The latest technologies and thoughtful design address labor, space and budget constraints.
Restaurant and foodservice kitchens have always been complex. But we’re living through a time of rapid change, so eternal challenges look a little different today. Consumers have different expectations for made-to-order meals — in particular, increased speed and convenience. There’s greater demand for takeout and delivery, even in full service. The inputs that go into meal production have changed as well. With labor shortages across all industries, foodservice workers are harder to find and retain, and often less skilled. And in an age of rising real-estate costs, inefficient and poorly configured kitchens impede operations more than ever.
To compensate for those problems, operators continue to call into service smaller batteries of more versatile, sophisticated and compact equipment.
We talked to several experts — a design consultant, two dealer-designers and the president of a service agency — to learn more about recent developments in the evolution of kitchen challenges and solutions.
Some operators see undercounter refrigeration equipped with doors instead of drawers as an extra expense they can’t afford, but speed and ease of use for kitchen workers make them well worth the money in high-volume kitchens. Photo courtesy of Rapids Contract Foodservice and Design
New Kitchen Demands, New Equipment Needs
Today’s trends in kitchen design primarily revolve around speed and streamlining of the food preparation process, says Tom Roberts, project manager at dealer/consultant Rapids Foodservice Contract and Design, a foodservice equipment and supplies dealer that serves the Minneapolis-St. Paul and St. Louis metro areas as well as central and eastern Iowa.
The most important aspect of those two trends, Roberts stresses, is making sure the facility has the best possible hot and cold holding equipment. Even dine-in customers demand greater speed in order fulfillment, requiring restaurants to make more food ahead of time rather than à la minute. But high-quality holding equipment that keeps the food safe and retains its quality is even more important for to-go and delivery meals, which represent a large and growing proportion of all orders, even in some on-site segments.
“It’s about making sure to get the food to the customer as close to its original state as possible, no matter how long it took the driver to get there,” Roberts says. “There may be an additional pickup station out front with a countertop area and hot holding. And not just traditional heat lamps; there are now rolling heated carts and cabinets with three to five areas or drawers for storage of different items. These units have been around a while, but manufacturers are now modernizing them, making them more efficient and more standardized.”
One trend that remains a constant, though, is the push and pull of the budgeting process. “Some architects are minimalist and keep a decent budget in mind; others have amazingly decadent tastes,” Roberts wryly notes. “Equipment is definitely better, but it’s not more affordable.” Many operators and commercial kitchen designers are turning to widely available used equipment, he says.
Even more daunting than compromising on older equipment is making a former restaurant’s kitchen your own, Roberts says. “An existing footprint can present a big challenge,” he explains. “To make somebody else’s dream yours — turning a Subway sandwich shop into a fast-casual restaurant, for instance — you find yourself making concessions. It’s still difficult to make somebody else’s dream yours.”
Bring Designers in Early
Laura Lentz, FCSI, design principal at Maryland-based Culinary Advisors, also says the cost of equipment continues to be a huge issue in commercial kitchen design as the cost of items has remained high since the pandemic, so it costs more to equip a kitchen today. “There’s sticker shock right now in the budgets for almost every project; even I’m amazed at what projects are costing,” she says.
Complicating that is the general uncertainty about where the industry is going. “Clients want answers from us as design consultants, but right now, there isn’t data to support what we’ve been doing,” Lentz adds.
One practice that helps clients, Lentz says, is to bring in designers earlier in the planning process. “We might call it the ‘test fit’ or ‘pre-design’ or ‘concept’ phase, ahead of the true schematic design,” she says. “That’s when we really home in and run the numbers. A client who doesn’t know exactly what he wants to do or how to fix the operation’s problems may have a list of 12 things he wants. We’re prioritizing, looking at what’s the most important thing, what’s the second most important.”
What’s the No. 1 ask in kitchen renovations today? “We get consistent requests for revamping chefs’ counters and pickup lines,” Lentz says. “Some clients might even have counters with beautiful custom fabrication and remote refrigeration, the kind that were popular in the 1980s and ’90s. We have a lot of conversations about how a redo is not as simple as pulling out refrigerators and putting in new versions. It can be complicated and costly.”
Here, a worker at a fried-chicken concept moves frozen poultry to the cabinet. High-volume, takeout-focused cooking increasingly requires thawing cabinets to bring frozen foods up to temperature safely and reduce cooking times, says Mark Rossi, CEO of Avanti Restaurant Solutions. Photo by Kayli Green; photo courtesy of Avanti Restaurant Solutions
Less Space, Less Labor
The key question kitchen designers face now, Lentz says, is “How can I use a smaller space to produce more menu variety?”
