Good Ideas, Great Kitchens

Good kitchens can help chefs to be more productive and contribute to better food quality. They may also help customers to be served faster, reduce food and labour costs, and improve food hygiene and safety. There is no single correct approach to kitchen design because they differ so much in their physical shapes and sizes, in the output expected of them and in the budgets available to equip them.

Nonetheless, good ideas from successful kitchens can often be repeated elsewhere. If you run a pub with a budget of 35,000 pounds, you may feel that you are in a different league from a central production unit that has spent 1.5 million pounds, but you can repeat concepts such as cooked and raw food separation. Similarly, seamless wall cladding is not just for big spenders - it is just as sensible in small kitchens.

Kitchen layout
Hygienic and efficient workflow is important in all kitchens, but nowhere more so than in large production units such as Abela Airline Catering’s 7 million pounds halal kitchen near London’s Heathrow Airport. It has been designed in such a way that food never travels backwards in its journey from goods-in and storage, through preparation, cooking and chilling to its final destination, the passengers’ trays.

For example, coldstores have doors at the front and back, enabling food to come in through one and out through the other. In the much smaller kitchen at the Green Man pub in Hurst, Berkshire, careful thought about workflow has eliminated the problem of chefs continually crossing each other’s paths. Also, waiting staff no longer have to walk through the cooking area to dump dirty dishes because the dishwash area has been repositioned next to the dining room, with the hot food pick-up immediately beyond it.

Flexibility of design is important, to account for the fact that there may well be a change of head chef during the life of the kitchen. The kitchen at the Swallow Eden Arms Hotel in Rushyford, County Durham, has moveable equipment so it is adaptable to the needs of different chefs. This also enables it to operate in different ways on a temporary basis - for example, if there is a heavy requirement for banqueting for a few days.

To allow for future expansion at the Oriental Restaurant Group’s central production kitchen at Park Royal, London, the cooked production area was deliberately oversized. This means that extra equipment can be slotted in if necessary in the future. Some areas are best separated from the main kitchen if space allows, especially pastry preparation.

At the old kitchen in Zafferano in Knightsbridge, London, pastry chefs used to work wherever there was space, but in the new kitchen, pastry has its own place. Similarly, pastry has a separate section at Prism in the City of London. Ideally, goods-in should also have its own separate area. At the Swallow Eden Arms, the large goods-in area has a table so that food can be deboxed and packed in storage containers without being dumped on the floor.

Cooking appliances
Nothing sells food like the sight and smell of it being cooked. At the Riverside staff restaurant at Oracle’s headquarters in Reading, Berkshire - operated by Halliday Catering - a bespoke range in the theatre-style kitchen is in full view of customers. There is also a rotisserie for spit-roasting chicken and joints of meat, plus a cast-iron sauteuse on the service counter for dishes such as cassoulet and paella.

The type of equipment needed will depend on the operation, so it is essential to analyse your sales before starting to design a new kitchen. At Woburn Safari Park in Bedfordshire, many of the customers are families with young children, so chefs may cook as many as 100 x 33lb cases of chips on a bank holiday. As a result, the new kitchen has five twin-basket fryers - far more than most would need.

It is worth keeping an open mind about the location of cooking equipment. At the Chester Grosvenor Hotel, a tiny room houses two jacketed boilers and three stock rings, so removing a lot of steam from the main kitchen and eliminating some of the potential danger of spills and splashes. With all equipment, small design details can make a big difference. For example, the Swallow Eden Arms hotel made sure that the pan racks above ranges were high enough to prevent handles becoming overly hot.

Similarly, the Pheasant Inn in Keyston, Cambridgeshire, specified nickel controls on its range, rather than brass, which looks great but needs polishing. Also, the salamander in this pub is mounted on a column so that it can be accessed from all four sides.

Space for plates
Most kitchens never have enough space for plating up. Ideas from the Chester Grosvenor to overcome this include double-decked, heated gantries on the hot passes and a wall-mounted plate rack in the starters section. At Oracle’s Riverside restaurant, plating up space was designed into the bespoke range.

Waiting staff territory
The best kitchen layouts keep waiting staff well away from the chefs’ working area. A hot pass not only keeps food hot while awaiting pick-up, but also keeps waiting staff out of the kitchen. And the Pheasant Inn finds that its new hot pass prevents ‘traffic jams’. Waiting staff should also not need to go into the dishwash area. At Zafferano, a hatch was installed for dirty dishes, so waiting staff no longer had to walk into the room and get their feet wet in the process.

Steps
Steps can cause accidents in busy kitchens. At Zafferano, most of the steps in the old kitchen were eliminated, making the new kitchen mostly on one level. In addition, the old staircase, with two bends in it, was replaced with safer straight stairs. And even a small number of steps can hugely increase the waiting staff’s work in getting meals from the kitchen to the table.

At the Merchant Taylors’ Hall, in the City of London, where the kitchen dates back to the 14th century, the problem was overcome by the installation of a lift that transports a heated trolley up the five feet difference in levels. Dumb waiters are used at Prism because the kitchen is in the basement. To enable chefs to keep an eye on the food when it goes upstairs, two TV cameras were also installed.

Reusing existing equipment
Age alone is not necessarily a reason for replacing an appliance. At the Merchant Taylors’ Hall, a 50-year-old gas oven was retained in the new kitchen plan, although it has been upgraded to meet modern safety standards and its asbestos door lining has been replaced. At the Chester Grosvenor hotel, the existing coldrooms were retained, but refurbished with new stainless steel doors and stainless steel cladding to replace the old white finish. This saved about half the cost of new walk-ins.

Modular coldrooms can be taken down and put up again in a different part of the kitchen - or even in a different building. The Pheasant Inn reused the modular coldrooms from a sister property, installing new evaporators and condensers with them.

Cleaning and hygiene
Ease of cleaning can be designed into kitchens. Walls and ceilings made from coldroom panels were chosen for Abela Airline Catering’s kitchen for this reason. They can be moved if a new layout is required. Another practical aspect of this kitchen’s design is a service void above the ceiling, so allowing maintenance work to be done without engineers coming into the kitchen.

Tiles are not always ideal in kitchens because they can get chipped and the grouting can get dirty. At the Green Man pub, some of the kitchen is tiled, but the wall behind the cooking equipment is clad in stainless steel. And the Merchant Taylors’ Hall is one of many establishments which have opted for easy-clean wall cladding rather than tiles. Floor drains make it much easier to clean kitchens. At Prism, the floor is hosed and mopped four times a day, then mechanically scrubbed every night - tasks which are made much quicker by the presence of the drains.

Clearing clutter
Clutter builds up in kitchens all too quickly, but good design can help to eliminate it. At the Chester Grosvenor, there are few shelves, which stops chefs keeping lots of pots and pans in the main kitchen. Instead, there is a storage room for cooking utensils.

Refrigeration
Having fridges close to hand makes a chef’s work easier. The Heathrow Marriott hotel has installed under-counter fridges to provide chefs with self-contained work areas and to save them from constantly walking to the main refrigerators. Good temperature control is increasingly on the agenda. At the Oriental Restaurant Group’s central production kitchen, a belt-and-braces approach is taken. There is a computer-controlled monitoring system and thermometers in every refrigerator. In addition, food is temperature-probed with an infrared device every two hours.