Seafood is a wonderful delicacy that helps form the backbone of thousands of restaurants. Seafood is healthy and great tasting, and customers love treating themselves to seafood when they go out to eat. Unfortunately, overfishing has increased exponentially in the last 25 years, resulting in the collapse of a full …

Managing a working restaurant is hard. There are a lot of moving parts that must come together just right in order to pull off a successful shift.  Add in the stress created by a couple missed orders or irate customers and the goal of making every guest full and happy …

I didn’t learn to program my first Point of Sale (POS) system until I actually become a head Chef at a restaurant and the POS system impacted my food cost. I taught myself how to use it, as there was no operating manual and none of the waitstaff or the …

Food allergies are a serious problem that millions of people deal with every day.  Sometimes those reactions can even be life-threatening, which makes the allergy problem something restaurants cannot afford to ignore. And yet for quite awhile now there has been a distinct ambivalence in the food service industry when …

According to a recent survey by the National Restaurant Association (NRA), 75% of restaurants offer a children’s menu and another 6.25% are considering offering one.  Most restaurants understand the need to cater to young families and accommodate them in every way possible. But is your restaurant really making your youngest …

Now that you’ve established your Critical Control Points and Critical Limits for every preparation process and every menu item in your restaurant, it’s time to monitor.  Limits and CCPs don’t do any good if there’s no enforcement.  The first thing to establish is someone who will accept responsibility for monitoring.  …

“Going Green” is a hot buzzword these days, and everyone, including the food service industry, is jumping on board the environmentally friendly bandwagon. The great thing about going green in your restaurant is that you can cut costs and save yourself considerable money while improving customer loyalty and visibility at …

When Oskar Blues opened its doors in 1997 in the tiny burg of Lyons, CO, just north of Boulder, it was just a place to get some great Southern style food and listen to the best offerings from the local music scene.  That all began to change when Oskar founder …

The Back Burner was recently honored with the top spot in the Business Schools Directory: 60 Best Blogs In The Restaurant Industry. After two years of blogging, we’ve accumulated quite a library of information for everyone in the food service industry here at The Back Burner. If you haven’t already, …

You’d think finding a place to eat lunch in a health nut haven like Boulder, Colorado that featured simple, all-natural ingredients made from scratch for a good price would be pretty easy.  Boulder residents Anthony Pigliacampo and Rob McColgan realized a couple years ago that unless they wanted to eat …