Wine designs cure for 'kitchen deprivation.'

Nation's Restaurant News, Jan 5, 1987 by Paul Frumkin

WINE DESIGNS CURE FOR 'KITCHEN DEPRIVATION'

NEW YORK--Barry Wine is only partly joking when he says his new 2,300-sq.-ft. kitchen in the Casual Quilted Giraffe is an "overreaction to seven years of intense kitchen deprivation."

The size and design of the state-of-the-art kitchen serving Wine's new 90-seat restaurant here owes perhaps as much to his years of cooking in overcrowded facilities as to the demands of the operation's complex and wide-randing menu.

When the fromer lawyer and his wife, Susan were first approached in 1984 by AT&T representatives about relocating their four-star Manhattan restaurant, the Quilted Giraffe, to larger quarters in the company's new midtown office building, Wine was ready for a change of kitchen venue. For five years he and his staff of 10 cooks had successfully "challenged the establishment with their fresh new approach to cooking," according to New York Times reviewer Marion Burros. What few had observed, however, was that they had challenged it out of an underequipped kitchen that measured 40 ft. long and barely 8 ft. wide.

"The Quilted Giraffe taught us a lot about circulation," Wine said wryly. "People have to squeeze by one another just to get from the stove to the refrigerator."

The space offered by AT&T was about 4,500 sq. ft. on two floors in the atrium of the company's headquarters on Madison Avenue--a neighborhood where a square foot of space can cost anywhere from $150 to $500 per year. Wine looked at the premium space he planned to lease and decided more than half of it would be needed for kitchen and storage purposes.

"From an industry statistic, this is probably quite abnormal," Wine suggested. "And it certainly is for 55th and Madison."

Along the way, however, the plans changed, and the Wines decided to leave the Quilted Giraffe at its Second Avenue location. In its place, they developed the Casual Quilted Giraffe, a restaurant that would offer a single, continuous-service grazing menu from 11:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.--one that included such wildly diverse dishes as grilled lobster, free-range chicken nuggets, duck meatballs and mashed potatoes, ricotta cheese and wasabi pizza, caviar, fried eggs and polenta, snails, confit of duck, cold sliced steak sandwich, sweet potato hash, pasta and grilled squid, charred lamb, root beer floats and gummy bears.

Even the pricing structure would be a little unorthodox. All small dishes would sell for one price--$12--whereas large courses would sell for either $22 or $30. Sides dishes cost $5, soups $7.50 and desserts $6.

Clearly, though, that large, free-wheeling menu helped dictate the final design of the Casual Quilted Giraffe's kitchen. "This is meant to be a restaurant that serves anywhere from 400 to 500 meals a day," Wine said. "With a menu of this sort, there has to be ongoing preparation--particularly since we don't use any processed foods."

"Even though this is meant to be a higher-volume restaurant than the Quilted Giraffe, it's still a restaurant where things are cooked to order," he added.

The actual design work was largely a collaboration between Wine and Superior Restaurant Equipment Co. Inc., an equipment and design firm based in Baldwin, L.I. "Conseptually, Barry had an idea of what he wanted," explained Andrew Lazar, president of the company. "He knew how he wanted the food to flow. After submitting three or four arrangements, we finally settled on the existing plan."

Lazar said that the large kitchen is warranted given the demands of the menu. "It's a highly specialized concept," he said. "The menu has strong, precise requirements. They have ex-acting specifications for recipes, for quantitites, for service."

The kitchen--which finally cost the Wines more than $400,000 to build--has both a front cooking line and back line-styled after the traditional European center-island kitchen, in which the ranges and ovens are positioned back to back. "Somebody can be working on food to be served three or four hours from now," Wine said. "On one side you have the line cooks, who may be serving lunch. On the other, you might have a cook preparing the confit of duck we're going to use tonight."

And again, the Quilted Giraffe proved to be a factor in the design. "It's on the rebound from the Quilted Giraffe," Wine said, "where we can't serve lunch because we're standing at the one and only stove and the one and only counter getting ready for dinner."

The two restaurants often present contrasting approaches to fine dining. For example, the Quilted Giraffe is designed to serve only about a quarter of the covers forecast for the Casual Quilted Giraffe. Ironically, though, the Casual menu can be more difficult to implement from a kitchen standpoint.

"This grazing, nonstructured kind of menu is particularly difficult to administer," Wine said. "At the Quilted Giraffe there is a fixed-price menu and everyone gets a first course, everybody gets a second course and so on.

"This [Casual Quilted Giraffe] is much harder. If a customer is ordering two or three small plates, it's not obvious whether he wants them all at once or one after another, like in a traditional dinner. This can be a difficult burden and requires considerable coordination."