Posts by Foodservice Equipment Reports

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…

They’ve become ubiquitous. You see them everywhere—on end aisles and the foot of the checkout lanes in supermarkets, on the counter of a snack cart in an office lobby, against the wall of a campus or retail bookstore, in the middle of a cafeteria servery, even built in to the counter of a coffeeshop. Refrigerators…

There’s nothing quite like coming home to a fire on the hearth, the warmth and allure of the flames drawing us in. That’s one reason more and more healthcare facilities are making hearth ovens the centerpieces of their retail cafeterias. Perhaps more importantly, though, foodservice directors are finding that these show-stopping pieces of equipment aren’t…