Shane Delia on Why He Insisted on SKOPE for Maha
There’s an undeniable authenticity to Shane Delia. A passion not just for the food in the commercial kitchen, but the people and the craft.
That’s why he chose to partner with SKOPE and Irinox when he renovated the Maha kitchen on the 10th anniversary of the renowned Middle Eastern and Mediterranean restaurant.
“The kitchen is the heart of your restaurant, so you need to look after it – and not just for your cooks. In the typical kitchen you’re in a basement with no natural light and no air flow. So to create an environment that really encourages excellence and professionalism, and make it so people really want to come to work, is really important.”
Maha uses five Pegasus underbench fridges with custom door handles and fascia, a VFX display freezer and an Irinox MF25.1 PLUS Blast Chiller.
“For us, reliability is key but it wasn’t the only thing. People say a Toyota is reliable too, but it’s also really ugly. So we didn’t want to put a Toyota in there, we wanted a Mercedes-Benz. A Mercedes-Benz is unbelievably reliable, it has beautiful design aesthetics, every little detail that you don’t even see has been thought about, and it carries some weight with its brand.
“We wanted products in our kitchen that hit all those pillars but also made our chefs proud to have the opportunity to work with equipment that was there to help them reach their goals.”
The Irinox blast chiller is one of the most advanced pieces of kit in Maha, but it’s easy to learn and provides commercial kitchens with a real opportunity to minimise food waste and maximise profitability.
Blast chilling and freezing is becoming an increasingly common mainstay of the modern commercial kitchen thanks to the financial impact of being able to cool and freeze at unprecedented speed, and preserve food in pristine condition for longer.
The Maha team are just scratching the surface of what’s possible, but it became clear very quickly that the potential of the technology was huge.
“On a day-to-day level it means efficiency and speed for us,” Shane says
“A perfect example came just yesterday. We were developing a new dish and we heated the sauce by accident when we had a whole room of people waiting to taste the dish. We needed that sauce real cold, real quick.
“If it wasn’t for the Irinox we’d be scratching our heads, putting it in ice, stirring it in the freezer. Instead we just put it in the blast freezer, and boom, we got the temperature down. It was a small thing but it avoided the hassle of us having to find a solution and having to go speak to the customers about the delay, and then having to delay the rest of the dining room.”
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4th October 2018