Labor uncertainty is another consideration. “The stakes are higher now,” Lentz says. “You might not have two or three people working the line on a busy night — if two of them call out, you need a line that one person can run without bringing down the whole restaurant.” Previously, Lentz says, she might have drawn up plans for a 20-foot cookline “because it fit the space and felt right in my gut. But now I challenge myself to see if I can get it to 15 feet to make it easier for one person.”
Planning for high-volume times with a high level of kitchen staffing can also be important. “Do I have the ability to create a second makeshift cookline and then take it away when it isn’t needed?” Lentz asks.
But even as kitchens shrink, the demand for menu variety remains strong. “You may only offer 15 items instead of the 30 on the original menu, but those 15 are going to be items from the original 30 and rotate out,” Lentz says. “The equipment has to execute seasonal changes. You might want to have both Asian and Tex-Mex items. There’s a desire for equipment to do more than one thing. Or you can change out equipment so that you can get more menu variety without a bigger space. You need to think about the type of flexibility you want when you’re in the design planning space.”
This call for menu and staffing flexibility — sometimes in an awkward space — increases the demand for “doing foodservice in a portable way,” Lentz says. Ventless technology helps make that possible. Switching out cooking equipment also means having enough electrical outlets in the right places so that staff can use three or four pieces of specialized equipment at once, she points out: “Electrification in general has risen to the top.”
Lentz says induction cooktops, portable or stationary induction woks, and a new class of speed ovens that do not include a microwave mode (which can change food consistency) serve as examples of the fast, versatile, switchable equipment operators need today. She notes that the availability of portable electrical equipment and ventless hoods is facilitating adaptive reuse in older buildings since kitchens can now be squeezed into odd spaces that once might not have been considered. “Before, you might have used the office-building basement for storage; now, you might build a kitchen in that area,” Lentz explains. The ability to create a kitchen in a small, out-of-the-way area means that a larger, centrally located ground-floor space that might once have been devoted to food production can now be used another way.
In all types of foodservice kitchens, advance preparation of food is becoming more important, so the use of blast chilling and sous vide equipment will continue to spread, Lentz says. “This genre of equipment was always just for high-end operations, but now you see more locations that want to have fresh prepared food but also need an advanced prep method that solves labor issues,” she notes.
The least glamorous part of the process of serving meals to consumers is also worthy of a new look, Lentz adds. “It used to be common to see separate pot-washing and dish-washing areas, but now, even in larger spaces, there’s usually just one person available, and you don’t want that individual running back and forth,” she says. “And consolidating the space for dish washing can mean devoting 5% more of your kitchen footprint to making a profit.”
As foodservice kitchens shrink, vertical stacking of combis and other equipment makes every square foot usable. Photo courtesy of Rapids Contract Foodservice and Design
High-Tech Equipment
Jason Cotter, director of design and construction at Kamran & Company, a California-based foodservice equipment dealer that offers design services, says high-end equipment like advanced combis, multimode speed ovens and blast chillers can save operators a great deal of money and hassle in the long run.
“By allowing operators to work with a staff that is lower-skilled and higher-turnover, this equipment cuts labor costs,” Cotter says. “Instead of having an executive chef for all shifts, you can have one executive chef and a bunch of cooks. Someone can come in today and, as long as they follow a few simple instructions, can cook a meal. Someone could come in tomorrow, take the same meal, follow simple instructions, do basic prep, push a button and have the same results. Equipment is becoming much more technical in programming and operations, and it can produce quality food with much better consistency than even the best chef.”
Cotter highlights equipment categories that have seen important recent advances:
Combi ovens. “A combi oven has the potential to replace seven to nine pieces of equipment,” Cotter says. “I can cook almost any meal with nothing more than a combi; the only thing I wouldn’t do is wet-batter frying.”
A combi can increase yield not only by ensuring consistency of the product being cooked, Cotter says, but also by minimizing product shrinkage. For example, “Everybody who cooks shrimp knows that it shrinks. But shrimp cooked in a combi shrinks much less, so you can purchase smaller, less expensive raw shrimp. The finished product will go to the customer’s plate at the same physical size as the larger shrimp you used before.” Sous vide cooking can also occur in a combi without the vacuum-seal process of traditional water-bath sous vide, he notes.
Because they’re stackable and different foods can be cooked at the same time, combis do a great deal of work in a small amount of space, Cotter says. Programmable combis can also keep working overnight when there’s nobody in the kitchen, and internet-enabled combis can be chef-monitored from anywhere in the world.
And though the combi steamer was invented in the late 1960s, advances continue to be made. Cotter praises in particular a newer feature from one manufacturer: a 5-point temperature probe, which can measure different spots of the food product to better determine exact doneness.
