A Return To Indoor Dining

A Return To Indoor Dining

If you've been managing some kind of restaurant, we don't have to spell it out for you. There were the initial months when hardly anything was happening – then those early efforts to try to re-engineer your business for takeout – then further spikes and changes in policy. Many food service businesses have been in a holding pattern for the better part of a year or a bit more. But now, we finally seem to have turned a corner, and with vaccination underway, more people are looking to move back into restaurants for indoor dining. What that means, though, is that restaurants have to scramble to restore their capacity to feed more people. Any kind of huge change in demand is hard to deal with. If you're trying to accommodate a lot of new customers as we work our way out of the coronavirus era, staffing, commercial kitchen equipment and inventory are all going to be important.

Commercial Kitchen Equipment: Front-of-House and Back-of-House Improvements

For the best long-term success welcoming your diners back, you'll want to invest in good front-of-the-house improvements like renovations and more staff for hosting and serving, and bartending if applicable. But you want to invest in improvements in the back of the house, too – in your kitchen where the magic happens, with restaurant kitchen equipment that supports your people.

Accounting For Wear Over Time

Let's face it - things wear out. A busy kitchen makes a lot of use of its equipment and resources. You might find, for example, that your commercial gas fryer or range, or other piece of equipment, is experiencing metal fatigue or has loose pipe fittings. You might have a bad pilot light on gas appliances, or problems with corrosion. Components of a key piece of equipment may be falling apart, or you have trouble heating and cooling food to the appropriate levels. Few restaurant managers or owners have to be reminded about how important these things are. Temperature-holding for food is a determining factor in not only customer satisfaction, but whether you pass health inspections!

More Benefits of New Equipment

How else can new pieces of restaurant equipment help you to succeed? Aside from helping to keep up a level of quality that's appropriate for your business, new equipment can help you to meet higher demand by cranking out more food. It can also help you to improve food quality, for instance, creating specific menu items to entice a bigger culinary audience. Better equipment also cuts down on production time, potentially allowing your kitchen to function more efficiently. There are also energy savings with new types of equipment. Newer models may save your kitchen money on utility bills, or in some cases, help with food costs.

For more, check out our entire catalog at Chefs’ Toys. We want to help you to gear back up as you streamline your path to in-house business, after the worst of the coronavirus is behind us. It’s a hopeful time, and we want to be part of that. Because we have actual kitchen experience, we are “for chefs, by chefs,” and we use our expertise to advise our customers, so reach out and let us help.