Will Lawrence introduced the Lawrence Food Group after spending nearly 20 years in the restaurant industry. Today, his private-dining hospitality company specializes in elevated dishes for VIP clients, corporations, and large venues. He says he is able to maintain his fine-dining standards and seamlessly alternate between different cuisines by using RATIONAL equipment.
Excellence at scale
“Life has changed after learning about RATIONAL,” Lawrence says. The iCombi Pro is “able to shorten the amount of cook time certain items need. It’s also able to increase the amount of volume I’m able to produce.”
And the volume he needs to produce can be massive. A United Nations embassy client recently hired Lawrence Food Group for 14 days of events, which included breakfast and lunch for 300 people and private VIP dining. “So, from start to finish, we will probably be cooking for a little more than 10,000 people,” he says.
For that event, Lawrence relied on the RATIONAL iCombi Pro for cooking large quantities of rice and vegetables.
“You can imagine cooking 10-12 pans of rice, you can't do properly in a pot. So that's where the RATIONAL ovens come in. `[We’re] able to set the amount of steam we like and make sure everything comes out exactly the way we want it,” he explains. “When it comes to par-cooking vegetables, instead of having to blanch them, we can put multiple trays in. Put the steam at 100%. Make sure they come out with the exact texture we like. So that's one of the reasons why we love using these ovens. Because for large catering [orders], there's really no other way to get the texture and the flavors without using an oven like that.”
Conventional cooking can’t compare
Before founding Lawrence Food Group, Will Lawrence spent time in some of New York City’s most prestigious kitchens, including a tenure at the three-Michelin-starred restaurant Per Se in Manhattan, so he’s familiar with traditional and classic cooking techniques. Yet, he’s been impressed by how RATIONAL equipment performs across the wide variety of dishes his team needs to produce.
“I came from very old school kitchens,” he says. “For someone who might be scared to abandon more conventional cooking methods for the iCombi, I would tell them that they will get a superior product for less time. There is a time and place to cook over fire, and it is very small. The iCombi will cover all the bases that they're looking for.”
Lawrence previously worked with standard ovens, but by working with RATIONAL equipment, he has been able to take on larger events while maintaining the standards of excellence that he and his clients demand.
“The main reason I would use RATIONAL in the future is just because it makes sense,” he says. “It makes sense for the money, it makes sense for the time, it makes sense for the labor and hours it saves. That’s pretty much all you need from a product.”
To learn more about Lawrence Food Group, and what RATIONAL products can do for your business, visit the RATIONAL website.
This post is sponsored by RATIONAL