Combi manufacturers also provide excellent support to operators to ensure that the units are being used correctly and to their full potential, Cotter says. “All of the higher-end combi companies have support at the manufacturer level and also from reps, so a chef who is not familiar with the equipment can get assistance and training,” he notes, adding that some companies also have 800-number chef lines.
Multicook speed ovens. These ovens typically combine impingement cooking with convection, microwaves or both. “For many items on a menu, speed ovens do a phenomenal job,” Cotter says. “Any bar menu works great in a speed oven.” And these ovens have less obvious uses as well; Cotter was impressed by a recent manufacturer demonstration in which a sous vide-cooked tri-tip roast was finished in a speed oven, resulting in tender, juicy but well-seared “crusty” meat.
But speed ovens also have limitations. “They aren’t designed for cooking raw product, except for eggs or low-fat items,” Cotter explains. “They will not do heavy, fatty foods because they can’t deal with the grease. If you try cooking hamburgers all day in a speed oven, you’ll just clog the ventless filtration system. They’re best used for lean proteins and finishing. But depending on what you want to offer, a speed oven can do a full menu.”
Blast chillers and freezers. “From a menu flexibility perspective and a food safety perspective, there are very few things more valuable than a blast chiller,” Cotter says. “It’s the safest way to parcook because you can get the food from cooking temperature to refrigeration temperature in 90 minutes. And if you do cook-chill, a blast chiller isn’t much more expensive than a bag-and-chill system, and it can hold chilled foods for up to 28 days safely.”
So far, Cotter says, blast chillers and blast freezers are being used mostly in large commissaries and central kitchens that do high-volume prep work. But he believes they should be adopted more widely, if only for the food-safety advantages. “Blast chillers and combis are two of the most useful tools in the kitchen,” he asserts.
Maybe they’ll be consolidated into a single piece of equipment one of these days. Cotter is impressed with a European company that recently introduced a blast chiller combined with a steamer. “Just opening and closing the cabinet door one time rather than several takes another piece of labor out of the kitchen,” he points out.
Changing water filter cartridges on a regular schedule is vital to the functioning of steam equipment, but the simple task is neglected often enough that some operators have their service agency do the switchouts. Photo courtesy of Rapids Contract Foodservice and Design
The Rest of the Story: Maintenance and Service
Trends in kitchens and equipment have implications for maintenance and servicing, says Gyner Ozgul, president and CEO of Smart Care Solutions, a Midwest-based company that installs, repairs and maintains commercial kitchen equipment. “The first is equipment complexity,” he says. “And because a single piece of equipment is doing more of the menu, you don’t have the redundancy you had before.”
Labor challenges in foodservice also impact the usage, maintenance and servicing of equipment. “Operators struggle to find and keep workers, training them on the more complex pieces of equipment is more problematic, and the training gap is increasing,” Ozgul says. “Hence, a lot of failures that we fix.”
Improper care of kitchen equipment can mean a number of things, Ozgul says: “Misusing the equipment, misunderstanding how to use it properly, not doing cleaning or other maintenance properly.” Some employees don’t even turn off units at the end of the night, sometimes because they don’t know how to do so, he adds.
Ozgul says operators should map out a staff training process as soon as new equipment is installed. “It has to be formalized because equipment is getting more complicated,” he says. “You need to have that ready, knowing that turnover will exist and subsequent hires will need help.” Training staff on proper equipment operation and maintenance shouldn’t be an onerous burden since manufacturers offer videos and apps. Manufacturers’ reps typically present first-day training on new equipment. A refresher training session a month or two later may also be offered.
To keep kitchen equipment functioning at its best, service agencies play a vital role in both maintenance and as-needed repairs. “Operators need to spend more and plan more for preventive maintenance,” Ozgul says.
Ventilation and water filtration are two notorious areas where maintenance is vital yet often postponed or neglected. Poor decisions in the design process can make ventilation maintenance harder. If the wrong size hood has been installed, “that exacerbates the harm of not cleaning frequently,” Ozgul says. Inadequate air circulation in the kitchen is another problem he sees frequently. “It’s very important to have the right level of oxygen so equipment will burn efficiently, especially if you have gas-fired equipment,” he says.
Changing water filters is not exactly a complicated task, but it’s vital to the taste profile of the food as well as proper functioning of equipment like combis and steam kettles. So some operators outsource it to their service agency just to make sure it gets done. “Installing most water filters means a twist down, a twist up, turn the water on and you’re done,” Ozgul says. “Nobody wants to pay a premium for a service agent to come in and twist on a water filter, but it’s absolutely important; over time, scale buildup will destroy equipment like combis and steamers. And filters that are shipped direct to the end user too often end up just sitting on a manager’s desk because nobody wants to do the job. Somebody can come up with a brilliant app, but there’s still got to be a person to take the filter out of the box, turn off the water, switch out the filter, write the date and turn the water back on.”
