Kitchens are a notoriously hectic environment for everyone who is in them. While residential kitchens are bad, commercial kitchens are far worse. Order after order runs in, to the point where you would have a hard time keeping up even if you had eight arms. That is why being able to have an efficient kitchen in your restaurant is so important.

By being more efficient, you can decrease the amount of prep time for each dish, which means you can finish making meals faster, serve more meals in a day and make more money. In the interest of helping to make your restaurant kitchen more efficient, we have constructed this list of steps that you can take to improve the performance of your entire kitchen and food preparation process.

Limit Your Menu

Having limited choices on your menu might sound like the last thing that you should ever do in a restaurant but it could actually be very beneficial as long as you handle it in the right way. The point of limiting the number of items on your menu is not about restricting the choice of your customers, it is about reducing the variety of ingredients that you need which can help lower your ingredient commercial blending costs in Denver.

If you have to deal with fewer ingredients, then it lowers the costs and time associated with handling them. Everything from your private label blending and packaging service in Denver to your dry storage space to hold them, it all becomes less. Plus having dishes that are all made using similar cooking and preparation techniques means that you will not have any cooking technology that is expensive or large and is only used for one or two of your items.

Fewer dishes also means that your staff will get more practice cooking food that they know how to cook really well. So instead of serving 30 dishes that your staff knows how to cook fine, you can be serving 20 dishes that your staff knows how to cook amazingly.

Have a Solid Inventory System

It is extremely hard to cook something when you run out of ingredients. This is a situation that all restaurants dread and will result in the staff doing something that could otherwise be making them money or making a customer happy. This is why it is so important that you always know how much of every item you have left.

By having an efficient inventory system, you will be able to keep track of what you have on the line and in storage and anytime even one of the ingredients starts to become low, you can either begin to prepare more or put in an order to your custom spice blends service in Denver to get some more ingredients shipped in.

That is why it is so vital that kitchen managers are doing complete checks of all the inventory both at the opening and closing of the restaurant. Otherwise, you could very likely be caught off guard and end up having to regretfully tell your customers that you are not able to make the dish that they were so looking forward to.

Do Not Be Afraid to Take Suggestions

There is nothing worse than a restaurant owner or head chef who is so stubborn that they do not value the opinion of their employees if it even slightly differentiates from their own. Just because you have more experience, it does not mean that you always have the right answer. Leaders who do not heed the advice of their trusted staff is doomed to drive their business into the ground. After all, who knows a kitchen better than the people who work in it day in and day out?

That is why you should not only be listening to your staff but also actively asking their opinions about changes that need to be made. If one or two of your line cooks notice that they are having to do a certain task in a way that takes more time and they have thought about a way that they could minimize the process, then it only makes sense to at least listen to their solution. It might be something that you never thought about and can actually end up saving you valuable time and therefore money.

Make Sure That You Have Enough Equipment

One of the worst enemies of a busy kitchen is a lack of equipment and space. This is because it ends up causing delays as some of your kitchen staff is forced to stop what they are doing while they wait for the other kitchen staff members to finish up with the equipment that they are in need of. This bottlenecking effect will absolutely kill a restaurant’s productivity.

So make sure that you have enough of all the kitchen essentials so that your staff will never be forced to wait for a chance to use them. This generally includes knives, towels, pans, plates, and cutting boards. But making sure that you have enough of everything else is always a good idea as well. Having too much equipment is a better problem to have than unfortunately not having enough.

Prep Early and Often

Getting one of your busy cooks to go in the back during the middle of a rush and start preparing items that you are running low on will only hurt your efficiency even more. Get a dedicated section of staff to come in a bit earlier to start preparing all of the things that you will need later in the day so that you never have to make more in the middle of the day. This way they can also get ahead of any last minute ingredient shortages and make a call to your private label blending service in Denver if need be.