Big things come from tiny kitchens: designers for LA's Fennel restaurant took on the task of designing a self-sufficient kitchen

Nation's Restaurant News, May 8, 1989 by Richard Martin

BIG THINGS COME FROM TINY KITCHENS

SANTA MONICA, Calif.-- Just as too many cooks can spoil the proverbial broth, an abundance of demanding chefs can complicate the design of a kitchen.

But such a complication may be worth overcoming if the chefs are four celebrated, Michelin-rated restaurateurs from France who have decided to take turns commuting to California to cook at Fennel, the beachfront restaurant they own in partnership with Los Angeles restaurateur Mauro Vincenti.

Fennel, the extraordinary brainchild of Vincenti and chefs Michel Rostang, Michel Chabran, Yan Jacquot, and Andre Genin, opened here in September. Capacity crowds were instantly lured to the 75-seat restaurant by the opportunity to consume the rarefied cuisines the chefs serve at their quartet of Michelin one-and two-star restaurants in France.

However, Fennel did not attain popular and critical acclaim without some preliminary problem-solving. The task of designing Fennel's minuscule kitchen loomed as a formidable challenge among the numerous logistical quandaries posed by the partners' bicontinental game of culinary musical chairs.

Allocated only 700 of Fennel's total 2,600 square feet of floor space, the kitchen designers had to be inordinately resourceful when they selected equipment and devised a floor plan.

All cooking, baking, preparation, refrigeration, dishwashing, and storage functions had to fit in a glass-walled, exhibition space occupying less than one-fourth of the already compact restaurant.

Moreover, the kitchen planners had to accord equal weight to the cooking styles and equipment wish-lists of five individuals--the chef-partners and Jean-Pierre Bosc, Fennel's resident chef de cuisine, who weaves a thread of continuity from one visiting-chef rotation to the next.

"I asked the designers for a lot of little details because the kitchen is so small," says the French-born Bosc, who has been a friend and colleague of the chef-owners for the last eight years.

The risks of human traffic jams in an area of such scant dimensions made the designers focus on departmental self-sufficiency, resulting in the creation of self-contained stations for fish, meat, salad, and bakery preparations.

"As much as possible, we had to try to avoid people moving around," explains Bosc, who directs Fennel's kitchen all by himself during the three-week period each month when none of the other chefs is present.

Bosc's fine-tuning of Rostang and Chabran's original kitchen concept included the step-saving location of an auxiliary sink at the fish station. Other added efficiencies were derived from space-saving, overcounter installations of compartmentalized ingredient rails. Bosc also demanded extra stainless-steel counter space to accommodate a greater number of plate setups.

Because space limitations precluded a conventional cooking "line" configuration, the kitchen's two ranges, with dual overhead salamander broilers, were configured in the back-to-back "Waldorf" style. That arrangement permitted chefs on opposite sides of the kitchen--one side for fish and the other for meat--so see each other through passthrough spaces, better enabling them to coordinate the timing and simultaneous completion of a table's food orders.

In addition to space limitations, a "fiery" dilemma confronted the designers. "One big problem was that chefs from France literally like fire to the ceiling--they like lots of heat," explains equipment specialist Shel Brucker, whose Avery Services Corp. in Los Angeles helped plan the $250,000 Fennel kitchen in conjunction with Vincenti and architect Oswaldo Maiozzi.

However, fire codes and equipment designs in the United States restrict gas flames to levels below those preferred by chefs in France, where rapid cooking a la minute requires a greater front-burner intensity. There was little the Fennel design team could do to compensate.

Adjusting to this country's heat constraints "was difficult; we [French chefs] like to cook everything at the last moment," Bosc says. Still, he confides that a slight mechanical modification of range burner enables a French chef to coax a little more heat from American stoves.

The only imported equipment at Fennel is a French rotisserie, installed beside the range on the "meat side" of the kitchen. Otherwise, the gear specified for the restaurant included a gas-fired grill and a steamer for the "fish side," a convection oven and a dough mixer for the bakery, and assorted undercounter refrigerators and a 10-foot by 10-foot walk-in cooler.

All the back-of-the-house plotting, planning, and fine-tuning that went in to the project yielded a kitchen that is "absolutely perfect" for Fennel, declares Mauro Vincenti, whose other highly acclaimed Los Angeles restaurants are Rex il Ristorante and Pazzia.

"We can produce food for 175 persons a night because the chefs have everything they need right at their fingertips," Vincenti adds.

During the week each month when one of the chef-owners is on hand, Fennel's regular menu is augmented by freshly imported special recipes. One-third to one-half of the standard menu, which is jointly devised by all the chefs, is changed every month and a half.