The out-of-home food service industry takes home £57 billion in the UK*, so opening up your pub to deliver delicious, tasty, easy-to-prepare meals and small plates gives your pub an excellent opportunity to expand and increase your take-home!
So, how do you roll out a great menu if you have little to no experience working in pub kitchens and restaurants? Well, the good news is you don't have to be a Michelin-Star chef to create excellent-tasting dishes.
Keep reading to discover how to open your pub up to customers who want something good to eat to go with their pint.
Pub menus should offer variety and choice. Sandwiches, chips, and burgers are always popular pub fare and are perfect when people only want a snack. Traditional dishes like shepherd's pie, curries and fish and chips will also go down a storm.
Make sure to ask your regular customers what food they would like and look at what your competitors are selling. Lastly, remember that your market at weekends and throughout the week might be different, so try and have options that cover these different markets.
Food safety and health standards are essential in the kitchen environment to ensure that your customers get safe food and that your employees are protected. No matter whether you're going to cook yourself or hire a chef, everyone who handles food needs to receive appropriate training.
In addition, ensure that you have allergen information available at all times; it's a legal requirement under the Food Safety Act. Having this information at hand increases the potential opportunity for customers to eat at your pub rather than going somewhere else.
A pub kitchen has a very different set-up from a home kitchen.
A commercial restaurant kitchen is well-thought-out and can help improve productivity, which ultimately means better service. You also need completely different equipment, e.g. commercial refrigeration and freezers, commercial oven and fryer, ventilation, storage, food prep areas and cooking utensils and equipment.
At RATIONAL, we can help design your pub kitchen space to ensure you have the most optimum layout for creating and serving delicious pub food. Our experts can also train you and your team so that you and your team work more quickly and efficiently.
The thought of buying a stove, a deep-fat fryer, a commercial oven and a steamer all at once sounds daunting - not to mention expensive! Luckily there are intelligent cooking systems that combine all these functions together, which can not only be cost-effective but also helpful if your kitchen area is small.
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RATIONAL's iVario Pro can boil, fry, deep-fry and steam up to 4 times as fast as conventional appliances. It also has built-in intelligent solutions to ensure nothing boils over or sticks so you have less wastage, with the ability to deliver high-quality food to your customers again and again.
Furthermore, you can split the iVario into four zones to simultaneously prepare different foods at different temperatures. Meaning you can deliver delicious fried halloumi, alongside succulent prawn skewers and a juicy steak, all in one appliance.
The RATIONAL iCombi Pro lets you take care of multiple dishes at once by using the iProduction Manager . Simply place each dish on a different shelf and the system will monitor each rack individually, so that the cooking times are adjusted intelligently to the quantity and desired result. You decide if you want the food to start cooking at the same time, or finish cooking at the same time.
If you get it right, food can be an easy way to bring more customers into your pub. Identify your audience, create a menu that suits them, and deliver it consistently. A great pub food menu can provide a long-term source of revenue as long as it is high-quality, preferably local, and is served quickly and efficiently.
Learn more about our intelligent cooking systems or, if you want help designing your pub kitchen layout, get in touch with the experts at RATIONAL!