Building a restaurant kitchen is a lot like assembling an enormous puzzle. It requires time and careful thought and all the pieces must fit together perfectly to achieve the desired results. If any of the pieces are missing, or put in the wrong place, it’ll be easy to spot and the finished product will suffer. One of the most important pieces of the puzzle that is your restaurant's kitchen is the equipment. From the big items like refrigerators and ovens to the smaller gadgets like food processors and mixers, each tool plays a crucial role in turning ingredients into delicious dishes for your patrons. 

Running a restaurant means taking on a variety of responsibilities. Providing delicious meals to patrons, maintaining the safety and quality of those meals, keeping an efficient kitchen, and managing staff are just some of the tasks required on a daily basis. Consequently, any piece of equipment that can make this demanding job easier is an invaluable asset to the kitchen.

Sam Tell isn't just the one-stop shop for all the foodservice supplies and equipment a restaurant needs. It's also your source for insights into the restaurant industry. 

Every month, we shine the spotlight on a handful of Sam Tell clients to celebrate their success and share what makes them special in our seasonal roundup. Take a look at this season's selections below: 

If you’re running a commercial foodservice operation, an oven is an essential piece of equipment. Even operations where cooked or baked goods aren’t the menu's main event normally have some need to cook or bake certain things. Different foods, as any chef knows, have different requirements when it comes to cooking, and that means more than just setting the oven to the right temperature.

Sam Tell knows that so much more goes into crafting a positive dining experience than what customers eat and drink. Creating the right impression with your guests is critical to maintaining your business, and while the menu and its preparation get most of the attention for influencing this, some of the most important considerations have little to do with food, at all. 

A school cafeteria serves a critical function beyond that of any typical restaurant. While the latter's chief goal is to provide guests with a pleasant dining experience, cafeterias have the responsibility of providing the primary source of nutrition for students.

Foodservice operations are as diverse as the cuisines they serve. Full-service, sit-down restaurants, food trucks, and drive-thrus, among others, all cater to the various needs, tastes and appetites of their customers—facilitated by customized kitchen layouts. Fast-casual restaurants are no exception.

Sam Tell isn't just the one-stop shop for all the foodservice supplies and equipment a restaurant needs. It's also your source for insights into the restaurant industry. 

Every month, we shine the spotlight on a handful of Sam Tell clients to celebrate their success and share what makes them special in our seasonal roundup. Take a look at this season's selections below: 

Designing a hotel kitchen is a lot like designing a kitchen for any commercial foodservice operation. On top of those considerations, though, are the added responsibilities of catering to a much more complicated set of needs. With potentially hundreds of guests patronizing multiple dining concepts, managing a hotel's foodservice is akin to overseeing multiple restaurants in one. Its kitchen must function as well as its smaller counterparts, despite such expansive duties.

The following tips can help create the best layout for this unique branch of hospitality:

Celebrity Chef Wenford Patrick Simpson, or "Chef Patrick" for short, didn’t attain his culinary superstar status overnight. His superb dishes are the result of skills he's been fine tuning since a young age, when he began cooking in his hometown of St. Ann Parish, Jamaica. His talents were recognized even in his youth, and it wasn’t long before he was cooking professionally at resorts, on cruise ships, and eventually, in New York City, at some of the best restaurants in the world.