For a restaurant, standing apart for quality might be as simple as having the right piece of equipment. I recently talked to a few chefs who would totally agree—after buying the right piece of equipment.
Let’s say you want to do better than Starbucks with your coffee, so you visit Guatemala and pick the farm with the best coffee beans, set up the distribution, grind the beans on premises and run the coffee through your old coffee maker seconds after grinding the beans. You end up with average coffee. Why is that? Because it turns out the coffee extracting process matters more than the beans. What equipment has the best extraction process? It’s what Carlo Granito, president/owner of coffee importer/roaster Terra Café, Montreal, Canada, grappled with until he finally partnered with an equipment company to come up with a better coffee maker. Thus came the Coffea Vacuum Brewing System, which won a 2013 National Restaurant Association Kitchen Innovation award. Granito runs a café on premises, and without telling guests, he switched to the new equipment, and they marveled at the coffee flavor. He told me you could take bad coffee and run it through the equipment, getting the perfect extraction, and the coffee would be the best ever.
Another example. You make the tastiest cheese soup this side of the equator, so you make it at the beginning of service, and it sits there all night, waiting to be used up. Or maybe it sits out on a buffet line. Guests at the end of the night don’t think the soup is so wonderful. It has become crusty on the sides. Or water from the sweat on the lid keeps dripping into the soup when the lid opens, degrading the quality. The right equipment can prevent that. I talked to Harry Ljatifovski, chef/owner of Harry’s Diner, Sheboygan, Wis., who serves about 100 cups of soup a day. He lamented the problems with me and told me that he finally found the perfect equipment. He bought the Mirage Induction Soup Rethermalizer from The Vollrath Co., LLC, Sheboygan. The equipment doesn’t use water to heat, so there’s no steam. He sets the unit to the temperature he wants to hold the soup at, so it never burns and the sides don’t become crusty. That piece of equipment also won a Kitchen Innovation award.
Operators should take some time to identify their biggest food quality issue and then go on a hunt for the equipment that will help them turn the corner. I discovered three other stellar pieces of equipment that have changed the business for other restaurants. You can read about them in my “Winning Equipment” article off to the right. It published in the October 2013 issue of The National Culinary Review.
Tell me what you think.
Comments