It was early on a Friday night, and already the front of the house was packed. My kitchen looked like a beehive, and as usual, my whole staff was working furiously to keep everybody happy. It's a necessity both they and I have come to live with as a result of our setup. You see, our kitchen is entirely too small for the amount of business we get. Because of my location, which I wouldn't give up for the world, there's not a lot I can do about it.

Anyway, things were running as smoothly as they ever do, when one of my main refrigeration units went down. One of my line cooks came from the back and informed that we were going to lose a lot of steaks if we didn't act fast.

Since we have no room, we formulated a plan to get the meat into one of the bar coolers until we could figure out what to do. While some of my staff was working on that, I made a call to a repair service, since I didn't think I would be able to reach my equipment supplier on a Friday night. They told me the next time they could come by to take a look would be on Monday. In desperation, I called my restaurant equipment supplier. Luckily, he was still in the office.

I explained what had happened and he thought about it for a minute. After grilling me (no pun intended) for a while on the preventive maintenance measures I had taken with the unit, we got on the subject of coils. It seems this particular unit has a sheet of metal between two sets of coils on the rear of the unit, leaving the rear coils exposed while hiding the interior set. The manufacturer put the thin sheet of metal between the coils to act as a heat transference device, as the heat produced between two sets of coils on a commercial refrigeration unit can be pretty intense. The sheet would absorb heat from both sets of coils and help to dissipate it, since it had more surface area.

The bottom line is that we had been cleaning the exterior set of coils, but not the interior set. My restaurant equipment supplier mentioned that this was an unorthodox (yet effective) setup for the back of a cooler, so he wasn't surprised we weren't aware of the interior coils. He told how to remove the metal sheet and suggested I clean the interior coils to see if that might be the problem.

My GM and I took the unit out back and removed the sheet and took a look at the inset coils. They were in bad shape, having never been cleaned before (or at least no as long as I owned them). To make a long story short, we cleaned them thoroughly and tried the unit again. Within five minutes, things were nice and frosty on the inside again. I called my equipment supplier back to thank him for his help. Of course, he told me to call him first before I use a repair service for out-of-warranty equipment, which I should have done in the first place.

Having a knowledgeable equipment supplier is of the utmost importance of my business. This particular Friday night, I was reminded of that in a big way.