Mapping Out An Efficient Kitchen (Restaurants USA, April 1999)

April 1999 issue

Mapping Out An Efficient Kitchen

Restaurants USA magazine's final issue was published in September 2002 but these archived articles remain available for our readers' convenience.

Restaurants USA, April 1999

Plotting out a logical path before jumping into the driver's seat will allow you to create an effective kitchen design for your restaurant.
By Lynda McDaniel

Gene Rees likes to tell the story about the woman who always cut her Easter ham in half before baking it. When her daughter asked why, she said her mother always did it that way. She then asked her grandmother, who answered the same way. Finally her great-grandmother recalled that she always cut the ham in half because she never had a pan big enough for a whole one.

“That happens in commercial kitchens, too,” adds Rees, who as president of Rees Design/Sales near Pittsburgh has designed hundreds of kitchens during his 30-year career. “Because something has always been done a certain way, there’s no real forethought as to whether it’s logical. Owners will buy an item and then walk around trying to decide where to put it. They look at the physical realities of the equipment, put it in place, fire it up, and it works fine. But when they do that with half a dozen pieces of equipment, pretty soon there is no logical flow in the kitchen. People are running over here to prepare soup, over there to freeze something and into a corner to pull a rack of baked potatoes from a convection oven. At some point, the whole design of the kitchen is completely in the dumpster.”

Given the relentless hustle-bustle of busy restaurants, cobbled kitchens seem as inevitable as dirty dishes. But don’t despair; there are ways to convert that makeshift workplace into an efficient showplace without shutting down, buying all new equipment or adding an inch of space. All it takes is a plan—or as Rees likes to call it, a map of where you’re headed.

“If you’re in Pittsburgh and you’re driving to Denver, you get a map, right? That way, you don’t end up in Seattle because of a wrong turn back when the interstates were just a few hours apart,” Rees says. “Kitchen design is the same thing. Put it on paper. Look at how everything logically works together, so that after you do ‘A’ and start ‘B,’ you don’t find out you have to tear down half of ‘A.’ A map lets you bite off logical chunks. You can say, ‘OK, we’ll do these three things now, then we’ll do these two things when we have the time and money.’ In other words, you’re not always moving the ladder to replace the carpet while you’re trying to paint the ceiling.”

Fixing the flow

A comprehensive plan may sound easy enough, but it requires deep digging to uncover all the facets essential to an efficient flow. Start with a long look at your menu and consider exactly how you build it. Do you cook with convenience foods or from scratch? Do you make your own salads? Are they garnished back in the kitchen or in a pantry area? Are your dressings made fresh or do they come in portion-control packs? What about sandwiches? Are they grilled, broiled or batter-dipped and deep-fried?

Exhaustive questioning at this stage can establish an orderly schematic that effectively moves your operation from receiving through storage, setup through assembly, preparation through production, server pickup through customer delivery and finally back to cleanup. Tighter procedures produce not only better food and improved service but also the added bonus of staff longevity, according to Harry Nisonger, president of Nisonger Associates, located in Cincinnati.

“I used to own six restaurants, so I look at things with different eyes than somebody who hasn’t lived with the realities of the labor market,” Nisonger explains. “There’s high turnover. People walk in off the street, and you need to get them productive in the least amount of time. For the past 25 years, we’ve taken a manufacturing-plant approach that studies the function of each workstation and creates a good flow with the fewest steps possible. The whole idea is to try to reduce the confusion in the kitchen so that people are more productive and less stressed out.”

When you’re serving 75 tons of chicken a year, that’s essential, says Chuck Mohan, who on any given day might turn out 10,000 pieces of chicken for a Fortune 500 picnic from his Pittsburgh-based restaurant, Mohan’s. “In order to address the volume and the time factor, we had to be very organized. Gene [Rees] helped us take a very simple project—cooking chicken—and break it down into seven procedural steps. We took the chicken from a storage cooler to a pulling cooler, from the breading station to the cooking station, from a dumping station to a packing station and to a warmer. Now, you can’t have seven steps [with] three on one side of your kitchen and four on the other, and our plan gave us a kitchen that flowed very smoothly.”

Safe work environments, especially in light of an increasingly inexperienced labor market, are also key to an efficient kitchen. Nonskid floor surfaces and the separation of work aisles from traffic aisles are essential. Employees taking hot pans out of the oven, for example, need convenient and sufficient racks or counter space so that they don’t have to carry hot pans around blind corners or across major traffic aisles. Positioning the equipment and choreographing the kitchen flow not only saves steps and reduces stress but also can encourage better use of staff.

