes at 10 p.m.

“You think there’s got to be an easier way,” says Madariaga. “But if you do it easier, you lose the freshness. And that’s the reason people come here.”

And come they do. By 11 a.m., the food has been prepared and tasted and the workers are in their appointed positions for the crucial lunch rush, when the restaurant typically does about 65 percent of its daily business. A half-hour later, a queue of about 50 people snakes through the brightly lit dining room and spills out the front door onto the restaurant’s Wilshire Boulevard patio.

Standing in line, Hampton Cantrell, an attorney who works nearby, scans the menu. It doesn’t take him long to decide. Cantrell has been eating at Koo Koo Roo for about two years and he knows what he likes original leg and thigh with a side of creamy macaroni and cheese.

He places his order and receives his change and a receipt, a copy of which is simultaneouly spit out at the start of the kitchen’s assembly line.

Babbush, assisting on the line, grabs the tag. He slaps a slice of warmed lavash bread on a plastic plate, adds the two pieces of chicken, swivels on his heel and spoons a generous helping of macaroni onto the plate, which he shuttles to the end of the line.

Cantrell’s number is called and the food is delivered. Babbush looks at the receipt, then at his watch. “Two minutes,” he says.

Cantrell, for his part, is equally impressed. “They make excellent time,” he says, preparing to dig in. “It’s almost always faster than I expected.”