I'm Supplying My Restaurant

Yesterday Dan and I were up at an unusual time - 8am - because we've been living through a plumbing/water leakage disaster and our schedule is all wonky.  We decided to get some errands done, one of which was to find a new olive oil dispensing bottle, because mine has fallen apart and I badly want a new one.  The other day at an Italian restaurant, I was tempted to grab theirs off the table.  (Don't worry, I didn't.)  At any rate, we found ourselves driving all the way to the north side of Denver to a restaurant-supply store.  I'd been wanting to check one out for a while now anyway, and here we were with an actual morning to fill, so what the heck.

The restaurant-supply store was awful.  It was extremely quiet, which made for very awkward shopping, but mostly it was just... nothing.  I thought there'd be giant aisles with stacks of inexpensive pots, pans, dishes, and giant whisks, but they barely had a thing.  They had a couple of very tiny oil bottles, but they weren't big enough, nor were they a deal.  I looked at a $40 fine mesh strainer in the section titled "Asian Cooking," and a plastic pitcher in the "Pizza Making" section... let's just say, not organized.  Nobody helped us or asked us if we needed anything.  We knew of a different company, on the other side of town, so we trekked over there, hoping for better results.

We were so glad we trekked across town!  As soon as we walked in to the second store we were like, ooh ahh.  It was huge, and most importantly, it was filled with giant aisles with stacks of inexpensive pots, pans, dishes, and giant whisks.  They had two huge aisles with just the super-discounted stuff.  After walking up and down those two aisles we had half the items on my shopping list - all very cheap.  We also found several other items on my list.  This place is great - it is well organized, they have just about everything you could want, and the prices of the things we looked at (we couldn't look at everything, it was too large a store) were either good or great.  For instance, I got a salad spinner for $3 and a fine mesh strainer for $6.  Also, we got friendly help from the employees, and the cashier was extremely nice.  After the horrible previous store, this one was a dream. 

I'm thrilled we found this store in the Denver area.  I will definitely head there first the next time I need something for my kitchen, rather than going to Bed Bath & Beyond or something like that.  For those in the Denver area who want to give it a shot, it is called Standard Restaurant Supply and they have one in Lakewood and one in Denver proper (we were at the one in Lakewood).   The "bad store" was called Restaurant Source.  Don't go there unless you are a restaurant.

Happy shopping!