Summer food festivals have been a fixture in American culture for years.  From the Taste of Chicago to the Alabama Crawfish Festival , food festivals large and small have kept growing and expanding, even through recent economic turbulence. Tens of thousands of restaurants participate in these festivals across the country.  …

Every year, your restaurant’s green credentials on the street gets more important.  According to the National Restaurant Association (NRA), it’s one of the hottest trends this year.  Companies across the board, in and out of the food service industry, have scrambled in recent years to label their brands as green, …

Health inspections are a regular part of life in any food service business, but too often it’s easy for a restaurant or commercial kitchen to fall into the trap of just passing the inspection rather than regularly practicing good food safety procedures. This series is intended to help your business …

A popular topic lately, in a couple different restaurant discussion forums I participate in, is the question of who owns the recipes your restaurant uses? Let’s look at a couple possible scenarios that could affect your restaurant: Your executive chef or kitchen manager quits. Maybe one or two members of …

The HACCP, or Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point, is a set of guidelines and procedures for food safety originally developed by NASA for astronaut food 30 years ago.  NASA needed a food safety program with “zero tolerance” to protect astronauts from foodborne illnesses while in space.  One can imagine …

Technology has made data easier to store, manage, and collect than at any other time in human history.  That power has resulted in amazing improvements in the efficiency of business, and restaurants have benefited just as much as any other – few restaurateurs can imagine running their business today without …

In part one of my discussion of pre-shift meetings, I discussed the things a manager can do to harm the effect of a pre-shift meeting. It was by no means a comprehensive list. There are many other mistakes managers can and do make that harm their pre-shift meetings.  It does …

There are two types of temperature controls used in commercial refrigeration: 1. Thermostatic (either an air sensing type or evaporator coil sensing type) 2. Low pressure control Let’s start with thermostatic type controls.  An air-sensing thermostat does just that: it senses air temperature.  The control sensor tube is usually mounted in the …

The concept of the “third place” was first developed by Starbucks, and anyone who has been in a Starbucks immediately understands the principle: make your business feel like a home-away-from-home. Unfortunately for Starbucks they made way too many homes just as the economy turned south – tripling the number of …

Lincoln/Redco is a well recognized company within the food service industry.  In case you haven’t heard of them, they produce a variety of food prep equipment and commercial cookware.  Lincoln cookware has been in production in one form or another since the early 1900s.  Every chef is pretty particular about …