Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Kitchen is (currently) closed at our drive-in

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Posted by Dave Bird (Member # 490) on 06-22-2018, 08:04 AM:

Sacrilege to offer no grilled or fried food at a drive-in? Though we are now only able to serve concession nachos and steamed hot dogs, for the opening month and a half of the season, our per caps are UP and very few complaints. Staff hours are down of course and the lines and clean-up is a breeze. Makes one wonder.

The reason for this is we kind of got hosed...when planning our renovation, the building inspector and fire chief in office LAST year both approved my plans with no engineering required. The new building inspector (while being a decent guy and in fact a customer) let us know a couple days prior to opening that he thought we should have engineering done on the new hood exhaust system. This has caused delays and many thousands of dollars in expense and some alterations which we're still working on. (Had I known this last year, of course we would have not moved or replaced anything to do with the hood system.)

Anyway, for what it's worth (and not sure what to do with the info since it's not like we won't re-install all this purchased equipment and start cooking again): Sales up, lines quicker, ease of operation up, paid hours down....I'll be damned.

Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 06-22-2018, 08:43 AM:

What's next? Organic raisins!?! [Wink]

Posted by Rick Raskin (Member # 1561) on 06-22-2018, 09:30 AM:

We had similar issues when expanding my VFW Hall. The permit people kept changing requirements, some of which were not even in the code, costing us thousands in engineering. We finally got the City Council to intervene and got the permits issued with no further hassles.

Since expanding our hall rentals have more than tripled.

Posted by Lyle Romer (Member # 1266) on 06-22-2018, 09:56 AM:

Building Inspectors and Fire Marshals should be elected positions. They wield and enormous amount of power and are not really accountable and very difficult to fight.

Yes, if you make them electable then they can be "bought" with campaign contributions but at least those are public record. The under the table payoffs that a lot of them get now are way more corrupt.

Posted by Dave Bird (Member # 490) on 06-22-2018, 10:02 AM:

It's a bit of the usual issue here, with something like 300,000 various codes, by-laws and laws on the books for Ontario, each department doesn't know the other department's portions of it, if they even know their own at all. We've wasted so much time and money on this, I'm not exactly sure how we'll get our second screen built at this point, at least not very quickly. It'll look silly to most people, we'll be completely "ready" for it building wise, needing only some gravel and the actual screen itself. Meantime, we're over-capitalized on what one would put into a single=screen.

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 06-22-2018, 12:10 PM:

Are you sure that you want to reinstall it? Perhaps you're simply subscribing to the sunk cost fallacy here -- if your sales are up and your costs are down when you do it this way, is it really rational to spend even more money to help your sales to decline again and your costs increase?

You might be better off selling your kitchen equipment and continuing with what you're doing right now.

When I switched to bottled Pepsi instead of premix, I can serve the concession customers far faster, and I do literally one twentieth of the mopping that I used to do. Now the slowest part of the concession service is shovelling popcorn into the containers; candy and drinks are just pick 'em up and set 'em down.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 06-22-2018, 12:43 PM:

I guess it depends on what your drive-in is known for. Are you getting complaints about the lack of food? If not, I'd just keep doing what you're doing.

If, on the other hand, people are griping that they can't get that one "special" thing you're known for, then you should probably go back to serving it.

Our drive in here used to serve burgers and pizza, but they were all frozen, and heated in a small oven. (No microwaves in those days, yet.) The only thing they actually cooked was the hot dogs. But they still sold the daylights out of the frozen stuff. I still remember the burgers - they had onion bits mixed into the patties and they were SO GOOD. Never found them since.

Posted by Alexandre Pereira (Member # 9295) on 06-22-2018, 05:18 PM:

Good way to go is food truck. On private property you just need a health inspection. And you can drive around the drive-in making granny hungry.
If you are using gas - open flame - deep fryers - you need hoods and fire suppression. That requires a permit but it is not a big deal. You could do the drawings yourself if you have cadd skills or computer hacking skill or numb chuck skills. Just copy from a template online and match your site for kitchen layout with fire suppression and gas cut off. City or town may want monitoring through a Fire Protection Company to the FD - but that is mostly a Toronto occasional requirement - so probably not at a drive in.
Look on kijijji for a mechanical engineer to stamp the drawings and you are good to go (pay no more than $600). All the city or town wants is to pawn off liability. City or town will usually walk you through what you need anyway - better for insurance that you have stamped drawings and the FD will be off your back.

Posted by Dave Bird (Member # 490) on 06-22-2018, 09:32 PM:

It's really hard to know, we have been seeing much bigger crowds from last fall's "IT" phenomenon through to this spring. Our regulars are starting to gripe a bit, they're understanding. At this point most everything is paid for, all ready to be installed. The next nearest drive-in appears to be giving up, they're now second-run single feature. It's hard to know. We're up a bit, maybe 10-15 cents and right around $4. I also raised prices. We're quicker for sure, I just don't know, drive-ins sell hot food, and we do have a couple items we sell a ton of...…….I think what might happen is we shut down the hot stuff before intermission, clean up and retain at least some of these reduced hours. Possibly use some warmers as well and not cook everything to immediate order.

Posted by Allan Barnes (Member # 5178) on 06-24-2018, 07:39 PM:

And how is your insurance company taking these "safety" changes?

Muskoka DI cooks outside on a GAS GRILL... just saying

Posted by Dave Bird (Member # 490) on 06-25-2018, 09:42 AM:

Haven't seen a broker in years, we pay, they stay away. If I get ambitious, I'll tote a grill up here, but I think we'll have this thing installed sooner than later, and I'm quite enjoying not bothering with it all at the moment [Razz]