Make Your Kitchen More Like Your Favorite Restaurant With One Helpful Tool

Home kitchens can become a cluttered mess in no time flat, with dishes piling up, pantry finds exceeding the space of your closet or cabinets, and elements of meals you're prepping getting lost in the sauce of busy activity. When your kitchen isn't organized, it's hard to get things done efficiently and without too much stress, let alone actually enjoying cooking or baking. But there are ways to avoid this pile-up, and for that we look to the pros — how do chefs organize their kitchens? Restaurant teams are firing on all cylinders, churning out dozens of different dishes a night, so streamlined spaces are essential. If we can incorporate even a few elements of restaurant kitchens into our homes, meal preparation is guaranteed to become a whole lot easier, and we'll feel calmer and happier in the space. 

One of the biggest game-changers for restaurant-inspired kitchen organization is the bus bin. As a restaurant patron, you may know these as the receptacle that dirty dishes and glasses get placed into to be taken to dishwashers, but kitchen staffs use these for many more things. Bus bins can be used to organize ingredients, hold linens, and store any number of various odds and ends, like takeout containers and smaller storage container lids. This is where the lightbulb goes off for us at home: If bus bins can be used for all this organization and storage, can't we use that convenience in our own kitchens? 

One of the biggest kitchen-organizing mistakes you need to stop making is using your space inefficiently. Store things according to how you move around your kitchen to prep, cook, and clean. Instead of stuffing overflow wherever it fits — for example, if you find good deals and stock up on more items than you have room for — use bus bins to help maintain your flow, rather than having things in your way. 

If you want to start out with one bin to see how you end up working with it, you can find a 4.6-gallon Rubbermaid tub on Amazon for about $18. Or, go all in and get a deal, since multiple bins will come in handy — score a four-pack of 5.8-gallon tubs for $40.55. The most obvious use for these bins is literal bussing, useful if you've got a big family or are entertaining: Stack dishes in the bin rather than all over the counter or in the sink. Place one near your pantry for those surplus items, and use them within a pantry closet for separating things like snacks from cereals — they're a great way to keep cleaning supplies isolated, too. If you've got the space, get an industrial wire rack, where you can keep these bins neatly stacked. Within them, keep ingredients you've separated into smaller containers — bus bins are really the first, best step toward other hacks to make mealtime a snap.