Kitchen working patterns should determine layout

Nation's Restaurant News, Feb 10, 1992 by Patt Patterson

Cleaning an operation like that was a snap, but that was a bonus. If there were a lot of sandwiches to be made, several sandwich stations could be made up and work flow kept to a minimum. If there was a lot of vegetable prep to be done, voila, prep areas were set up right where they were were needed.

Since then, I've seen a couple of commercial kitchens that had similar approaches, though none on the scale of the Corpus Christi operation. But that's just one approach that reflects the needs created by constantly changing cycle menus.

Some kitchen designers are doing what my friend's did: keeping the service personnel out of the kitchen. If you create a nextdoor service pantry, you'll be surprised what it does (1) to cut down the size of the kitchen, (2) to improve the efficiency and (3) to reduce the confusion that too many owners--and chefs--consider normal. Confusion doesn't have to be normal.

The same thing is true of wareashing. That's probably one of the biggest causes of high humidity levels in the kitchen. But moving warewashing into a separate room of its own doesn't need to mean creating a sauna for the part of your staff. Properly designed ventilation systems actually do a better job when most of the moisture-generating equipment is put in its own room.

At a meeting of the Foodservice Consultants Society International some months ago, I was interested to hear one of the members say that there could be too much flexibility in a kitchen design. "If you set a kitchen up so it can do literally everything," he said in a reception conversation with several of his colleagues and some equipment manufacturers, "you run the risk of not being able to do anything very efficiently. There has to be a compromise."

One way is to set up prep stations that can shift quickly from one function to another -- for example, from vegetable prep to possibly salad making. By simple restructuring of the kitchen through multiple use of work stations to accommodate the preparation cycle, you can get savings of space, equipment and labor.

When you need a new kitchen, work with a design specialist who has the experience and the same objectives you do. They should be to produce the most efficient, yet versatile kitchen possible -- one that's a pleasure for the kitchen staff to work in.