Restaurant Masterminds

I know there is a general concern with the health consequences of eating fried food, especially when it comes to cholesterol. I own a seafood restaurant on the southern coast of Maine, and one of our mainstays is fried food. We serve almost as much fried food today as we have in the past. There’s something about having fried clams while on vacation in Maine that is a must. Our customers always comment on how they go without all year, waiting for their vacation to Maine for their annual fix of fried food. This is the sound of sweet music to my ears; we love the pleasure of serving our customers that annual fix. It’s exciting that so many people choose our restaurant for this simple pleasure.

For our part, we use only one hundred percent canola oil, and we change it daily. We buy quality French fries, we don’t use coated fries or fries loaded with sugar. We want to give our customers their fix, while trying to provide some healthy element to the indulgence. I don’t think having fried food a couple of times a year will be detrimental to anyone’s health. We maintain excellent standards in our quality, that go beyond our oil and French fries, we are committed to using fresh fish and cooking all of our food to order. Our onion rings are hand cut and breaded to order, with a light coating, using real milk and egg. If you’re going to indulge, you might as well have a high quality experience that tastes so good, that it’s worth the lecture from your doctor.

The good news with fried food is, there are benefits that go beyond taste and quality. Recently, I’ve been researching a new bio-diesel generator that runs on recycled fry oil. It has a built in filtering system that cleans the left over oil and turns it into fuel for you generator. It’s amazing all the technology that exists today, especially industry specific equipment for our restaurant. One of the biggest negatives of maintaining standards like ours, where we change our oil daily, is the waste. It’s a messy job; you deal with grease dumpsters, which almost always are a mess. You rely on a company to pick up your grease when the dumpster is full, and you hope the dishwasher doesn’t spill the oil when they’re emptying the pails of grease. There is nothing glamorous about this whole process; it’s one of those byproducts of having a quality product.

Enter the new bio-diesel generator that stores, heats, filters and burns your waste oil for fuel. This process will typically supply up to twenty percent of the electricity for your restaurant. In addition to the electricity, the heat generated from the generator is used to heat glycol lines, which are attached to your water heater and will provide up to eighty percent of your hot water. If you’re a busy restaurant, your dishwasher runs constantly and uses a continuous supply of hot water. The simplicity of this machine is perfect, it utilizes your waste and turns it’s own waste into hot water for your restaurant.

With all the talk of going green, this has to sit near the top for restaurateurs. You no longer have a big truck blowing exhaust pulling into your parking lot to empty your grease. You’re recycling your waste into energy for your company, reducing the pollution generated in producing electricity. You’re parking lot is much cleaner, you no longer have a grease slick in your lot around your grease dumpster, and it totally cuts down on the flies, that a grease dumpster attracts.

As a concerned citizen, you can now proudly eat your fried food and inform your doctor that maybe, he just might be wrong when he lectures you on the pitfalls of eating fried food. As an educated consumer, you can let him or her know that you are only trying to help restaurants go green and that you are a good steward toward helping the environment. I liken this to a win-win, everyone wins, and we get to feel a little less guilty eating fried food, knowing that in the process, we are helping the environment. Fried Clams just got a little tastier.

Dick Varano