Time and patience are precious and precarious in the fast paced and demanding environment of food service. Every hospitality employee has tips and hacks that they have created to make processes run more smoothly. Read on, for our fast-tracked, hack attack that shows you how to save time and avoid painful issues that arise in everyday business for your hospitality workers and more.
Cutlery is King
- Jar Lids Suck
Jar lids stay sealed because the air underneath the lid creates a vacuum that makes the lid stick. To relieve the pressure and open your jar with ease, you can either tap the jar with a piece of metal cutlery, or use it as a lever to let some air into the jar. Either way, you let air in to take the top off easily.
- Bar Blade Runaways
Bottle openers are like pens, they seem to have legs. If you find yourself without a bar blade, use a spoon and your index finger as a lever to pop bottle caps off. This is more innocuous than using a lighter or gigantic ice scoop.
- Chop Stick Trick
Pouring from a cup into a bottle can be tricky and messy without a funnel. But if you have a spare chopstick lying around you can pour onto the chopstick and the liquid will run directly down. Just make sure the chop stick is sticking into the bottle.
Sticky Situations
- Unsticking Stickers
How annoying is it when you order equipment or decorations and the manufacturer has used the world strongest glue on the price sticker? Soaking the sticker won’t work, but there’s a clever chemistry trick that will.
Water (polar) won’t mix with some sticker glues (nonpolar). That’s where oil, the famous nonpolar enemy of water comes in. Oil mixes with the glue and makes it easy to rub off with a paper towel.
With a Pinch of Salt
- Now Everything is all Oily!
Woah! Chill out, just put some salt on the oil. Salt is absorbent and will suck up the oil, so that it can be brushed away. Detergent will also work in this situation, because it gets between the oil and the bottle.
But the salt will be useful if you have spilt some of that oil on the floor. Dry the oil up and sweep it away with ease. This trick’s super helpful because oil can be dangerous for customers and staff.
- Cool Trick
Salt can do even more cool hack things when you combine it with ice.
Imagine you run out of beers on a busy night and you have to pull some out of the dry store. Your customers want drinks now, but they haven’t had time to cool down.
Put the bottles in a large bucket with ice, then pour salt over the ice. The salt lowers the freezing temperature of water, so that the beers are fully submerged in water that’s as cold as ice. This cools them way more quickly.
- Breaking up a Covenant of Salt
With all this salt your using, it’s not going to look good if you run out of salt on customers tables.
Salt gets wasted when moisture makes it stick together in clumps. To avoid this, fill your shakers with a mix of salt and rice. The rise sucks up all the water and keeps the salt free and independent.
A Wax Hack
- Another Cool Trick
Candles are a great way to create mood in your restaurant. But there is nothing more frustrating than cleaning wax out of glass holders. You might think that heat is the best way to get wax off, because that’s how it got stuck there in the first place.
You’ll have more luck if you use some more freezing water. Cooler temperatures make the wax brittle, so that you can snap it off easily.
Time Pour
- Fire the Strawpeedos
The humble strawpeedo is common party science. But the idea behind this can help you save time in your restaurant. Emptying out full bottles can be frustrating and tedious, but if you swirl the liquid before you tip the bottle upside down you can get the job done in half the time. The vortex of liquid does the same thing as the straw: it lets air into the bottle.
If you have a full table of bottles to empty out at once, this trick is a life saver.
- Sauce of Frustration
This is an age-old gripe that has mostly been eradicated thanks to plastic squeeze bottles. If you get fancy sauce that still comes in glass bottles, the solution is surprisingly simple. Just shake the sauce to the lid before you open the bottle.
- Annoying Glass-Scrubber Rubber
In sink glass scrubbers are practically a life hack in-and-of themselves. They are a cheap solution that save you heaps of time washing messy juice or wine glasses. But anyone who has opened a restaurant or bar knows the pain of trying to PUT THE DAMN RUBBER SEAL ON THE TOP.
Seriously, why is that such an annoying thing to do. It isn’t! Just put the rubber rim in the hot glass washer. You don’t even need to waste water on a cycle. The steam heats up the rubber and makes it more flexible.
There you have it. A full stack of frustration cracks. Share, react and write back with your own pack of hacks.
