Essential Restaurant Kitchen Equipment

If you own a restaurant, then the kitchen should be the heart of your business. It’s where all the important food preparations take place and it determines how happy your customers will be. Proper organization and equipment is very important in order to run a successful restaurant. The space in your kitchen should be optimally divided in order to ensure sufficient space for each area, such as the following: cooking area, prep area, cold storage, washing area, and food service and staff quarters. However, one of the more vital aspects of running a proper restaurant is finding the right restaurant kitchen equipment.

restaurant-equipment

Refrigerators and Freezers

No kitchen is complete without a proper refrigeration unit. The different types of refrigeration units include: reach-in coolers, walk-in coolers and restaurant freezers. There are many different sizes of freezers and refrigerators. The first thing you should do is have the exact dimensions of your kitchen ready, measure how big the entries and exits are so you can be sure the equipment will fit and make sure to plan out the position of the different pieces in order to achieve maximum efficiency. Determining the type of refrigerator you ought to get also largely depends on your menu. For instance, if you primarily need to store meat, you will need a different refrigeration system than let’s say if you serve Chinese food and likewise.

Ovens

A commercial oven can perform a wide variety of functions, such as heating up a simple soup to preparing all sorts of dishes. The most important thing is to have the proper commercial restaurant equipment. The most common types of ovens on the market are electric ovens and gas ovens. Electric ovens are the cheaper option, but require more money to run, the gas ovens however, are more expensive to install but cost a lot less in the long run. Depending on how often you intend to use your oven, you should choose accordingly. Both reliability and durability are very important when investing in commercial restaurant equipment. It is always a good idea to do a bit of research on the brand you’ve settled on and see what they have to offer in terms of the durability and warranty. The size of your oven depends on the demand – the amount of food you need to produce. You need to determine how to fit the oven in your kitchen best and if it has enough space for the amount of food you need to cook per day.

Mixers

No kitchen can function properly without a proper mixer, especially if your business deals with baking or bread making. There are two options when it comes to the size of the mixer, heavy duty mixer or counter-top mixer. Depending on the amount of dough you need to produce, you need to get the appropriate mixer. Bakeries and pizzerias can benefit greatly from a large heavy duty mixer, whereas restaurants that don’t require large amounts of dough constantly are better off with the counter-top version. If you are going to be using your mixer often, a bigger version is better as they are built to be more durable, if however you don’t need to constantly produce dough, a smaller version will do.