Achieving greatness in kitchen design is definitely in the eye of the beholder. That’s because what represents greatness in a school foodservice operation will differ significantly from the way a steakhouse or even a corporate dining facility will measure it.

That said, there remains one universal way foodservice designers can tell if their work is great: operator and client feedback. “When a client is happy, that’s a successful project for us,” says Phillip Landgraf, FCSI, executive principal, Ricca Design Studios.

What makes a design great often does not pertain to one specific element. Rather, the greatness of a design often comes in the details. One such example would be solutions that prioritize ergonomics for employees and efficiency for the operation, says Eric Norman, FCSI, principal/vice president, Clevenger Associates. “If you have access to those non-public spaces, you can tell if something has been designed with the employee in mind.” In more public spaces, it’s not just what is pleasing to the eye, but a sense that it furthers the dining experience, he suggests. “Sometimes you can tell that a team connected well and worked together to accomplish solutions.”

Indeed, great design is way more than what you see on the surface. “Great design isn’t limited to what it looks like, but how the design functions, how an operator experiences it and how it improves their daily operations,” adds Kerri Fitzgerald, FCSI, principal, ColburnGuyette Foodservice. “My mentor always said that success is measured in smiles. Is the client happy at the end of the project? Will they call on you again for their next one?”

What does it take for foodservice design to go from good to great? How do you make customers smile? This trio of consultants share a few of their trade secrets. 

A state-of-the-art teaching kitchen was one of three separate and distinctive foodservice areas planned by Ricca Design Studios at Alabama’s Auburn University.

Deliver on the Client’s Vision

If great commercial kitchen design is incumbent on client satisfaction with the completed project, then designers and other partners need to be experts in communication and diplomacy. “Going from good to great means listening to the client’s needs, requests and their vision,” says Norman. “Some know exactly what they want, but others may not know as much about how the process works, and you need to be more patient and understanding.”

Landgraf has a similar perspective. “I design 50-plus projects a year, but for the client, they might do one or two projects in a lifetime,” he notes. “If they come into a project with a clear vision, they may not want to compromise or accept our feedback as a consultant.”

Such circumstances can mean walking a narrow balance beam with the seemingly effortless ease of legendary Olympic gymnast Simone Biles. “I don’t like being a ‘yes man,’” says Landgraf. “It’s about communicating that ‘I hear your vision but let me translate that back to you in the most effective way.’”

This is where the project team needs to stand behind their respective areas of expertise, with a healthy dose of tact. “We may need to educate them, noting, ‘That might not be the best path or the best option,’” says Norman. The key is to have alternative solutions ready when you have those difficult conversations. 

Fitzgerald points to her experience working on a self-operated, residential dining program for Boston College: The Brookline Dining at Messina College project was completed in 2024. The goal was to design a 200-seat facility that encouraged community togetherness among students in a new two-year associate’s degree program. The institution’s leadership was committed to exclusive use of electric power, including all-electric kitchen equipment. According to Fitzgerald, the dining services team had no experience with this kind of conversion.  “They were a bit skeptical about it, especially losing open-burner ranges,” she recounts. 

The situation was highly charged (excuse the pun). Hands-on education was at the heart of a multipronged approach to bring them around, says Fitzgerald. “We encouraged the dining services team to meet us at The NAFEM Show in 2023 and see for themselves the equipment we had in mind. Then, we arranged for follow-up training sessions so they could ‘kick the tires’ on the equipment. Once they were able to witness the wonder of induction and other electric cooking equipment, they became enthusiastic converts!”

Sometimes taking a design from good to great requires mediating a variety of perspectives and objectives. Case in point is Langraf’s involvement with the Tony & Libba Rane Culinary Science Center at Alabama’s Auburn University, which won the FE&S 2024 Facility Design Project of the Year award. The facility is home to three distinct foodservice areas: culinary classrooms, a boutique hotel and a food hall. “Three separate entities — education, hospitality and student life — had to work together,” he says. “That’s probably what we’re most proud of, working with a diverse team to share functions and share them effectively. People are always well-intentioned, but they can get protective about their respective areas.”

For example, the departments wanted three separate storage areas, which was out of the norm, Landgraf notes. Instead, “We worked to get everyone on board with a centralized purchasing and storage program, developing a system to manage it effectively across the three departments.”

Norman identifies one other area where good-to-great client satisfaction can be tricky: When the lifespan of a project means “We might start with one chef, but another chef takes over and hates the design.” When the work has been approved and is underway, this kind of pivot is often untenable. “In this situation, we might bring the chef and the higher-level decision-maker together, offer options and discuss possible compromises,” he says. “We do find ourselves as kind of a marriage counselor sometimes.”

Combine Functionality with Aesthetics

Many great designs represent the successful unions of functionality and visual impact. For Norman, a conversion project at the Diamond Jo Casino in Dubuque, Iowa, embodies such success.

The goal was to turn an area of the casino reserved for high-limit gambling into a bar/restaurant. “We couldn’t tear up the floor. We were landlocked and couldn’t expand the footprint. We had to get creative about running beer lines and mechanicals. And there was no room for a large keg cooler in the back of the house,” Norman recalls. 

