Restaurant kitchen equipment is cheaper, tougher, and more versatile than home versions. Here are 12 tools I use daily and where to find them.
Whether I’m in the kitchen developing recipes for a client or just cooking a weeknight dinner, I’m often struck by how many pro restaurant kitchen tools I use all the time.
Some are holdovers from my culinary school knife kit. Others I picked up out of habit working in a restaurant pastry kitchen. They’re hardy tools that emphasize function over form, built to withstand the abuse of a busy restaurant kitchen. And because pro kitchens are notoriously crowded and (much) smaller than you’d expect, every item must earn its place.
Restaurant kitchen tools may not be glamorous, but they hold up to years, even decades, of hard use.
Restaurant chefs and cooks get as attached to their favorite tools as any dedicated home cook. Line cooks are known to hide favorite utensils so they’re sure to find them at their next shift. (I heard tales of things tucked above ceiling tiles.) My pastry chef and I had a small, locked cabinet where we’d keep gadgets we didn’t want absorbed by the general kitchen. I even had my own personal favorite 4-cup measuring cup that I toted back and forth with my knife kit.
Why Restaurant Equipment Belongs In Your Home Kitchen
Unglamorous restaurant gear typically costs less than its counterparts marketed to home cooks. That’s especially true when comparing costs between restaurant supply stores and luxury kitchenware retailers.
It’s also designed to take a beating. Restaurant managers, who operate with razor-thin profit margins, hate to replace equipment unless it’s truly dead. Even then, it probably can be used for something.
Another plus: These tools are versatile, with many pulling double, or even triple, duty.
The Restaurant Kitchen Tools Worth Having
These are a dozen of tools I reach for all the time in my recipe development work and home cooking. I’m only including links to products where I find a specific make and model make a difference.
Prep & Organization
Cambros, available in a many sizes, are hardworking containers for dry and wet ingredients.
1. Cambros. These stackable square or round containers are found in every restaurant kitchen. They’re available in sizes from 2 to 22 quarts, all with airtight lids that can be used interchangeably. They’re also marked with metric and imperial volumes (nice for measuring and mixing right in the container). You can use them to store liquids, dry goods, and prepped ingredients to stash in a cupboard, pantry, fridge, or freezer.
2. Large cutting board. Too many home cooks put up with small, warped plastic cutting boards, which are unsafe. Take a cue from pro kitchens: bigger is better so you have plenty of room to maneuver. I’m a fan of Epicurean’s roomy 17½”x13” composite paper cutting boards ($44). They hold up beautifully and are easy on knives.
3. Kitchen shears. Sure, chefs pride themselves on knife skills, but sometimes a sharp set of kitchen scissors gets the job done more efficiently and precisely. Messermeister’s 8-inch Take-Apart Kitchen Scissors ($7) have been a diehard since they were part of my culinary school knife kit. They’re lightweight, come apart so you can clean them thoroughly, and their design enables you to also use them as a bottle opener, nutcracker, and even screwdriver.
Stay Sharp: How to Be a Knife Master →
Hardware-store standbys – in this case a Sharpie and a roll of painter’s tape – are handy kitchen tools.
4. Painter’s tape and a Sharpie. In the restaurant world, there’s a whole culture around painter’s tape and Sharpies, which are always within reach to label and date everything. Do people neatly cut their tape or just tear it (which cutters consider a serious character flaw)? For fun, check out the #kitchentape hashtag on Instagram, where you’ll find delightfully creative spelling. “Seizure dressing” = Caesar dressing. “Mole Asses” = molasses. (Hey, busy line cooks are paid for their cooking prowess, not spelling skills.) It’s a habit I maintain in my home kitchen, because I’m not going to remember what dressing is in that squeeze bottle or when I prepped and froze that tomato sauce.
The bench scraper is a pastry-kitchen mainstay. But it’s also handy to scoop up any chopped ingredients.
5. Bowl and bench scrapers. These are core tools of the pastry kitchen. Plastic bowl scrapers feature a curved, beveled edge, ideal to get every last bit of dough out of the bowl. Stiff metal bench scrapers are used to cut and help shape and transfer dough, as well as clean the countertop (i.e., “the bench”). Not into pastry? That’s OK, either is a tool I use daily to transfer any ingredient, like scooping up a pile of diced onions from the cutting board to the pan.
