Brentwood kitchen earns applause at Burn's fine-dining showplace

Nation's Restaurant News, June 26, 1989 by Richard Martin

Brentwood kitchen earns applause at Burns' fine-dining showplace

LOS ANGELES -- The Burns family, owners of the three Bob Burns restaurants in Southern California, wanted to create a sophisticated exhibition kitchen as a focal point of their new fine-dining showplace, the Brentwood Bar & Grill.

At a cost of more than $500,000, the Burnses got just the kitchen they wanted -- a perfect complement to BB & G's $3 million worth of sleek, dramatically lighted architecture, marble slab floors, Honduran "crossfire" mahogany woodwork, and sumptuous black-leather upholstery.

Behind a glass curtain, in full view of the restaurant's 160-seat dining area, a custom-designed culinary theater gleams from floor to ceiling with polished stainless steel, bronze, copper, black granite, and white tile.

Against that stunning backdrop, executive chef Joseph Miller and his crew stage nightly performances that have captivated the Brentwood neighborhood's well-heeled gourmets. Applause for BB & G's inventive menu of contemporary grill fare is being registered in a prodigious tally of meals served since the restaurant's debut.

Productive, efficient, and beautiful, the 1,000-square-foot exhibition kitchen is also versatile. "This kitchen can do any kind of food; the only thing it doesn't have is a wok," says proprietor Bob Burns III.

"It's really a great design, one of the best I've seen, and I've been around," says chef Miller, a veteran of such famed establishments as L'Orangerie in Los Angeles, Le Perroquet in Chicago, and Restaurant Michel Guerard in France.

The ceiling is a good example of the impressive features in BB & G's kitchen: Made up entirely of highly polished stainless-steel panels, it includes dozens of perimeter sections with sound-muffling perforations that primarily serve as inlets for 64 separate air ducts. The dispersed, low-velocity ventilation system virtually eliminates hot spots and cold spots, keeping the cooks and the food from unwanted temperature extremes.

Esthetics and functionally are married throughout the kitchen. The central and largest of its six prep "islands" comprises a back-to-back, Waldorf-style bank of ranges. The main cooking island is crowned with a 14-foot-long, pass-through salamander broiler, which is attractively curved at the front end and trimmed with a bright strip of bronze. At the island's front is a bainmarie trough; at the rear end is a broad, two-sided broiler big enough to be sectioned off for different kinds of fuels, such as mesquite, oak, and applewood.

Overhead, ringing the infrared-powered salamander, is a ventilator assembly of checked-glass panels that was patterned after one at the famous Lameloise restaurant in Chagny, France.

White tile walls, the shiny ceiling, the glass ventilator, and the flush-faced draw-and-door surfaces of the stainless-steel islands all contribute to the kitchen's visual appeal.

Achieving such a harmonious appearance required special attention to detail. "Kitchen equipment is simply not attractive," explains Stan Abrams, a partner in the firm of Abrams & Tanaka of Santa Monica, Calif., and BB & G's principal back-of-the-house designer. Abrams' task was to combine efficiency, attractiveness, and the requisite mechanical gear of a high-volume food production space. "From a design standpoint, that was a real challenge," he says.

One way Abrams met the challenge was by concealing fire-suppression systems inside the glass ventilator. Piping for an automatic wash system was also concealed inside the exhaust plenum.

The concealment technique was also used in the pastry-making area and in prep islands. Two small deck ovens were flush mounted in a wall near the pastry station. A partly concealed exhaust ventilator over the ovens provided unrestricted access for cleaning through a movable, louvered panel. Sinks in two island work counters were also recessed to be out of guests' sight lines.

Hanging copper pots and pans and the black-marble-topped pickup counter in the front of the room complete the attractive appearance of the kitchen, as seen from the dining room.

Out of sight, behind the exhibition cooking area, is a 2,500-square-foot prep kitchen area, with additional ranges, a Swiss brazier, and a 100-gallon stock pot. Storage rooms, offices, and two walk-in refrigerators are also in the rear kitchen area. The walk-ins and dishwashers were the only facilities retained from the layout of the restaurant that formerly occupied BB & G's San Vicente Boulevard site.

Back out front, to the left of the exhibition kitchen and also visible to diners through another glass wall, is the restaurant's wine room. Together, the kitchen and the wine room, with its floor-to-ceiling bottle racks, have exerted a strong influence on the restaurant's patrons.

"We've noticed that people are staying at least two hours," explains Selwyn Yosslowitz, the director of Santa Monica-based Bob Burns Restaurants. While customers linger over meals and enjoy watching the kitchen pyrotechnics, they order more food and beverages than management anticipated they would. The resulting fewer table turns are more than offset by higher check averages.