How to choose cookware for a professional kitchen

Before you look at a single pan, look at your menu and your covers. A breakfast-heavy hotel restaurant, an à la carte kitchen and a high-volume catering operation stress cookware in completely different ways. The right range is the one that matches what you actually cook and how many portions you push through service.

Write down the dishes that run every day and the peak number of covers. That list tells you which pan shapes you need and, just as importantly, how many of each - a common mistake is buying one of everything instead of enough of the pans a station burns through.

A worked example makes this concrete. A 120-room hotel running a buffet breakfast can push 150-200 egg orders through two omelette stations in a two-hour window; those stations need several 20 cm and 24 cm frying pans in constant rotation, not one of each. A useful starting ratio from general kitchen practice is one pan per station for each daily-use shape, plus one more in rotation so service never waits on the wash-up.

Aluminium is the workhorse material of commercial cookware for two reasons: it heats quickly and spreads that heat evenly across the base, and it stays light enough to lift, tilt and toss through a long service. Even heating means fewer hot spots, more consistent colour and less food stuck or scorched at the edges.

Olala pans use an aluminium body for exactly this balance of responsiveness and weight. Even heat distribution matters most on frying pans and crepe pans, where a single hot spot shows up immediately in the food.

Weight matters more than many buyers expect. A cook on a busy sauté station lifts and tips a pan hundreds of times in a single service, and a pan that is a few hundred grams heavier than it needs to be turns into real fatigue by the end of the week. That is why heavy cast materials, whatever their virtues at home, rarely survive as the everyday pan on a professional line.

For most HoReCa work - eggs, crepes, pancakes, delicate fish, fast plating - a non-stick surface earns its place. Food releases cleanly, portions come off intact and pans wipe down fast between covers, which keeps service moving. Every Olala pan has a non-stick cooking surface for this reason.

Non-stick surfaces do need care: use the right utensils, avoid leaving empty pans on high heat for long periods, and clean them gently. Treated well, a non-stick pan pays for itself in speed and consistency across thousands of covers. Metal utensils and stacking pans without a liner between them are the two habits that shorten a non-stick surface fastest.

A common buying mistake is treating non-stick as a one-time purchase. In daily professional use the surface is a consumable: keep newer pans on egg and crepe duty, move older ones to less delicate work, and re-order on a schedule instead of waiting until the whole set is tired. Many kitchens review pan stock every quarter and replace in batches so performance stays consistent across the line.

No single pan does everything well. A professional range is a set of shapes, each built for a task: a deep, high-sided wok for fast, high-heat stir-frying and large-batch sautéing; a low, flat crepe pan for crepes, pancakes and delicate items that need an easy slide; a general frying pan for searing and everyday service; a shallow sahan for cooking and presenting straight to the table; and a flat pancake pan for even results at volume.

Picture a café brunch service: crepe pans handling the crepe and pancake orders, a wok covering a stir-fried special, frying pans on egg and searing duty, and sahans carrying baked-egg dishes straight from the hob to the table. Each shape is there because a named dish depends on it - if you cannot name the dish a pan will cook, leave it off the first order.

Build your kit around the jobs your kitchen actually does, then add sizes within each shape.

The same pan shape in different diameters lets you match the pan to the portion - a small frying pan for a single egg, a large one for batch cooking on a busy line. Stocking a spread of sizes stops your team reaching for the wrong pan and overcrowding it, which is where even heat and clean release break down.

As a rule, order the sizes your busiest stations use most heavily in the greatest number, and fill in the outliers with fewer units.

For frying pans, many kitchens standardise on three working diameters - say 24, 28 and 32 cm - to cover single portions, two-to-three portion orders and batch work, then add 20 or 22 cm pans specifically for eggs. A practical split for a first order is roughly half your units in the workhorse middle size, a third in the small size and the remainder in the large, adjusted to your own menu.

Handles take a beating in a commercial kitchen - grabbed, knocked and moved between hob, oven, pass and wash-up hundreds of times a day. A stainless steel handle stands up to that handling and cleaning. Olala pans are fitted with stainless steel handles for this reason.

When you evaluate a pan, hold it the way your cooks will: grip the handle with a dry hand and again through a folded cloth, check the balance empty and loaded, and look at how the handle is fixed to the body. Loose or wobbling handles are among the first failure points on cheap cookware, and in a commercial kitchen a failed handle is a safety issue, not an annoyance.

Cookware only works if it matches your hobs. Induction hobs need pans with a magnetic base; gas and standard electric hobs do not. Olala pans are not induction compatible, so they suit gas and conventional electric ranges. Always confirm your hob type before ordering any cookware, whatever the brand.

It sounds obvious, but this is one of the most common and expensive mistakes in commercial cookware buying: a refurbishment switches the line to induction, someone re-orders the usual pans, and a full delivery arrives that will not heat on the new hobs. Make hob type a standing line on your purchasing spec and re-confirm it whenever kitchen equipment changes.

Sourcing for a professional kitchen is different from buying a pan at retail. You are buying a range, in quantity, that has to be consistent and re-orderable as pans wear. Working directly with a wholesale supplier means you can spec the shapes and sizes you need, order in the volumes a commercial kitchen goes through, and come back for the same items later.

Before you request a quote, prepare a simple spec: the shapes you need, the diameter of each, the quantity per size, and how often you expect to re-order. A one-page list like this gets you an accurate quote faster and keeps every re-order consistent with the first delivery. It also pays to order slightly above your calculated need - a common rule of thumb is 10-15 percent extra of your most-used sizes - so a damaged or retired pan never leaves a station short mid-service.

Olala supplies professional cookware wholesale to hotels, restaurants, cafés, catering companies and distributors across Türkiye and for export, with private-label / OEM production available on request. There is no public price list - send your requirement and we'll come back with a quote.