A tale of three kitchens

Nation's Restaurant News, August 30, 1993 by Jack Hayes

Three tough brothers with an ugly surname -- space cost, labor cost and equipment cost -- are telling restaurateurs to quit working out of big kitchens.

Furthermore, those same three guys are telling operators to work quicker and smarter -- turning out more covers from their shrunken kitchen space.

Is there a penalty for ignoring harsh threats like these? Yes, indeed.

It's called a bad-tasting bottom line.

In more literal terms, the era of the 1,200- and 1,500-square-foot kitchen as the production engine for a 150-seat freestanding restaurant is rapidly coming to a close.

The reason is that real estate, staff and cooking gear get more expensive every season. So most operators are trying to expand the dining room -- the revenue-producing area of their establishing -- and simultaneously decrease the size of the back-of-the-house.

Thus, the challenge is designing and equipping a smaller kitchen -- 1,000 square feet or roughly one-fifth to one-third less space -- that operates with a smaller staff while turning out more rather than fewer meals per shift.

Yet, accompanying the smaller kitchen come a pair of trends some designers are calling the "flexible" kitchen and the "functional" kitchen.

And those trends are leading manufacturers of kitchen equipment into the act, with smaller ranges for smaller cooking lines; salamanders and steamers that stack; griddles and fryers that can quickly be disconnected and moved to different locations; and slow cookers that double as roasters, smokers and baking ovens.

Designers familiar with the trends are fond of the term "budget engineering." In short, it means exploiting every available ounce of creative talent and researching every paragraph of technical innovation and every new product photo for the answers.

Successful downsizing takes commitment not only from the kitchen but also from the dining room staff. In fact, without the backing of everyone, the shrunken kitchen can trigger operating snags -- problems that defeat the potential gain of the added space up front.

In the profiles that follow, three different designers and operators talk about kitchen downsizing.

Cafe TuTu Tango, Atlanta

Michael Langley, a senior designer engineer at Miami-based Arrow Industries, remembers the saying of his restaurateur friend -- a Frenchman who operates a 25-seat fine-dining concept in Champagne, Ill.

"Never build a kitchen bigger than you and your wife can run yourselves."

And while Langley doesn't personally advocate such minimalism, his own design work today -- like that of other architects, engineers and planners in the world of freestanding restaurants -- is more and more about cutting the size of the kitchen.

"Square footage costs are excruciating," Langley says. "If you're paying $27 to $28 a foot, you need a bigger dining room to maximize turnover."

Even today's larger rest rooms are robbing from the kitchen, according to Langley. Designed to mandated specifications, rest rooms today are 50 percent larger than they were only five years ago.

But chefs know how important the front-of-the-house is, Langley maintains.

"They know the value of adding eight more seats when the check average is $20," he says. "And they're willing to make that sacrifice if you build them a space they can feel good in."

Langley designed the kitchen for Cafe Tu Tu Tango, a casual concept that originally opened in Miami and recently expanded to Atlanta. His challenge there was squeezing equipment that could serve a 270-seat restaurant into a severely downsized space.

Cafe Tu Tu Tango specializes in an appetizer format and has three separate "kitchens" -- grill, saute and fry -- for separate areas of the menu.

"Now you're baking in your slow cookers," Langley says. "A 36-inch range used to have four cooking heads. Now you can get six heads on a 34-inch range -- plus a griddle, a salamander and an oven.

Because the concept encourages sharing at the table, patrons expect their plates to be "run" as soon as they are ready, so there's no space tied up in food holding.

"Utilization of space was key in the beginning and still is," adds general manager Fred Meyers. "We committed ourselves to revenue production, aiming at maximizing dining as opposed to kitchen."

Meanwhile, with virtually all of its kitchen committed to production, Cafe Tu Tu Tango uses its dining area for creative product storage.

Braided garlic ropes and strings of dried pepper hang near a refrigerated case stocked with ethnic sausages and cheeses that are basic menu ingredients. And storage becomes display also for canned and bottled products, such as olive oil and balsamic vinegar, stacked behind a dining counter near the pizza oven.

"Outside of your chef, there's not much equipment-handling sophistication in the back of the house," Langley says. "As staff gets reduced, we have to go back to simple design and a more straightforward approach. After all, these are not rocket ships we're building."

Cafe SFA, New York, N.Y.

Nobody can afford to build kitchen monuments any more, asserts consultant Robert Nyman, who heads the New Jersey-based Nyman Group..