6. Squeeze bottles. Walk into any restaurant kitchen and you’ll find these everywhere and all sizes as tools to contain and dispense with precision. Line cooks rely on squeeze bottles to quickly coat a pan with oil (just enough, not too much!). The garde manger crew has them filled with salad dressings, while the pastry kitchen fills them with sweet sauces to garnish desserts. The line cooks at brunch use big ones to neatly dispense pancake and waffle batter. The squeeze bottle is such an iconic chef tool that Graza olive oil built a brand on their version of the squeeze bottle.
7. Microplane zester. Ina Garten keeps multiples in her kitchen crocks, so every home cook should have at least one. Use it to zest citrus and finely grate garlic, ginger, hard cheese, chocolate, and nutmeg. In this case you want to go brand specific: Microplane. (I made the mistake of buying an imitator once and couldn’t get rid of it fast enough.) My favorite: the basic Microplane stainless-steel zester blade ($12).
Heat & Cooking
8. Quarter Sheet Pans and Sizzle Platters. Of course, every home cook knows sheet pans, but did you know they come in a variety of sizes? Technically speaking, the half-sheet pan (about 16”x13”) is what you find in home kitchens; it’s an ideal fit for most home ovens. I’ve got a few of those but reach most often for the quarter-sheet pan (13”x9½”). It’s a handy size for prepped ingredients (I’ve got fish filets thawing on one in the fridge right now), and it fits perfectly in my countertop Breville oven.
Another favorite is the sizzle platter. These sturdy, oval, aluminum platters come in a variety of sizes (10½” and 11½” are common) and are used in restaurants to serve food piping hot from the oven or salamander (broiler). If you’ve ever had fajitas served sizzling hot at a Mexican restaurant, you’ve seen a sizzle platter. In my home kitchen, I use them for everything from toasting nuts and croutons to thawing things in the refrigerator.
And both sizzle platters and quarter-sheet pans work nicely as casual, rustic serving pieces.
A fish spatulas isn’t just for fish. Its flexible thin metal blade can handle any delicate ingredients.
9. Carbon Steel Skillet. Like the idea of cooking with cast iron but don’t love the weight? Carbon steel cookware, long a staple in restaurant kitchens, has found its way to more home kitchens in recent years. It shares many qualities with cast iron – virtually indestructible, develops a naturally nonstick surface with use – but weighs less. It’s a workhorse in pro kitchens that deserves a place in yours, too.
Carbon Steel Cookware: Meet Alton Brown’s Favorite Pan →
10. Fish spatula. With its long, thin, nimble blade, fish spatulas are ideal to gently lift and turn delicate fillets. I use them for fish, sure, but I also reach for them to transfer cookies from a baking sheet, toss roasted vegetables, and even flip pancakes.
Precision & Consistency
11. Thermometer. Another key tool in my culinary-school kit was an instant-read thermometer. Doneness (and therefore food safety) comes down to temperature, not touch, not time, not appearance.
12. Kitchen scale. Despite years of cooking professionally, I’m terrible at eyeballing things. So I grab my kitchen scale all the time to accurately portion everything from pasta to flour to meatballs. I also love the convenience. For instance, when measuring dry ingredients for baked goods, you can just plop the bowl on the scale and keep adding ingredients, zeroing the scale after adding each.
What Culinary School Taught Me About Kitchen Tools →
Where to Buy Restaurant Kitchen Equipment
Restaurant kitchen tools are easy to find. My favorite: Any local restaurant supply store (it’s a fun excursion to troll the aisles). No great resto supply depots in your area? WebstaurantStore and Amazon are both good online resources. (HINT: Items like the ones listed here fall under “smallwares”.)
Feel adventurous? You’d be surprised what you can find in Facebook Marketplace. If there’s a restaurant or caterer closing their business locally, you can bet they’re selling off all the equipment, large and small. And you can pick up some real bargains.
The beauty of using any of these tools in your home kitchen? They’re yours, in your very own kitchen, and they won’t “wander off,” so you never have to hide them.
Download the free recipe brief template I use with every client →