The restaurant business is like a rollercoaster. You’re going to be up on a high when you have a great day but sometimes come down off that high is fast and hard. It’s just the way the industry operates because restaurant meals are treated as a luxury by most people. So, it’s very consumer confidence oriented and any industry or sector that is at the mercy of this aspect is going to have to get used to turbulence. How can you improve your customer experience? Better food of course but really, what makes a restaurant look like a well-oiled machine? Fast service, first-time communication, always ready to adapt to a customer’s orders, ready and willing to be swamped with more customers than expected. But what if you could increase your restaurant’s productivity by doing less?
The overnight batch
Many restaurants will want to serve food as fresh as possible. Nothing beats the flavor of freshly prepared ingredients. However many ingredients can and should be made the night before. For example, pizza restaurants in New York always make fresh dough the night before they open. This is because the yeast is allowed to rise and fall multiple times. This makes the dough tangy, spongy and also crisp at the same time. Italian restaurants also make pasta the night before and freeze it so it only takes 30 seconds or less to cook in boiling water as most of the water content has been taken out of it. For some seafood restaurants, they will leave their ingredients in brine to make the fish as full of flavor as possible which they will add to soups.
Burn high burn long
For restaurants, heat and fire is the heart and soul of the business. Your chefs should be focussing their energy and mind on the dishes they are cooking not the equipment they are using. Therefore long burning products like charcoal briquettes are ordered en masse as they burn at a high temperature and burn for a long time. Take a look at the Briquetting production process and see why this is a good tool. Buying your own machine allows you to always have fresh charcoal at the ready so your restaurant can stay open for longer and manage to cook several different dishes at once. By not having to worry about heat management in the kitchen your chefs also become more productive.
A clean policy
In any restaurant, space is everything. Your staff are going to be moving around quickly and chefs will have their hands full quite literally. Therefore having a good cleaning policy is vital as it keeps mess at bay and stops space from being blocked. You need to have a rata which puts all manner of employees on cleaning duty. Cleaning may not be done continuously but every night before the lights close you should have a nice clean kitchen once again. Make sure you are using equipment that supports your cleaning policy, such as axial fans for extraction, steam cleaners, dishwashers, and effective detergents and disinfectants to help you meet cleanliness standards.
It’s an incredibly exciting industry to be a part of, but restauranting is no slouch. You need to make sure your chefs never have to worry about heat management and have fresh batches of ingredients to use when they arrive in the afternoon.
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