Case Study - Café Spice Namasté
Challenge: How can a busy restaurant cook and serve between 800-1,000 covers per week, served mostly with rice, and ensure optimum quality for every portion?
Cyrus Todiwala OBE DL has been chef / proprietor at Café Spice Namasté for the last 24 years, a restaurant built on a reputation for authentic, inspirational cuisine from India. A busy lunch and dinner service is enough of a challenge but the restaurant has a popular events and function business too.
Solution: The Panasonic rice cooker meant that for functions, there was no need to cook then re-heat rice as it cooks fully automatically, freeing up the chefs to concentrate on other duties, saving them valuable time too.
Aiming high, keeping it consistent
Café Spice Namasté strives to offer the very best it can with regards to service levels and quality of food, to a varied customer base, across its a la carte and events business. Cyrus says that consistency is one of the main challenges he faces; “At Café Spice Namasté we want to familiarise people with the many different flavours India can offer which means we are innovative with the ingredients we use and constantly inventive with our menu but aim to maintain a high quality food offer at all times. Once new dishes have been introduced, we have to review our processes, and look to new ways of achieving consistent standards, and that can mean new equipment if it helps to achieve our goal.
“The rice cooker has enabled us to prepare different kinds of pulao rice, not just steamed, for our events without the need to cook and re-heat. We’ve achieved better portion control and as it’s fully automatic, the chefs have peace of mind it will cook to perfection and they don’t have to be constantly watchful over it. Once cooked, it will hold rice hot at the correct temperature for two hours.”