Commercial Foodservice Equipment

A commercial kitchen is not a shopping list of appliances. It is a flow — receiving, dry and cold storage, prep, cook line, service, warewashing, and back out to the dock — and the stainless steel equipment that carries that flow has to be sized, sequenced and specified together. A dishtable that lands two inches short of the machine, an undershelf that blocks a cart, a hot food table that leaves a gap in the serving line: those are the mistakes that cost real money after the drywall is up.

MH-USA represents Eagle Group, a broadline stainless steel manufacturer founded in 1947 in Clayton, Delaware with more than 17,000 standard models across foodservice. That catalog covers nearly every stainless component between the receiving dock and the dish room, which means one schedule, one submittal package, one freight shipment and one point of contact instead of six vendors pointing at each other when a table arrives short.

Our job is the part in between: reading the plan, picking the series that matches how hard the equipment will actually be used, catching the dimensional conflicts before fabrication, and getting the package to the site on a schedule that matches the trades. We have been doing that from Salt Lake City since 1997 for restaurants, schools, hospitals, senior living kitchens, correctional facilities, food plants and stadium concessions.

A dish room is a small conveyor system built out of stainless steel. Soiled dishtables collect and scrap, the machine runs, and clean dishtables land and stage. The layout — straight, corner or island — is dictated by the room, and it determines everything downstream: where the scrap trough sits, which way the operator turns, whether a cart can get to the clean end without crossing the soiled side.

Straight-design tables are the default in a rectangular room. Corner designs turn the flow ninety degrees where a wall gets in the way. Island designs let two operators work opposite sides of a machine in high-volume kitchens. Soiled tables are available with an integrated three-compartment sink or with a landing shelf, and mobile soak sinks handle the pots that never fit in the machine.

The rule that saves the most rework: fix the dish machine model first, then size the tables to it. Table height, overhang and drain location all follow the machine, not the other way around.

Panco is Eagle’s transport line, and it is the part of a kitchen package that determines how many trips your staff make. Bun pan racks in aluminum and stainless, universal angle racks, oven racks, Z-type nesting racks that collapse for storage, pizza pan and dough box racks, donut racks, oval tray racks for banquets, roll-in refrigerator racks, and can racks all move product without hand-carrying it.

Insulated transport cabinets — heated, heated proofing, full-size and half-size — carry food from the kitchen to a satellite location or hold it through a service window. Banquet carts and multiple-purpose racks cover catering and event work. Utility carts, RediPak carts, dolly trucks and cart covers round out the fleet.

Sizing questions we ask on every transport quote: what pan size is standard in your kitchen, how many pans per rack does a single service require, what is the narrowest door the rack has to pass through, and does the rack need to nest when it is not in use?

Underbar equipment is measured in inches and seconds. Every reach a bartender makes on a busy night gets repeated hundreds of times, so the layout of the cocktail station, ice chest, glass rack storage, blender module, dump sink and bottle filler is a productivity decision, not a cosmetic one.

The Spec-Bar line plus the 1800 and 2200 series cover cocktail units and stations, underbar sinks in three- and four-compartment configurations, ice chests, combination units, glass rack storage units, glass rinsers, blender stations with a T&S faucet, dump sinks, speed rails and portable indoor bars for events.

Standard advice: put the ice chest inside the bartender’s pivot, keep the hand sink at the end of the run where the health inspector can see it, and specify drainboards long enough that wet glassware never lands on the bar top.