Last night (March 2nd) was the debut of Alto Cinco's 2nd kitchen downstairs in their restaurant. They are so happy to finally have the opportunity to drastically reduce "ticket times" across the board (including dining in, take out and delivery). When they were given the opportunity to expand into a space next door, they did not have a lot of notice to prepare for the expansion, but certainly did not want to pass up the opportunity. It was on the heels of opening Otro Cinco (downtown Syracuse) and at that time had put all of their resources and energy into opening a beautiful expanded dining room and growing the kitchen as much as they could in their upstairs space at Alto Cinco's location in the heart of the Westcott business section. While adding additional staff for certain shifts and working as fast and as hard as they could, they realized over time that their current kitchen was just not enough space to put all the food out as fast as they needed.
So faced with a problem, the owner Johanna Yorke had the solution...to take one of the additional parcels that they gained downstairs (when they moved into next door) and turn it into a beautiful state of the art kitchen.
In addition to purchasing all new equipment (they now have 2 of everything), they redid the floors, finished out the walls and ceiling and installed a huge hood system.
In terms of operation, most evenings of the week, all dining room food comes out of the downstairs kitchen and all take-out and delivery comes out of the upstairs kitchen. So, now they will finally be able to achieve their goal of putting out the same product (fresh, hot and handmade) in a much more timely manner. They recognize how valuable their customer's time is and are so excited to finally have the opportunity to show it to them!!!
We will check in again with Alto Cinco in the April edition of the Co-op's New Leaf Newsletter in the
"Co-op Supplier Spotlight" section to see how it's going.
