As a home cooking hobbyist, I'm always on the lookout for those neat gadgets that make life easier for chefs. Bed Bath and Beyond keeps me supplied in the usual stuff, but sometimes you really have to hunt for quality. My quest for kitchen tools led me to Brown's Home Kitchen Center, near the Discount Auto Parts and the Skate World on Capital Circle. I was able to find a lot of the fancy equipment that cullinary experts recommend and use on their tv shows....but the prices were even more fancy than the items themselves. I've been to a few restaurant supply stores in Atlanta and Jacksonville, and items that were identical were at least 25% more at Brown's than other stores and 30% more than online stores. I think the problem here is that Brown's is not fully in the restaurant supply business, but more in the kitchen consulting business for newly built homes or rennovations. While they do have a few racks of good commercial kitchen supplies, the bulk of their store is geared towards luxury kitchenware. Because of this, the rest of the inventory is just there to create traffic, and rarely gets evaluated for price worthiness.
My recommendation: if you're a home cook and you know market values of appliances, cook/bakeware, and gadgets.....take a look, you might find what you need at a decent price. If you don't know market values, you're bound to get ripped off.
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