Complex, tri-level kitchen; Lewis' Hamlet Gardens pulls it together

Nation's Restaurant News, Feb 24, 1986 by Richard Martin

Complex, tri-level kitchen

LOS ANGELES -- Under a 30-ft.-high glass dome, the soft strains of grand piano music waft over beds of flowers and through palm and ficus trees to reach the stylishly attired diners, who are clearly enjoing the convivial mood of their surroundings.

The diners' other senses are awakened by the carefully crafted aromas, flavors, textures and sights issuing from an exhibition grill-rotisserie and from an invisible kitchen somewhere beyond the weathered brick walls of the collonaded dining room.

It is dinner time at the elegant new Hamlet Gardens and the piano, which has already serenaded some 300 guests at lunch, is now playing for what may be another 500 evening patrons--most of whom will remain blissfully ignorant of the complex, sometimes frenetic culinary drama unfolding on a grand scale behind the scenes.

The kitchen of the $3 million Hamlet Gardens is actually a three level, four-kitchen complex that took more than two years to plan and design and half a million dollars to fill with state-of-the-art equipment. An intricate design concept, largely predicted on the menu specifications of Marilyn Lewis, makes this multifaceted kitchen an intriguing case study in restaurant design logistics.

When Marilyn and Harry Lewis, founders of the 35-year-old Hamburger Hamlets chain, decided to put an upscale fine-dining restaurant into a vintage-1931 brick Mediterranean building here in Westwood Village, they faced challenges greater than just those of a major renovation.

Because of the pre-existing dimensions of the bulding's balconied, circular courtyard (now Hamlet Gardens' domed central dining room), the Lewises had to stack back-of-the-house facilities around the building's perimeter and install a full elevator to connect the 900-sq.-ft. main kitchen to a 1,750-sq.-ft. prep-pantry-dishwashing kitchen upstairs and a 500-sq.-ft-basement containing liquor storage and mechanical gear.

The resulting layout, including a handsome, 190-sq.-ft. appetizer kitchen in the bar room and a 160-sq.-ft. burger-to-go grill kitchen in an adjacent shop, actually gives 210-seat Hamlet Gardens and its take-out adjunct, called SRO, the standard one-third back-to-front space ratio--or about 3,200 total square feet of kitchen to nearly 7,000 sq. ft. of customer area.

Just how does such a necessarily complicated kitchen operation take shape, with all its elements in proper perspective?

"First I do the menu," Marilyn Lewis declared with deceptive simplicity. Intent on offering an eclectic array of flavors and styles, Lewis had to consider the probable customer preferences for sauteed dishes and salad-pantry items in placing priorities on her kitchen floorplans.

"The meat stations used to be most heavily utilized, but designing a kitchen is now so very complex," Lewis said.

Such first-course and salad dishes as gravlax marinated with dill and aquavit, salmon tartare with toast points or Szechwan chicken salad "don't take a long time to put together, but the pantry people who make them do have a lot of mise en place requirements to consider," Lewis explained.

"Originally, I was going to put a Chinese wok station in, but when I began to visualize how the wok chef's arms would be flying around, I got a little white knuckled."

Lewis back-burnered the wok, but she did allocate space for such intended signature dishes as chicken Pojarski, lavender fennel pepper steak, Wienerschnitzel, assorted frsh fish and pasta specialities, even such a familiar item as Hamburger Hamlets' classic lobster bisque. Desserts, including an extravagant caramelized apple-topped bread pudding floating in creme Anglaise, were given their kitchen niche.

Space was conserved because of the prevailing culinary philosophies at Hamlet Gardens. "My chef [Dutch-born Robert Van Hooten] and I don't believe in batch cooking--everything is a la minute," Lewis said. "I hate steamers, and I knew we'd have no use for convection ovens either," she added.

Lewis's mental conception of her kitchen needs then became a tangible sketch, with dark circles representing chefs at their respective stations. "We wound up with a seven-chef line. It would have been better it we could have done it with five chefs, but that's the nature of the menu I created," she said.

Lewis then "played the game" of drawing lines from dot to dot, giving a visual depiction of traffic flow patterns and the probable volumes of the various work stations.

"I knew that wherever the greatest number of lines crossed I would put my expeditor and deep-fry station," Lewis noted. At the hub of the kitchen line, the busy coordinating chef would work at the fryer, Lewis reasoned, because Hamlet Gardens' more sophisticated menu requires fewer fried items.

Her sketch completed, Lewis then called in her inhouse spatial planner, John Richards, who made refinements and helped sort out the ingredient-flow and traffic-flow complexities that were imposed by the multilevel kitchen layout.

"Putting the prep department on the second floor along with dishwashing is not ideal," Lewis remarked. "To compensate, we must have a fine-tuned management to keep the labor in perspective."