Common kitchen gaffes: when you're poorly informed during kitchen planning, communication isn't all that breaks down

Nation's Restaurant News, Sept 1, 2003

Any time operators open a new or renovated foodservice facility, they do so with fingers crossed and breath held, hoping against hope that there are no problems.

More often than not, their prayers go unheeded and glitches large and small crop up once the kitchen is operational. Design and foodservice management consultants agree that most problems that arise in the construction or renovation of a kitchen are due to one cause: a lack of communication.

"At some point along the line, someone does not explain enough about what is needed in the kitchen, or someone makes a change without informing the other parties," says Hank Steinberg, a consultant with The Rochelle Group in Congers, N.Y.

The problem may also stem from operators who do not explain to designers the exact nature of the foodservice operation being served by the kitchen.

"I can remember years ago the federal government hiring designers to come up with kitchens for new prisons, and the designers with the lowest bids had no experience building prison kitchens," says another consultant. "They were used to designing hotel kitchens, and they had no concept of the security measures needed in the kitchen of a correctional facility. That's a recipe for disaster."

Fortunately for other operations, the problems that arise in most kitchens aren't as dangerous as what can occur in a poorly designed prison kitchen. However, they can nonetheless be annoying to operators.

"One of the more common mistakes I see is designing utilities that do not match what is available in the building," says Rob White, formerly a consultant with The Baker Group in Grand Rapids, Mich. "It can be very frustrating to be almost complete with a renovation only to discover that you have to rip out walls and replace pipes or electrical."

With the number of open kitchens and marketplacestyle restaurants and on site cafeterias on the rise, another increasing problem in kitchen design is insufficient utilities.

"With a marketplace cafeteria, you need to have enough electric for all the various pieces of cooking equipment," says Deb Wicks, vice president of marketing at Design Solutions, the foodservice design arm of food management concern Aramark Corp in Philadelphia. "In addition, you have to make sure you have enough utilities to move equipment around. One of the selling points of a marketplace is its flexibility, and a lack of utilities can hamper you."

Another design annoyance, according to The Baker Group's White, is ordering equipment that turns out not to be able to fit through the kitchen entrance.

The time consuming result will be to reorder the equipment, dismantle it and rebuild it inside the kitchen--or widen the opening.

Not compensating for local and ambient noise is another common and easily corrected problem.

Foster Frable Jr., president of Clevenger-Frable-Lavallee in White Plains, N.Y., says noise levels can be reduced by including in the design several kinds of contingencies. These include installing sound deadening materials in the bottoms of sinks and tables, locating ventilation and air-handling fans on the roof rather than in the kitchen ceiling, and paying a little extra for equipment that is designed with sound deadening materials.

In large kitchens, such as hospitals where patient meal trays are assembled and then shipped to patient floors, a lack of staging space can be an unforeseen problem, says Glenn Schirg, a consultant with Romano-Gatland in Nashville, Tenn.

"You need to plan for enough space to hold the volume of product moving through the system at peak times," says Schirg, who was director of foodservice at Vanderbilt University Medical Center before becoming a consultant. "If you don't have adequate space you can create a logjam that slows up the production process."

Another mistake operators and designers can make is designing a kitchen with poor traffic flow, particularly where "crossover flow"--where clean utensils and prepared product are being crossed over by soiled utensils and raw food--is an invitation to foodborne illness. "You really need to design kitchens where product flows only one way," says Schirg. "And this is not only true for large commercial or on-site kitchens. We foresee the day when every kitchen will have to have a [Hazard Analysis of Critical Control Points] plan in place, with someone on your staff designated to enforce HACCP rules."

The best way to avoid problems in kitchen design, according to consultant Steinberg, is to include the operator and foodservice consultant on the design team. "This is not necessarily to help critique the design, either," says Steinberg. "Sometimes, it's for no other reason than to know what's being installed and where. When you have an understanding of who's who and what's what, it's easier to get things resolved in a timely manner."

Orlando Espinosa, vice president of Aramark's Design Solutions, says a consultant's work should not stop when the kitchen opens, either. "The most important thing we can do is to meet with the operator afterward to see what works and what doesn't," says Espinosa. "Kitchens aren't cookie-cutter designs. By going back, we can discover what is wrong and learn not to repeat those mistakes."