Restaurant Plates and Platters - Homer Laughlin China - Dinnerware - Restaurant China
These plates and platters are perfect for all your venue's needs. Our china is durable, colorful and long lasting. Make sure that you have the platters, plates, saucers and salad plates on hand to properly accommodate all you guests quickly and efficiently!
So what are plates and platters? With dinnerware and restaurant china, standard nomenclature can be finicky especially when companies embark on combining the functions of dinnerware. Plates can be considered platters and vice versa depending on who you ask. Simply put, plates are circular china which hold main courses as well a side menu items. Platters are generally larger, heavier and oval in shape but are also great for serving. Serving platters can occasionally have slight partitions in the china pattern which help in sectioning off foods. This is especially useful when you do not want juices or liquids to interfere with any adjacent foods on your dinnerware.
Plates and platters have a wide variety of uses during dining service. What you serve with plates and platters will of course be decided by your menu. Often, larger plates and platters are used as 'chargers' at the table. Chargers are plates that are placed underneath the main serving dish which actually holds your food. Charger plates, service plates, and chop plates are all terms that can be used to describe the plate which sits underneath the dinnerware which holds the food. Although fairly common practice, standard plates and platters are not intended for this purpose. With Homer Laughlin's selection of plates and platters, you can serve food with style and elegance without the need of a charger or garnishing plate.
Homer Laughlin and Ventura China alike, provide excellent selections of decorative plates and platters. With their combined inventory, we are able to offer you 15 unique styles of plates and platters to choose from. Each of these 15 styles have further color and graphic options available. With so many options of plates and platters to choose from, you will find one right for your restaurant.
Cleaning your dinnerware properly is very important. Obviously you will not want to serve food with a dirty plate. Any dining experience whether casual or formal, will be instantly ruined if you serve a dirty plate or platter at the table! Clean dinnerware in a restaurant must be maintained at all times without any exception. For the majority of us, keeping clean restaurant china is common sense and part of the daily maintenance routine. However, a more common scenario is one that puts yourself in the shoes of your bus tub runners and dishwashers. Imagine that your restaurant has been slammed all week, your bus boys and dishwashers have spent hours upon hours in the scullery room. They give you their all, but now its friday and several have the weekend off. The only thing on their mind is to clock out! This is when plates and platters can easily be damaged. In a rush, dinnerware handling will take a turn for the worse. Excessive plate scrapping with forks or other harsh and abrasive items will shorten the life of your restaurant's dinnerware. Poor handling methods and improper solid food disposal can damage all of your dinnerware and cost you big in overhead. Even strict dishwashing methods can be overlooked on a friday night. To compensate for this, Homer Laughlin creates dinnerware plates and dinnerware platters with a non-porous clay body providing greater resistance to breakage and intensified thermal shock resistance.
With that being said cleaning your china is not a daunting task. Our commercial dinnerware and china is built with high volume usage in mind. By utilizing a proper sanitization technique with your dinnerware at all times, you will get years of mileage from your restaurant china. Here are a few tips which will help you in prolonging the life of your dinnerware:
- Solid Food Disposal - make sure that when cleaning your plates, use a softer sponge or pad to wipe clean any solid foods left behind. Also make use of your pre rinse faucet at the dirty dish table. This will help in loosening up tough food particles stuck on the plates.
- Never bang your dishes! One mistake made by almost every commercial kitchen is to bang the plate on the side of the table to make food particles loose. Even though you may not shatter a plate or platter by doing this, you can cause unseen fractures, dramatically shortening the life span of your dinnerware. Avoid using forks to scrape food loose as this will also scratch and wear the surface of your plates.
- Use only china and dinnerware that is dishwasher safe. High temperature sanitization is great, but can cause problems if your china is not resistant to thermal shock. Thermal shock will happen anytime your dinnerware and china encounters extreme changes in temperature. This includes serving hot meals to a chilled dish, or a chilled dish being washed with high temperature sanitization.