Aremote commissary for dessert making and bread baking can help multiunit operators address rising labor and commodities costs and the dearth of production space in many kitchens, officials at B.R. Guest Restaurants say.
The New York City-based operator of 18 restaurants and one nightclub opened such a space nearly a decade ago in Long Island City, N.Y. Each week the 2,000-square-foot building prepares components for 6,000 plated desserts and delivers them by refrigerated truck to the company’s seven Manhattan restaurants, including Ocean Grill, Vento Trattoria and Blue Water Grill.
The desserts include chocolate cake batter, ice cream and sorbet, peach tarts, dessert garnishes and sauces, and homemade marshmallows and crispy rice treats for chocolate fondue. The skilled work has been done in advance, so kitchen staffs merely scoop out the chocolate cake batter into molds for baking.
“We can make it all in bulk much more cheaply than in the restaurants and with very high quality,” says Jerry Goldman, general manager of the commissary and B.R. Guest’s former corporate pastry chef. All told, he estimated that commissary preparation saves the company 20 percent on labor for desserts alone.
It’s far cheaper to hire cooks to plate prepared dessert components than it is to hire a pastry chef who might command a $50,000 to $80,000 salary, Goldman noted. Economies of scale also apply.
“It costs as much in labor to make 100 mini chocolate cakes as it does to make 50,” he said. “We feel we’re not only saving money but also controlling quality and distribution by doing this. With bread production especially, it’s really problematic to do this in the restaurants.”
Another benefit of the commissary is that it frees space in the typically cramped Manhattan restaurant kitchen.
“Every square inch of space in the back of the house takes away from the number of seats in the dining room,” Goldman said.
For its ice cream and sorbet production, B.R. Guest uses two Italian large-batch ice cream machines and an Italian ice cream pasteurizer. The latter is a machine that automatically makes ice cream mix when it is filled with ingredients like cream, milk, sugar and eggs. It heats the mix to a precise temperature, holds it for a programmed time and cools it to a safe temperature for holding prior to freezing. The commissary sends about 50 gallons of ice cream and sorbet daily to the restaurants.
After ovens—a double convection oven and two revolving-rack ovens—the commissary’s most vital piece of equipment is its laborsaving dough sheeter, Goldman said.
“To be able to roll out dough automatically is a huge advantage,” he said.
B.R. Guest’s sheeter is a medium-sized model with an 8-foot span, but Goldman said more compact tabletop sheeters are available for smaller kitchens. One of its uses is prepping a fruit crisp dessert. Circles of sheeted pie dough are frozen and shipped to the restaurants, where they are topped with fruit compote and streusel and baked to order.
“This is something that the restaurants wouldn’t be able to do practically if they had to do it all on their own,” said Goldman.