Many people love the idea of running a small hotel or pub serving great food. It’s a dream job, especially if you love meeting people. You can live in a large and even historic building in a location of your choice. But, as with any business, it needs meticulous planning, from the décor to the cuisine you serve.
The kitchen is a key area, as people will travel miles for good food, whether that’s regional cuisine with food sourced from local farmers and delicatessens or specialist food such as Thai or sushi.
Restaurants can help a hotel or pub earn more money, as the Hotel Industry magazine points out. It says that restaurants can provide a great opportunity for hotels to increase their profits from guests, and there is also the possibility of attracting customers from the local area too.
Getting the Right Staff
As well as finding the right cuisine for your customers, you’ll also need to get the right staff in the kitchen and serving in the dining room.
Obviously, it helps if you are a trained cook, as good chefs can be hard to find and will demand a higher salary than a waitress or kitchen helper. The National Careers Service says a head chef’s duties include planning menus, managing stocks, controlling the budget, organising the staff rota and managing health and hygiene procedures. And that’s before they’ve started cooking for hungry guests.
Planning Your Kitchen
A hotel or pub kitchen is a busy and stressful place, so everything should be done to ease the pressure. This could be relatively simple things such as making sure the layout of the kitchen is easy to manage so staff can quickly put their hand on the right tools or find the ingredients they need.
There will need to be sufficient storage space for raw, prepped and cooked foods. A very important area is making sure there are enough fridges and freezers and that these are at the correct temperatures. You may want a separate commercial fridge freezer for meats, fish, prepared dishes or sweets, for example.
This should go some way to ensuring you have a well-run and successful kitchen.
Staff comfort
Now “youv’e kept the heat out of the kitchen” so to speak but heat is important, you will want to ensure a warm and comfortable environment for your staff who work in it.
Ensure its warm with appropriate heaters like those available from http://apolloradiators.co.uk/ they do all sorts from kitchen radiators to towel radiators for the bathroom to give them that extra feel of comfort.