Specifi Blog

Little Ceasars Has a Mission: to Serve as the Heart of Detroit City Arenas are usually all about sports and entertainment. But for Little Caesars Arena, opened one year ago in downtown Detroit, the venue has a larger mission: to serve as the heart of a city. The 20,000-seat Little Caesars Arena, home to both the…

Big plans lie ahead for ChopShop: 4 projects are better than 1 When private equity firm Hargett Hunter Capital Partners, Raleigh, N.C., purchased in 2016 the Original ChopShop, an approachable, natural food restaurant with three units in the Phoenix area and a nearly cult following, it had big plans: to take the concept national. But…

Creamy, dense, and intensely flavored, gelato is hard to resist, and a growing number of consumers don’t even try. However, this traditional Italian treat is generally an impulse buy. So, as you seek the right setting for this frozen gem, you need to start by showing off. Suppliers offer plenty of display cases to do…

How fast is fast? When you have a line of very hungry customers, “now” sometimes isn’t fast enough. At least three potential challenges can stand in the way of fresh food fast: a location that can’t accommodate ventilation over the cooking equipment; a staff not trained to cook (and a lack of budget to hire…

We live in a world of multi-functional equipment, designed to make our lives more efficient, but sometimes the simple approach is still the best. And so it is with standard convection ovens. Although there are other ovens that cook as well as do so much more, many kitchen operations only need a reliable convection oven…

For the best tips on designing an island suite, we turned to J. Russell Stilwell, FCSI, Principal of Next Step Design, Annapolis, Md., who has designed hundreds of these compact powerhouses over the past 30 years. Island suites, which must always be built perpendicular, not parallel, to the service window or pass, have the ability…

Water is the lifeblood of the commercial kitchen, where gallons and gallons flow through expensive equipment and land in the cups of your customers. Although water looks deceptively clear, it contains substances that can affect the taste of everything from soups to sodas and cause thousands of dollars in equipment damage if not managed. Protect…

So you need to spec some equipment, or maybe some décor items. As if you don’t have enough choices among the thousands of suppliers of off-the-shelf pieces out there, there’s a whole other universe of custom fabrication. You can get custom-spec stainless fabrication, or custom millwork for wood or other materials. There are dealers who…

Operating a restaurant profitably is a complex process built on many tasks and many costs. In a business environment that’s more competitive than ever before, site operators and chain executives alike are on the hunt for any way to trim costs without sacrificing the quality of the food or the customer experience. With more sophisticated…