With NYC restaurant week coming up, there will be lots of restaurants gearing up to put their best foot forward. How do you stand out in the crowd? Add entertainment to the menu. Restaurant event planning is a big deal for a reason: it draws people into your restaurant and greatly increases the chances of them having a memorable experience. Check out this list of ways to ensure a successful event.
Commercial Refrigeration
This Ice Machine Cleaning Checklist Could Save Your Restaurant
Food safety has to be a primary concern on the mind of every NYC restaurant owner. If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t stay in business very long. The consequences of serving potentially dangerous food are serious, not only to your patrons’ health, but also for your business:
- poor health inspection grades
- negative reviews on social media and in the press
- lawsuits and even financial damages
10 Restaurant Kitchen Design Mistakes You Must Avoid
Restaurant kitchen design: planning is everything
Your kitchen is the heart and soul of your restaurant. Getting your restaurant kitchen design wrong can be a huge disaster. Design impacts the success of your restaurant in many ways:
- the efficiency of your food prep
- the ability of your staff to follow safe food handling practices
- cleanliness of your restaurant
- whether you’re meeting all applicable codes and standards (if not, you could be shut down or your opening could be delayed)
As a provider of HVAC, refrigeration and kitchen equipment maintenance to NYC restaurants for decades, we’ve been involved in lots of restaurant renovations and build-outs. Over the years, we have learned a thing or two about what NOT to do when creating a restaurant kitchen design. Whether you’re remodeling or opening a new establishment, avoid these bad practices that can cost you big time.
Refrigeration Lessons from Frosty the Snowman
Isn’t it the most wonderful time of the year? When else is it perfectly acceptable (even encouraged!) to eat candy canes, wear ugly sweaters, and sit around watching animated holiday TV specials?
We’re offering today’s blog just in case you needed any additional justification for that last holiday activity. Did you know those holiday specials can be surprisingly educational? Here’s a case in point: if you happen to be in the food service business, Frosty the Snowman offers some important refrigeration lessons that can help you keep your commercial refrigeration equipment running reliably.
Restaurant Refrigeration Installation: Get It Right the First Time
What’s the worst thing you can imagine happening right before the grand opening of a new restaurant:
- An invasion of ants taking over your kitchen?
- A sink hole opening up right in front of your restaurant?
- A freak tornado hitting NYC in December and specifically your block?
Seriously, other than losing your chef to the competition, one of the worst things that can happen is having problems with your refrigeration equipment. After all, if your refrigeration installation goes badly, ALL your cold food storage equipment could be affected and fail to hold the correct temperature. And that could mean you can’t store all the product and ingredients that are being delivered, your staff can’t practice their prep techniques and recipes to get ready for the grand opening, and you can’t prepare any food that’s safe to consume. How are you going to open?
That’s exactly what happened to the owner of a New York City restaurant group when he hired to wrong people to do the refrigeration installation for a new restaurant.
5 Ways to Stop Negative Reviews of Your Restaurant
Negative reviews of your restaurant can be a frustrating problem to deal with. Especially when you have gone to the trouble to find a great chef, pay him as much as you can afford, and you know the food is good. From what you see and hear every day, people love the food. Yet there are still people writing negative reviews and giving you only a couple of stars on Yelp.
What’s going on? And how can you put a stop to it?
Here’s the problem that may be behind those negative reviews: many restaurant owners are very conscientious about the quality of the food (and rightly so), yet don’t pay as much attention to the dining atmosphere. This is a mistake, especially in New York City, where there is so much competition; it doesn’t take much for an unhappy customer to choose the restaurant around the corner next time.
The truth is, a great dining experience is not only about the food. There are many additional factors that can make or break a customer’s experience. And they are the kinds of things that it’s easy for an owner to overlook; you spend so much time there that you tend not to notice. But if you want to put a stop to those negative reviews, it pays to fix these issues once and for all.
