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Tips On How To Serve Prepared Foods In Your Restaurant

Every foodservice establishment strives to develop its own personal style, its unique flavor, and when using ready meals or frozen food products purchased from an outside source, tips on how to serve prepared foods in your restaurant can be critically important to presenting these products in your restaurant in ways that will be found nowhere else.

With today's food service trends calling for wholesome foods that are preservative and additive free, look first to a supplier that incorporates these important characteristics in as many of its products as possible. Let these items be the basis of a dish, or even an entire menu, and then personalize from there.

Perhaps your restaurant is designed around a centralized theme - the Old West or the rain forests, perhaps. With one entree item from your gourmet food suppliers product list, build some ideas around your theme.

For example, say your prepared item is a mushroom ravioli and your theme is the Old West. Call your dish Gold Rush Ravioli and serve it with accompanying items that represent the luxury of gold - Champagne cream sauce, shaved French truffles, an elegant imported bleu cheese, and freshly cracked grains of Paradise.

For the rainforest theme, steam the mushroom ravioli in an envelope of banana leaves that also contain mango, plantains, a fragrant sliver or two of lemongrass, some fresh cilantro and basil, and a splash of coconut milk. Serve this en papilotte-style so the exotic look can delight the eyes while tropical aromas waft enticingly through the banana leaf.

If yours is a restaurant that reflects a pride of place, patriotism for home, use local influences to personalize your prepared mushroom ravioli.

With the American Southwest in mind, serve your ravioli with a chipotle or poblano cheese sauce, some freshly sliced jalapeno or serrano chilies, a sprinkling of crumbled queso anejo, a handful of pinion nuts or toasted sunflower seeds, and garnish with fresh cilantro leaves.

The Pacific Northwest? Serve your mushroom ravioli on a bed of field greens alongside some fresh raspberries, purple onion rings, a wedge of local farmhouse cheese, a sprinkling of fresh chives, and drizzle this scrumptious salad with a hazelnut vinaigrette. Garnish with a fresh, edible nasturtium flower blossom.

New Orleans and jazz music more your style? Serve your mushroom ravioli in a piquant etouffee sauce, toss in a few mudbug tails, an oyster or two, and perhaps a link of andouille sausage. Serve with garlic bread, Tabasco sauce, and a squeeze of lemon to get your dinner guests dancing back for more.

Keeping this one, highly versatile, prepared gourmet dish in mind as catering food, you can apply any of these themed ideas to the buffet line, too. And whenever pasta is included on a catered menu, it's always best to use a ravioli-style pasta instead of something long and stringy. Catered events often call for eating while standing and juggling a wine glass, handshakes, and interesting conversation. Something easy to eat like ravioli is much less fussy than twirling spaghetti in a crowded room.

One of the most important tips on how to serve prepared foods in your restaurant is to pay attention to what your competitors are serving. It's likely they, too, are using prepared food products and may even be getting theirs from the same source you do. In this, or any, case, you'll want to use these high-quality, delicious foods to their best advantage and in a way the reflects your own unique and delicious style.

Learn more about this author, Sandy Hemphill.
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