Avoid Commercial Sink Clogs in Your Dishroom
In a busy commercial kitchen, there’s generally a lot of emphasis put on being able to give your customers high quality food in a timely manner. But another thing that can be just as important as improving ticket times is having an efficient dishroom that can keep up with your busy lunch or dinner rushes.
During peak hours of a busy commercial kitchen, the efficiency of dish turnover is an important piece of the puzzle. It’s a balancing act that demands attention. If your dishroom can’t keep up, this can lead to significant disruptions in service.
For businesses with a limited inventory of glasses, plates, and silverware, staying on top of dishwashing is not just a matter of cleanliness, but necessity.
If dishes aren’t washed as quickly as they come in, the kitchen could run out of clean wares, leaving customers without anything to eat on.
No matter the number of glasses, plates and silverware you have, rushes can deplete your stock fast. This means customers have to wait even longer to be served.
Fortunately, there are steps that can be taken to make sure clean dishes are readily available for plating and service.
Achieving this optimal pace in a commercial dish room requires a blend of the right equipment, effective processes, and well-trained staff. High-efficiency commercial dishwashers that can clean quickly and effectively are a must.
Organizing the dish room for maximum efficiency, where dirty dishes come in one end and clean dishes exit from the other, minimizes handling and speeds up the process. Training staff to work efficiently and safely in this environment is also crucial.
Train Employees To Clean When You’re Busy
In the middle of a busy lunch or dinner rush, it’s tempting to have all hands on deck getting the food out and letting dishes pile up. But a mountain of dirty dishes is not only an eyesore, but poses a real hazard in a busy commercial kitchen.
It’s easy for staff to trip over, leading to broken dishes, potential injuries, and further delays. This kind of environment can also make a busy rush even more stressful.
On the other hand, you don’t want your dish crew acting recklessly trying to wash dishes too quickly. They won’t do a thorough job and could end up breaking plates and glasses in their race to clean them or have potential slip and fall accidents with a heavy bus tub full of dishes in their hands.
Rushing through the dishwashing process increases the risk of breakages, which can be costly over time, both in terms of replacing dishes and in lost time during service. It’s essential to find a middle ground where dishes are turned over rapidly, yet handled with enough care to avoid breakages.
Train your employees to have a sense of urgency, but at a controlled pace. As long as they keep the sinks and the dish machine active during a busy rush, then your cooks and servers should always have the clean pans, plates, glasses and utensils they need to serve customers.
Equip your Dishroom with the Right Products
To get your dishes cleaner faster you need an efficient dish machine. You also need to get the majority of the food off the plates and silverware before you run it through, so your dish machine only has to put on the finishing touches.
You should have your silverware bus tub filled with soapy water so the silverware is already soaking and loosening up food particles before you run it through the dish machine.
Your servers and dish crew need to scrape off plates with a spatula into a trash can before stacking them so they will stack better without tipping over and there’s less food to clean off.
When you stack plates full of food on top of each other you end up with plates that are dirty on both sides.
Soaking plates in hot soapy water before you wash them and utilizing sprayers in your commercial sinks can also allow you to get remaining food particles off before running them through your dish machine.
Commercial dish machines can run up your water bill, but there are several energy efficient varieties nowadays that use less water and electricity. The speed of your dish machine is determined by water pressure, temperature, and detergent levels to make sure your dishes and silverware come out quick and clean.
Make sure to consider the amount of space available in your dishroom. Think about where you’re going to put your bus tubs, sinks and dish machine.
You’ll also need room for drying racks and you won’t want too many steps between any of the stations.
Don’t Let Commercial Sink Clogs Slow You Down
One of the biggest problems you can run into during a busy rush is having a commercial sink clog. When the sinks won’t drain, the dishes start to pile up and everything grinds to a halt.
It’s not just food that can lead to commercial sink clogs. Plastic straws, the foil on butter pats and many other items can get stuck in your drain pipes and cause problems.
What you need is a solution that captures all of these items, but still allows your sinks to drain quickly.
The Drain Strainer™ can help you avoid issues with what gets put down your 3 compartment sinks. No matter how much you focus on employee training, short cuts are always going to be taken and items are going to be put down your foodservice disposer that can harm it.
If you want to avoid issues with clogged grease traps or commercial disposers that are leaking or have burned out motors, The Drain Strainer™ is an effective and affordable scrap collector system that doesn’t require the use of water or electricity.
Invented by a former restaurant owner, The Drain Strainer™ can eliminate issues with mangled silverware or dangers from employees putting their hands down the commercial garbage disposal trying to clear out a clog.
Click here to find out more about how our wet waste collector can keep food solids out of your grease trap, so you won’t need to schedule grease trap cleaning as often.
Let The Drain Strainer™ keep your commercial sinks running smoothly by capturing food solids and avoiding any drain problems.
The pace and efficiency of your dish room has a big impact on your commercial kitchen. A well-run dish room ensures a steady supply of clean wares, which in turn keeps the kitchen and service areas running smoothly.
It reduces the likelihood of service delays and accidents and contributes to a more organized and stress-free working environment.
The rapid turnover of dishes in a commercial kitchen during peak hours is not just about washing dishes quickly. It’s about creating a workflow that maintains a balance between speed and care, ensuring that the kitchen operates like a well-oiled machine, providing excellent service to customers, and maintaining a positive, productive environment for staff.