The kitchen is the center of your business. You need high-quality, high-powered commercial kitchen equipment to withstand daily use and keep your staff organized and happy. Before you start purchasing equipment for your kitchen, it’s crucial to note which appliances are right for your restaurant.

Starting a restaurant easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Equipment, space, menu design, and marketing are all big-ticket items that add up quick. Throw in staff and inventory and your funding may start to look flimsy. While these factors may seem nonnegotiable, businesses before you have made it by on much less money than normal and still seen success. Read on to find out how you too could start a restaurant with a barely-there budget.

Smoothie bars are all the rage and have been for a few decades. They are a convenient way to get a cool drink and a serving of fruit and veggies. Popular places to have one is near a health club or in malls or on the beach. There are several different types of equipment you’ll need to start up your smoothie bar. This is a guide along with some recommendations to help you get started.

During the hot summer months, everything tends to run a little slower. To help your ice machine run more efficiently, so you can keep cool,Ice-O-Matic has some helpful tips for maximum ice machine productivity.

Health inspections for commercial dining venues are a fact of owning such a business, and thank goodness for them, because we’d never want to eat out if there weren’t any guidelines. The experience can, however, be unnerving to the point of downright terror if you allow it to be. There are some common sense ideas in preparing for a health inspection that can make it less painful and more successful.

With the constantly increasing awareness of world energy use becoming a more and more pressing concern with every passing year, many food service establishments are beginning to look for ways to reduce their waste production and excess energy use. The mental image of trash being emptied into slowly crowding landfills is powerful motivation for many restaurateurs to begin minimizing their waste – not to mention the increasing costs of waste disposal services. While taking steps to reduce waste is often slightly less convenient, and will take more time and effort from both you and your restaurant staff, the financial, environmental, and social impact of minimizing waste will almost certainly be worth it in the long run. Here are a few tips to start reducing your restaurant’s waste production.

When it comes to motivating your servers, business writers suggest you hold daily contests with the winners receiving small monetary prizes. They suggest, basically, that once a day you should gather your waitstaff in the kitchen, flash a fifty dollar bill, and then tell everyone that whoever sells the most surf-and-turf plates that evening goes home with the fifty tucked inside their billfold. The logic here is everybody wants money, and so when you dangle $50 over your employees’ heads, they’ll jump however high it takes to snatch it. Well, if that sounds reasonable to you, then listen up because this is important. Contests are for chumps.

It’s easy to see why restaurant furniture designers have moved away from upholstering their booths in cloth to upholstering them in vinyl. Modern vinyl fabric, which honestly is barely recognizable as a plastic anymore, duplicates the skin-like plushness of leather while costing restaurateurs much less to own. And since vinyl repels water, most of the spills absorbed by cloth upholstery simply rolls off these seats. However as you’ve probably found out for yourself, vinyl is less than 100% impenetrable to stains. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of the best cleaning techniques to undo vinyl’s most common blemishes, including solutions for ink, blood, scuffs, gum, rips, rain, the sun, & crumbs.

So you want to open your own restaurant.  It’s a more popular field than ever before because less people are taking time to cook.   Maybe you’ve seen that perfect old building being remodeled in town, and envisioned it fully of happy diners expounding on your brilliance.  Seems like a good place to start?  Wrong answer!  There’s a logical process to opening your own restaurant, and it doesn’t start with the cutest old building you’ve ever seen.

Maybe it’s because you’re swamped. Or maybe you’re just lazy. Regardless the reason, that thing you’re doing… it’s disgusting. Anyone who works in the service industry has skipped some important sanitation procedure before—it’s only when you start making a habit of uncleanliness that your restaurant begins to suffer. So be honest with yourself, are you guilty of these ten sanitation no-no’s?

With its high heat conductivity, relatively low price, and ease of manufacturing, aluminum is quickly becoming an industry standard in cookware equipment. Many modern pots and pans feature aluminum-clad bottoms to help with fast and even heat conduction without sacrificing durability, while others are made of solid cast aluminum. But with aluminum becoming a more prevalent cookware material—one that may make its way into our home or restaurant very soon, if it hasn’t already—it is important to know how to care for your aluminum pots and pans. Caring for aluminum is a bit different from caring for highly finished and polished materials like stainless steel, but with a bit of care and attention, your aluminum cookware will offer years of reliable use. Here are some tips for keeping your cooking implements in great condition:

Food-based allergies have symptoms ranging from barely noticeable to imminent threat of death.   Research suggests that approximately 15 million Americans have food allergies.  A 2015 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that food allergies in children increased by about 50% between 1997 and 2011.  The most common allergen for children is cow’s milk, while the most common allergen for adults is shell fish.   Peanuts aren’t the most common allergen for any segment of the population, but they are frequently the most violent.  Some are so allergic to peanuts they can’t be in the same room with a peanut butter cookie.   Food allergies are increasing in all segments of the population.   It’s not clear whether allergies or reliable diagnosis is on the rise, but one thing is certain.  The health threat can’t be ignored.  Food service is feeling the impact strongly.

Customers will pass judgment about your restaurant the second they sit down. That is why picking the right dinner plate is so important to the restaurateur. Dinner plates are an important part of your restaurant experience and thus should be well thought out before purchasing. It should complement the color and design of your establishment. When choosing dinner plates, you should consider several things including materials, colors, shapes and sizes.

Lodge Manufacturing has made cast iron cooking equipment for more than 110 years. It was not until 2002 Lodge developed a vegetable oil spray system with high temperature gas ovens to season their cookware before it left their warehouse.

Outside dining is upon us again. The chance to enjoy our meal outdoors is a deciding factor for many people, including me, when choosing a restaurant. If we’ve gone to the trouble of finding an ocean, we like having dinner beside it. Side walk window shoppers and carefully tended lilies are preferable to walls of art we’ve seen before, even if we love them. Patio furniture grants us the freedom to savor your menu selections while we savor the season.

It’s no secret that there’s money in concessions. Jaw dropping food and beverage prices have reigned supreme at theaters, athletic events and carnivals for years yet people keep coming back for more.

The marketing potential of the internet has become a very powerful tool in the modern restaurateur’s brand-building repertoire. Social media and networking sites have become one of the best methods of brand promotion and word-of-mouth advertising for many companies, particularly restaurants and other foodservice establishments. But using these tools properly can sometimes be a bit tricky, and “doing it right” is often a time-intensive commitment.

If you don’t have a lot of room in your commercial kitchen but you are finding yourself in need of a good fryer, then you might look at a commercial counter top electric fryer as an option.

If you are in the market for a new refrigerator or freezer, with all the features, options, brands, and manufacturers these days, your search can turn into an overwhelming mess pretty quickly. Luckily, we are here to help. In this blog we will compare three different refrigeration manufacturers and their equipment to ensure when you are choosing your next piece of refrigeration equipment, you are well-informed to make a good decision and choose the correct fridge or freezer to fit your needs.