Restaurants are seemingly on every street corner nowadays and it is for good reason. Having a place to go and be able to order and eat some of your favorite dishes without being forced to try and do a million things in a kitchen at once and then faced with a giant pile of dirty dishes afterwards is something that everyone cherishes. Unfortunately, because restaurants have become so common, it means that in order to succeed in such a competitive marketplace, you have to make your restaurant as good as possible.

There are many different areas of your restaurant that you could try and improve but perhaps the most vital part of a restaurant is the kitchen. Without an efficiently functioning kitchen, nothing else in your restaurant will ever be able to function well enough to make your business a powerhouse in the industry. So you should undoubtedly be focusing your energy on making your kitchen the best that it can be.

The first step on the path to getting a phenomenal kitchen area is to make sure that it is set up properly to begin with. If you have not properly prepared the kitchen when the restaurant opens, then you are already starting on the wrong foot and will have to work twice as hard just to be half as good. So make sure that before you unveil your restaurant to the world, that you look over these tips on how to make sure that your restaurant kitchen is properly prepared for success.

Plan Where to Put What

You should never be doing anything important without first coming up with a plan, especially when it comes to creating something important like a restaurant kitchen. That is why you need to set aside a large chunk of time to think through the planning process of your kitchen design and where you are going to put everything.

Depending on what kind of restaurant you have, there may be several different kinds of cooking stations that you will need to have. For example, some common stations that can be found in many restaurants are a prep station, pizza station, salad station, grill station, and dessert station. So you need to take a look at your menu items and figure out exactly what stations you are going to need in your kitchen.

It is not just enough to think about what you need though, you also need to consider how you are going to arrange them. For example, it is wise not to put a salad station right beside a grill station because then you can have several potential problems pop up. Not only is there the potential issue of the heat from the grill throwing off the consistency and visual appeal of the salads, but there is also the bigger issue of cross contamination happening from the raw meat that will be frequently put onto the grill.

So make sure that you have a setup where hot stations are next to other hot stations, cold stations are next to other cold stations, and any dishes that require items from multiple stations are not having to be passed back and forth down the line a couple different times in order to gather all of the ingredients for it.

Bringing in the Supplies

This is probably of the most important parts of running a successful kitchen because you can put the tools and ingredients into the hands of some amazing cooks but if they are forced to use really poor quality items, then nothing that they make is going to come out being very good. This does not only refer to the food items themselves, but the tools to prepare and cook them as well.

In order to help ensure the quality of your ingredients and tools, you need to make sure that you are buying from companies and places that you have done research on and have proven to be reliable companies selling reliable products. From your knife supplier to your food co-packing and custom spice blends service in Denver, you need to make sure that it is also coming from companies that care about their clients and their products.

Although the quality of your items is incredibly important, it is not the only thing that you need to focus on when stocking up your restaurant kitchen. You also need to make sure that you have enough of all of these items. Running out of dishes, pans, or spices in your Denver kitchen will cause nothing but havoc and devastation to the reputation of your restaurant, so this must be avoided at all cost.

Get the Right People

Earlier, it was mentioned that a cook is only as good as the tools that they are working with. Well, as it turns out, that happens to work both ways. You can give some of the best cooking tools in the world to a chef but if they do not know what they are doing very well, then the dishes that come out of that kitchen will not be very good. That is why getting the right people to come to work in your kitchen is such an important step to take before opening any restaurant.

Out of all of the qualities that can be looked at when searching for a new employee, one of the most important ones for a cook to have is experience. Not just experience in cooking, however, but experience cooking the same type of food that your restaurant will be serving. It does not do you much good to have a very experienced Italian restaurant chef coming to work in your new Indian restaurant because they will not be familiar with the kinds of dishes that you will be making.

So make sure that you are getting cooks that know all about the type of food that you are serving and are people who know the value of proper communication and teamwork within a kitchen setting.