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SERVICELINE NEWS
TEMPORARY KITCHENS: MAINTENANCE TIPS
1. Temporary kitchens are subject to the same legal requirements as all commercial kitchens in respect of building regulations, fire codes and EHO food hygiene legislation. In the first instance, when looking at hiring in temporary kitchens, check and make sure the supplier offers the necessary assurances over health, safety and hygiene in respect of their products and services. Needless to say, give yourself a reasonable time to evaluate potential suppliers, their service quality – and prices.
2. Equipment in temporary kitchens – just as in any normal kitchen – can break down. To prevent issues from the outset, a major factor to consider is to make sure your staff are familiar with the temporary equipment they will be using. Suppliers will offer training as part of their installation package, usually upon delivery. This may be the day before the chefs are required on site however, so careful planning is necessary.
3. Secondly, check what you are covered for in terms of emergency repairs in the event of a breakdown. Temporary kitchen suppliers should ensure the equipment is delivered to you in a clean and well maintained condition and they should also offer a telephone ‘helpdesk’ service for queries. Check also what the response time is to breakdowns. If the volume is sufficient to justify it and the operating period too tight to benefit from a call out, you might want to build some ‘redundancy’ or spare capacity into your temporary facilities to cover you for all eventualities.
4. Major events feeding thousands and using temporary facilities typically arrange for engineers to be at standby onsite where the maintenance of service is crucial…and sometimes the engineers needs more than their spanners or wrenches to affect a fix.
One such is a lawn tennis club. It was a beautiful hot summer’s day at a rather famous tennis tournament. The caterers were gearing themselves up for the mid-afternoon rush for cups of tea, sandwiches and strawberries and cream when….the water boilers stopped working!!
Perhaps it was too much Pimm’s with lunch or the groundsmen who began their day’s watering too early, but the water tower supplying the complex had been run almost dry by the demands of the toilets, showers, grounds staff and the caterers.
Three Serviceline engineers are based permanently on site for the duration of the tournament, a quite usual scenario for these high profile events. Now these guys have every tool and spare part imaginable to hand – because they might need to repair any bit of kit on the site which includes full kitchens and banqueting operations and satellite catering units.
But – quite appropriately for this very traditional venue – it was the good old fashioned kettle that saved the day – well three kettles. Each engineer grabbed a large catering kettle, filled it from the nearest tap and poured the water directly into the boilers.
They kept this routine up until the afternoon rush had been quelled and the customers satisfied. Then, out came the tool boxes. Water boilers have a pre-set safety feature which only allows filling when there is a certain degree of water pressure, but there is a high safety margin built-in and the engineers could adjust the settings to allow filling under a lower, but still safe, water pressure. Word was also sent to the site maintenance staff asking them to restrict, where they could, use of water until the end of play.
PUBLISHED IN Caterer & Hotelkeeper 17th April, 2008
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