Nisonger recommends creating close relationships between different areas of the kitchen, to make it easier to cross-train staff. “That way you don’t have so many specialists in the kitchen,” Nisonger explains. “Consider the dish room. Too often I see dish-machine operators isolated and alone. It’s harder to manage those people and harder to get them involved in some of the other kitchen functions, whether it’s putting up stock from receiving or assisting in some of the simple prep functions.”

Edward Engoron, president of Perspectives/The Consulting Group in Los Angeles, agrees. “Large, cumbersome kitchens eat up labor dollars, and these days that labor is often not even available,” he says. “We’re seeing anywhere from 1 to 3 percent unemployment in most markets today, so it’s very difficult to find people. As a result, we’ve found that we need to automate some procedures.”

Pizza chains, for example, are automating with conveyor pizza ovens featuring sophisticated controls and technology that allow for quick training of new employees. “Clients are looking for ways to make their product more consistent,” Rees says, “so instead of buying a $5,000 pizza oven, they’re buying an $18,000 pizza oven that allows them to tell the staff, ‘Make the pizza look like the picture.’ You may not get artistic pizza, but you do get consistent product. They’ve eliminated the weak link—employee sophistication—which is not available these days, at least not at a reasonable price.”

Kitchen stock

To find the right equipment to outfit an efficient kitchen, take advantage of industry trade shows. Instead of spending precious time with individual manufacturers’ reps at your restaurant, use shows like the National Restaurant Association’s annual Show held each May in Chicago to view the latest equipment backed by advice and technical support from company presidents and chief engineers. As Keith Ashby, committee chair for exhibitor relations for the Association, puts it, “You can kick it, feel it, see the warranties, talk to the people, compare it and find out what it’s like to service.”

But bring your road map to trade shows, cautions Rees, so as not to take a costly detour. John Bechakas, owner of Texas Hot Lunch in Kane, Pennsylvania, likes to attend the shows but checks with Rees before making his decisions. “I need an expert,” says Bechakas. “We’re out in the country here, and if I had relied on my expertise, equipment would only last three to four years before I’d be tearing it out and replacing it.”

Engoron also advises that operators make sure the equipment not only is built well but can also be serviced easily. His policy has changed from using what he describes as “equipment that was built like a tank that could be fixed with a hammer to equipment that took eight men with very small screwdrivers to fix.” He’s back to recommending equipment that is built like a tank and backed by an easily accessible service organization.

As for the size of an efficient kitchen, recommendations range between 30 and 40 percent
of total square footage, although on occasion Engoron takes that figure down to 25 percent as part of his jealous use of expensive space and his aversion to overdesign. By keeping things tight, yet flexible, restaurateurs can save space, maximize equipment and adapt menus more quickly as trends change.

“We put a lot of equipment on wheels, and we do things that enable us to disconnect equipment easily,” Engoron adds. “In fact, because of our preference for smaller kitchens, we actually change out between different times of the day. We might move a griddle from the line at breakfast and change it to a charbroiler at lunch and dinner. Instead of having a griddle that needs to be cleaned in the morning and again at dinner because people have put all kinds of junk on top of it, we have a more compact line. In the process, we can take better advantage of expensive hood space.”

Back-of-the-house budgets

Kitchen budgets vary as widely as restaurant menus, although figures average $185 to $250 per square foot, with consultants’ fees running 2 to 4 percent of the budget. But operators like Bechakas believe that the fee pays for itself in monies saved in buying the right equipment and time saved during remodel or expansion. He still marvels at how good planning allowed him to tear down an old building and put up a new one in only 16 days.

Other operators report that with a tight plan, expansions or renovations can be completed without closing down. “You might have to modify your offering,” Nisonger adds, “but not close for service. We’ve created temporary kitchens that are designed in semi-trailer trucks. We roll the trailer up, make hose connections, plug on a propane-gas skid, hook up the electric, and we’ve got a functioning kitchen.”

Nisonger and his associate, Ron Kruse, recently finished work on a state-of-the-art 16,000-square-foot restaurant for the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis that managed to serve the museum’s 1.2 million hungry visitors throughout the nine-and-a-half-month renovation. To solve a pervasive problem of long lines, they created a new concept that offered name brands such as McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Hot Dog Construction Company and Starbucks Coffee, among others, alongside a catering kitchen and an area used for everything from school sack lunches to private functions for as many as 5,000 guests.

It was a tall order, but according to Marnie Maxwell, vice president for strategic planning, the museum was without foodservice for only one day. “I’m very proud of that,” she says. “We started construction while we were still operating. During the nice weather, we moved most of our foodservice outside underneath a tent, though it was not our fullservice experience. That operated from May until September while we built the new kitchen.”

Bigger and busier than most, the museum’s restaurant illustrates what can be accomplished in kitchens of any size, and proves that careful planning and a targeted map can mean the end of the road for the half-baked kitchen.

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Lynda McDaniel writes for Restaurants USA from Washington DC.