20 Chefs Share The Most Important Tool in Their Restaurant

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Here at Hamburger America, the most important tool

is my Smashula, because there's really nothing

like it at all.

It's the perfect tool for smashing burgers.

A lot of people use smashers that go straight down.

A lot of people use bacon weights.

This actually gives you the ability to sort of operate

like a brick layer, you know, and move it around.

You break your arm before you break this thing, I think.

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The most important tool in this restaurant is this hearth.

It is so important to every single part of what we do here.

The ovens, the hearth, everything's hanging

during production.

We're drying herbs, we're drying meats.

We're using it to produce things

for our fermentation larder,

and it also cooks all of the food for our guests.

There's no gas, it's just wood and charcoal.

A lot of unique things about our grill specifically

is kind of this grid that's right here, as well as this grid

that's on the back wall right here.

All of these things can move around.

We have planchas, we have grill screens.

Everything can shift around.

Everything is customizable to what we're cooking.

That allows us all the freedom in the world

to cook however we want.

Out in Williamsburg Pizza,

the most important tool in our arsenal is probably our oven.

This is an Italian steam tube oven.

It replicates the exact thermal mass

and environment of a coal-fire oven.

It's also, like, the most energy efficient oven out there,

so there's only 120,000 BTU burner

that's creating a heat exchange through these tubes

where it's a very dry heat,

but all the tubes have a little bit of water in 'em,

so each tube meets at the bottom

and turns water into pressurized steam;

an amazing heat exchange.

It got about like 15

to 20 times the thermal mass of a regular pizza oven.

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Most important tool in our restaurant is our dish machine,

because if it goes down, we're screwed.

Well, this is, like, a high-temp dish machine.

It sanitizes things up to, like, almost 200 degrees,

I believe.

And you can run a full rack of these fully cleaned

in less than 90 seconds.

So, imagine this rack filled with plates.

In 90 seconds, you can throw in the next round,

then the next round.

It's gone down before,

and we have to have another three-compartment sink

in the basement where we have to manually wash it all

by hand, and you need three or four people

just to kind of keep up

with what this can do with one person.

And this thing does go down a lot too,

but that's... [laughs]

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Multiple pieces of equipment that's important.

You got the pizza peel, the pizza oven.

This is the pizza peel, which brings me

to my next piece of equipment, this turning peel,

and this is what we use to take the pizza outta the oven.

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The most important tool in Pies 'n' Thighs

is our seven-slice pie cutter,

which you can see has been well loved.

We cut our pies into seven pieces

because it's the perfect size

for our 9 5/8 inch pie pan.

Six is too big, eight is too little.

We love it so much that it is missing

one of its piece cutters.

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The most important tool at Wenwen is this meat slicer.

We had to order it from China,

and all the parts, like, pretty much

just all come from China.

You have these blades inside that are, like, circular,

and they kind of just, like, will rotate,

and they'll slice anything you put in there pretty fine.

This gets quite a bit of use.

We use this for the shrimp floss.

We use this for lo ba beng, we use it

for pickled mustard greens, shiitake mushrooms.

This saves a ton of time for us.

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The most important tools in my restaurant

would probably be the chef knife,

because you can't really do much without it.

I've had it for about maybe two, three years.

This is a Takamura, a true Damascus, folded metal.

It's as strong as a drill bit.

I keep it very sharp.

So, I've had it for such a long time,

it started, like, over here, and it's worked its way down.

If it was just like a regular knife,

it probably would've been a lot skinnier by now.

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At Rolo's, the most important tool for me

is this very specific spoon.

It's one of one.

It's super beaten up, and it's been here since I started,

and anytime I'm using it I kind of feel

a little bit more confident while cooking that project.

There's something great about the firmness

of the actual spoon,

especially when you're building up, like, a lot of fond

on the bottom of a pan.

You can really use the spoon to kind of like scrape it off

and kind of continue getting that Maillard reaction.

I don't think anybody knows that I like this spoon,

but, like, I think if you walk in

and see, like, this in a bain Marie, sitting somewhere,

it's likely that I'm using it,

but I don't know if anybody has the same affection

for this spoon as I do.

Our most important tool at Dian Di is our wok station.

You can't replicate this kind of flavor at home;

the amount of heat and how quickly it cooks.

There's the flame, and it heats up the wok really fast,

really hot.

[wok sizzling aggressively]

The most important tool at Cozy Royale

is probably our burger patty press.

We only have this one.

Every day, the grill cook will come in;

the bulk of his work is prepping patties.

This tool for us is much better than using hand

or any other form, because if you and your friend come in

and get a burger, they're both gonna be

exactly the same size, which means

they're gonna cook exactly the same way.

We're gonna know our cost on the item.

The consistency is just huge,

and this is 100% every time.

My most important tool here at Saigon Social

is my cleaver.

I would always see my friends' uncles and aunts

and mom, like, their dads working in Chinese restaurants

and was always really amazed

about how simple the tools that they used were.

The universal tool in all of the restaurants

I've been to have always been the cleaver.

This is my cleaver.

Sometimes I kind of put it away and hide it,

but then our prep team also uses it as well,

which I don't really mind because it makes me very happy

to know that this is their tool of choice as well.

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The most important tool in the kitchen,

as a future shop at Kellogg's, is our gelato machine.

I call it, like, the Cadillac of ice cream machines.

It's pretty impressive,

just because of the amount of ice cream

that we go through in this restaurant.

It would be only three settings,

which makes it pretty straightforward.

And then, generally once it hits a certain temperature,

except for, like, a couple different flavors,

it'll let me know when it's done.

It kind of does a beep when it hits

a certain internal temperature.

If I didn't have a machine,

we just would not have ice cream.

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So, most important tool is a tajine.

It's a pot made out of clay,

and it keeps the food super warm.

So, you see how it has the special plate underneath.

It's to protect the clay to not crack.

This one is cooked on the top of the stove.

Then we have another one that we can put in the oven.

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The most important tool of Golden Diner is our plancha.

For the amount of volume we do,

it's a little small, but we make it work.

This is where we make all of our pancakes,

which is our bestseller by far.

The most important tool in the Oxomoco kitchen

is the rubber spatula,

because that way we don't waste anything.

Specifically, this rubber spatula is my favorite;

first of all, because it's heat resistant,

so you can have it on the stove and it won't melt.

Just the size is perfect for everything.

The most important tool at to Sobre Masa is our mill.

This is the mill we use.

It's a 10-horsepower mill that will grind 300 pounds

of corn an hour.

We wouldn't exist if we didn't have this mill.

It's definitely one of the most fundamental pieces

of equipment in being able to produce high-quality masa

for tortillas.

Well, we use it five days a week,

probably for three to four hours during the day.

This meal makes me feel really proud

because you can see the difference not just in working

with a product, but, you know,

in the final product itself is really cool.

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Our most used tool in our restaurant, it's our Alto Shaam.

Alto Shaam is basically a multipurpose tool.

It steams, it bakes, it is a convection.

I use this to cook our ribs, our pork belly.

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The most important tool here is staff.

Without my staff, we could not get a lot of things done.

I mean, we rely on equipment,

but sometimes the equipment is just not accessible.

We're gonna make these meals regardless.

So, I appreciate my staff.

My most important tools; I have two of them.

They are our prep team: [indistinct] and Alejo.

These are my sharpest tools.

Say Hi, guys.

And they're making sausages.

I can literally run this restaurant with me

and one other person, and that's him.

He's incredibly talented.

He learns super fast.

He's kind of like a prodigal talent with charcuterie,

and he really cares.

We taste everything together.

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