kitchen designers have come up with numerous strategies to deal with it. You may have noticed that in some restaurants, servers are expected to perform some food-related tasks outside of the kitchen area, at waiting stations closer to guests. They can slice and serve bread, serve soup, prepare and dress salads, or make drinks. The idea is to speed up support and preserve the (sometimes inadequate) space of the kitchen area for actual cooking tasks. Website design By BotEap.comAnother critical decision to be made early in the design process: Should servers enter the kitchen area to collect food, or should it be delivered through a walk-through window between the kitchen and dining room? Although the pass window is considered informal, it could be used in a fancier restaurant, perhaps masked from public view by a wall or partition. Each of these elements (distance and access to the kitchen) help determine your flow layouts. In an ideal world, the flow patterns would all be straight lines that do not intersect. However, this perfect is rarely achieved. An easy rule of thumb is that the faster you want your serve to become, the more important it is that your circulation patterns don’t cross. Within a quick service scenario, flow lines should be short and straight. Website design By BotEap.comThe next time you’re standing at a fast food counter, notice how few steps most workers have to take to pour your soda, pick up your burger, and pack your fries. Speed is the desired result.
The opposite is true within a fine dining establishment, where all the work is done in the kitchen area to enhance the feel of a relaxed dining experience. No noisy dishes, no bustling waiting stations here. Now that we have analyzed the movement of people as they go about their business in the restaurant, stick to the food flow line: the path of raw materials from the moment they enter the building until
the time they become leftovers. Website design By BotEap.comThe receiving region is where food is unloaded from delivery trucks and brought into the building. Most restaurants locate their reception locations near the back door. Our next stop is storage (dry storage, refrigerated storage, or freezer storage), where large amounts of food are kept at the right temperatures until needed. Food that emerges from storage goes to one of several preparation areas for vegetables, meats, or salads. The slicing and dicing take place here, to prepare the food for its next stop: the production region. The size and function of the preparation region vary widely, depending primarily on the style of service and the type of cooking area. Website design By BotEap.comWhen most people think of the restaurant kitchen, what they envision is the production line. Here the food takes its final form before it is served: Boiling, sautéing, frying, baking, roasting and steaming are the main activities in this area. The food is placed on a plate and garnished before it heads out the door on a serving tray. And that’s the end of the typical food flow line. Several kitchen performance centers are not included in the common food flow sequence, but are closely linked to it. For example, storage locations should be in close proximity to the staging area to minimize employee pacing. In some kitchens, there is a separate ingredients room, where everything needed for a recipe is organized, for pickup or delivery at a particular workstation. Website design By BotEap.comStorage is much more useful when placed near the preparation region than near the receiving region, saving busy workers steps. The bakery is usually located between the dry storage and cooking areas, because the mixers and ovens can be shared using the cooking area. A meat cutting region is also essential. It should be in close proximity to both refrigerators and sinks for safety and sanitation reasons, as well as for easy cleaning. Keep in mind, however, that some kitchens simply aren’t large enough to accommodate separate specialized work centers. Kitchen space planning becomes a matter of juggling priorities, and it’s an ongoing commitment. Website design By BotEap.comAs you juggle yours, think about each task that is performed in each workplace. How essential is it to the overall mission of the kitchen area? Are there assignments that can be modified, rearranged, or eliminated altogether to save time and/or space? Some of the ideas that need to be discussed here are: the frequency of moves between numerous pieces of gear, the distance between pieces of gear, allowing room for temporary “landing areas” for raw materials or finished plates to settle until As needed, put equipment on wheels so it could be moved from one site to another, creating a “parking space” for equipment when not in use. Website design By BotEap.comSimply put, if work centers are adjacent to each other, without crowding, you save time and energy; And if people who work in more than one area have convenient, unobstructed paths between those places, they can perform more efficiently. An often-missing center of work is the sink, which always seems to be relegated to the darkest corner of the kitchen. Sure, it’s not one of the most attractive areas, but think of the many other workplaces that depend on it. The common kitchen generates an overflow of pots and pans. Why not put the sink closer to the production line to deal with the mess? Website design By BotEap.comAnd, speaking of pots, think carefully about where to store them. Both clean and dirty, they take up a lot of space and require creative storage solutions. Pot/pan racks can often be hung directly over the sink area, giving dishwashers a handy place to shop for clean pots right off the rack. (Remember that anything stored near the floor should be at least 6 inches off the floor for health reasons.)