Form fits function - and space

Nation's Restaurant News, Nov 12, 1990

Form fits function -- and space There's no single common concept of kitchen design.

That quickly becomes apparent in speaking with the leaders of Cini-Little International Inc., one of the country's largest foodservice consulting firms with a major share of hotel food and beverage facility design around the world.

Patt Patterson, Nation's Restaurant News contributing editor, talked with president John Cini, senior vice president Jim Little, and Harry Schildkraut, vice president of the Chicago office and a specialist in hotel design.

Here are edited excerpts of their conversation.

SCHILDKRAUT: In general, kitchen design in this counrty is going to smaller, more compact layouts because of the cost of space these days.

LITTLE: At the same time, many overseas properties are going to larger layouts. In the Conrad Hotel in Hong Kong, for example, there is an increased number of dining operations. There's one kitchen just for Chinese food preparation in addition to Western-style kitchens.

SCHILDKRAUT: The same thing is true at the Four Seasons in Singapore, where there are three different kitchen areas: Chinese, Moslem and Western.

On the other hand, we're seeing more suites concepts in this country. They have practically no food prep facilities at all. They may serve a buffet-type breakfast plus a light feeding area with only 50 to 60 seats, which is very small, even for a coffee shop.

CINI: There's no clear trend toward centralizing food preparation for all of the different food and beverage operations. It's difficult to locate foodservice operations in one place. For a good hotel design, you have to put activities, including dining, where the people are going to want to be.

SCHILDKRAUT: That's especially true in a resort hotel. People want to eat where they play, so you have to place the food preparation near where you serve.

LITTLE: Often the space on a single level is limited. And you may not want to intermingle the operations for another reason. Management may want to separate quality and skill levels required for various types of feeding. You don't need or want the same skill levels for an all-day dining area as you would for yor high-end, dinner-only operation or for your banquet facility.

SCHILDKRAUT: There's not much space saved between having one large central kitchen and, say, three dedicated kitchens. The problem with centralizing is that you have to put food into motion to get to the serving areas, and the less of you have of that, the better things run.

LITTLE: And putting together three cooking lines, say, just for a three-meal-a-day unit, an upscale dinner operation and room service, can have its own difficulties. For one thing it's tougher to control each dining element at a profit center. What you might possibly gain on space and personnel will cost you in control.

SCHILDKRAUT: But you can combine some phases of operations. Hyatt International, for example,wants a separate kitchen for each dining area, but it wants common support centralized. As a result, we set up a central commissary, where all basic prep and bakery operations take place. And you often see people centralizing dishwashing.

LITTLE: Some years ago we studied a convention hotel with a centralized dishwashing operation serving four or five restaurants and a separate banquet floor. We found there was no savings because of the distances involved. There were not only more people required to move dishes and more dishes needed because so many were in motion between areas, but the breakage was higher. The replacement was two to three times as great as with decentralized dishwashing.

CINI: That's one of the fallacies of the centralization concept. You think it's going to save space and reduce staffing, but it usually doesn't work that way. Each case is individual. That's why they hire us.

LITTLE: Harry faces some requirement overseas that affects where a kitchen is located. For example, in France, Italy, Switzerland and Poland, legislation forces the kitchen to have outside light and air.

CINI: That makes it hard to put a central kitchen in the middle of a building.

LITTLE: People are getting harder and harder to find for foodservice. So training is becoming a factor in a hotel's foodservice design. For example, they're realizing the importance of training. So there are better training programs being developed.

CINI: We're seeing demands for a training room with audiovisual aids. And some hotel people are calling for kitchens to be laid out with an eye toward training.

SCHILDKRAUT: In European Hyatts we're being called upon to include a training kitchen as part of the staff cafeteria. It's only preliminary training, and I'm not talking about turning out chefs, but for cooks and helpers. In Eastern Europe especially, there's no apprenticeship system, so the hotels have to do the training in a short time, in-house.

Those staff cafeterias are much more open and expansive than we see here. They're more like commercial operations. There's self-service lines, cook-to-order lines, excellent for training personnel to work in the main kitchens.