SPECIAL REPORT -- “You’ve got people in a New York City office designing a kitchen for a hotel that’s a thousand miles away, without any real feeling or sense of what’s actually needed. It’s a big investment, and it looks great -- but it’s all wrong. They don’t ask the chefs!”
That’s Michael Goodman, Executive Chef at the Four Seasons Resort in Scottsdale, AZ, sounding off on the “flagrant mistakes” he’s seen in his 20-year career in the kitchens of luxury properties.
For example: “They put an oven next to the Frialator. Does that make sense?
Why didn’t they put it next to the stove, where it belongs? Or they equip a kitchen that serves three meals a day without a proper walk-in refrigerator. And I’ve seen kitchens that are not more than five years old without air conditioning. Who’s going to work in an environment that’s hot and sticky?”
Added Philip Kendall, Vice President of Food & Beverage at Starwood Hotels &
Resorts: “You could have a very attractive kitchen with wonderful equipment -- there’s great technology today -- but if you don’t have all the ‘flow’ elements thought out, it could be a nightmare. If there’s no cold box where it’s needed, for instance, and a chef has to walk to the other end of the line to get an item, you’re taking him completely out of his rhythm.”
Since the movement of waiters within the kitchen is another key aspect of flow, several
F&B executives have sought to minimize server traffic. “We set up a system where there’s the least number of people in the kitchen,” noted Jon McGavin, F&B Director at Cleveland’s Ritz-Carlton. The eight servers in the hotel’s new dining room are kept out of the kitchen, replaced by two food runners and one expediter. “It’s a smooth operation, much less noisy and a lot less hectic.”
Kitchen congestion has also been reduced significantly by confining chefs and other workers within strictly defined areas. “That keeps the steps down,” said McGavin. “We have cooks in four-foot spaces producing only certain items, instead of going from one end of the line to the other.”
Ease of flow also depends on the kitchen’s layout, according to Andre Zotoff, F&B Director for New York’s Inter-Continental and Crowne Plaza Hotels. “The square-footage of new hotel kitchens is much, much smaller than in years past,” he pointed out. “But efficiency of the layout can compensate for restricted space.” Here, such factors as type of menu, number of meals served when operating at full capacity, and areas to be devoted to banquet and room service “must be considered when designing the line,” said Zotoff.
Maximum labor efficiency is achieved most readily, he added, when all of the hotel’s cooking needs are centralized in one kitchen. “You must have certain staffing levels to operate separate restaurant and banquet kitchens. And slack times – periods of inactivity – vary in each of the kitchens.” But in a centralized kitchen, chefs and other staff members could be mutually helpful during rush times, Zotoff maintained. For example, as the restaurant cooks await a la carte business at 6 p.m., at least two of the chefs could “easily lend a hand with a banquet, dishing out items to help serve 300 people.”
While seeking to enhance kitchen efficiency, management may actually impair productivity by adding inappropriate equipment, said Win Person, F&B Director at Houston’s Four Seasons Hotel. “Get the chefs involved,” he emphasized. “Don’t buy equipment that they don’t need.” Here, Person cited a new property that purchased a $15,000 rotisserie to handle an expected rotisserie-type menu. “But the only thing they have on their menu that’s roasted is roasted chicken -- so they have an expensive piece of equipment that’s totally underused.”
Missteps of this kind demonstrate the need to think “menu first, equipment second,” said restaurant consultant Ben Hiatt, President of BWH Hospitality Consulting, based in Alexandria, VA. “Equipment and layout should be considered only after the menu is determined.”
But even if this concept is heeded, “you sometimes get architects on projects who overlook the obvious need for adequate preparation and storage space,” Hiatt continued.
“They don’t really understand food production and kitchen operations.”
At the same time, overall kitchen size is not the main factor in operational efficiency or cuisine excellence, said Starwood’s Kendall. “You can have a wonderfully large space that’s terribly ineffective, while some people are putting out great food in postage-stamp kitchens because they have everything they need right around them.”
Kendall called for “much more free thinking” in kitchen design and operation. “Too many stick with the established ways of doing things. For example, they may dismiss the need for a wok station because ‘we don’t serve Chinese or other Asian food.’ So they disregard the fact that a wok is the very best way to do vegetables -- it brings things to temperature so quickly and holds heat so effectively. It’s so much better, so much faster, and the vegetables are so much fresher.
“And you don’t have to be cooking Indian cuisine to install a tandoori oven,”
Kendall added. “It’s an incredibly effective way to cook marinated meat, fish or vegetable products very quickly. Put the items on a skewer and just drop it in a tandoori.” Moreover, “a tandoori oven provides extreme heat with very little firepower.
“In sum,” said Kendall, “look at your kitchen very closely and decide: Which pieces of equipment do I really need and which will give me the greatest amount of flexibility?”
Finally, Kendall offered this emphatic caution concerning any kitchen-design project: “If a bona fide chef -- a quality culinarian -- hasn’t had his or her hand in it and didn’t walk behind it, you may wind up with an ornate white elephant.”