The solution was to make the keg cooler a decorative element at the heart of the bar and similarly dress up the exposed pipes. Turning practical needs into an eye-catching showcase was right on brand for the casino setting, and Norman is proud they could produce an undeniable “wow” that is crucial to the client’s goals to drive revenue. The Filament Meetery + Eatery, completed back in 2017, is now marketed as “an electrifying yet casual place to meet up and eat up.” 

Another project in Dubuque had a completely different set of goals, but with function and finish working in tandem. Dubuque Senior High School opened in 1923 and had its most significant remodel in 2016. Norman was involved in moving the kitchen and cafeteria from the “dark, dingy and unappealing” basement to the main level of the school, albeit still located in an older part of the building, which contributed to some architectural constraints, such as working around structural columns. 

Good to great here meant “giving the kids a nice place to eat, while streamlining production and service efficiencies,” Norman explains. The result is a two-section servery that feeds into a bright dining space that encloses a former courtyard. Meanwhile, kitchen equipment, both for volume prep, as well as custom orders on the line, got a major upgrade focused on higher capacities and faster production.

Conversion of existing spaces often bring thorny infrastructure challenges. Clevenger Associates successfully married function with decoration to deliver an on-brand casino restaurant in Dubuque, Iowa.

Push Beyond the Comfort Zone

On her Boston College project, Fitzgerald not only had to help make the case for an all-electric kitchen she also had to persuade facilities management on the value in adopting a refrigeration rack system. 

“All of their refrigeration had been either self-contained or a one-to-one system — one condensing unit for each evaporator coil — meaning separate systems across all the walk-in boxes. This meant using components from multiple manufacturers, and component compatibility became an ongoing issue,” Fitzgerald recounts. “But the facilities team was not keen on implementing any significant changes to systems and technologies that they would be responsible for maintaining. After hours of meetings, presentations, education sessions and more meetings, the college agreed to try a refrigeration rack for the new residential dining hall project.” 

Fitzgerald called it “a Herculean effort” to make the change, “But it was the right solution for their ongoing issues.” Since its installation, the system has been deemed a success by both the dining and facilities teams. “Now, the entire system — rack, controls, compressors and coils — is provided by one manufacturer, making operation and troubleshooting much simpler for the facilities team,” says Fitzgerald, also noting that the refrigeration rack saves energy, which saves operational costs. It has now become the new standard for Boston College dining projects.

“In my opinion, great designs often solve problems simply, while taking great care in the details, even if some of those details seem mundane!” Fitzgerald says. “Did the design consider where the trash bins will live in the kitchen? Does it leave room next to the prep table to park a speed rack? Anyone can include an action station in the front of house, throw some beautiful finishes around that to make it look gorgeous, but it’s still only a good design if no one considered how to handle the soiled wares produced at that station.” Thoughtful details are essential for every foodservice design project.

Create a Collaborative Environment

Oftentimes the perfect off-the-shelf solution does not exist. In those instances, collaboration among multiple parties becomes necessary to achieve greatness. Deerfield Academy, an independent college-preparatory boarding school in Massachusetts, is wrapping up a renovation of its decades-old, 750-plus seat residential dining hall. While some meals are provided via a servery, the self-operated program also incorporates multiple family-style meal service occasions each week. “These meals are one of the defining aspects of Deerfield’s campus culture,” explains Fitzgerald. 

Conversion to back-of-house cook-chill food technology was at the heart of the remodel. Fitzgerald notes that it will provide labor efficiency, minimize hot holding times and reduce soiled wares processing, among other benefits, while allowing 750 guests to be served at the exact same time.  To take full advantage of the process for family-style service, “We developed a solution where the food could be served at the tables in the same exact vessel that it was cooked, chilled, stored and rethermed in,” says Fitzgerald. “That meant the vessels needed to look great on dining tables for guests while holding up to back-of-house use.” 

The project team worked with the dining services team, the cook-chill manufacturer and smallwares manufacturers: The process had a trickle-down impact across the foodservice operation. “It made a difference if we only had capacity for 70 vessels, when there were 75 tables to serve,” she explains. “Then, every extra speed rack meant that either an additional oven was required or longer hot holding times would be necessary, neither of which was ideal.” It meant every detail — from vessel sizes and materials to pan slide spacing to air flows — was scrutinized.

Sometimes achieving greatness might require designers to draw on their years of experience. For example, while working with a fine-dining restaurant, Norman teamed up with his father Ed to develop a prep solution that allowed the culinary team to break down fish and meat at the same station without disrupting the production flow. The solution: a prep table that allows for a quick, smooth transition between handling fish and meat and includes features appropriate to both types of butchery. “We went through the patent process and licensed it to a manufacturer, which now features it as a standard model option. But we still own it,” says Norman. “And we’ve used it on a lot of our projects.”

Take Advantage of Tech

“In the past 10 to 15 years, BIM [building information modeling] technology has dramatically improved the design and documentation process,” notes Fitzgerald. “We have used that technology not only to better convey our design to the construction team but to the client. Being able to virtually walk a client through a project in 3D during the design phase is an incredibly powerful tool.”

But AI is coming. Norman and Landgraf both report increased use of AI for presentations, browser searches and other general business applications, and all three consultants recognize it will soon have a significant impact on the heart of their work.

“We are using AI to generate inspiration renderings of spaces or to design equipment that doesn’t exist yet, but we have a concept for it,” says Fitzgerald. “I think AI will continue to grow as a design tool and support industry innovations.”

According to Landgraf, Ricca has a task force looking into how best to apply AI across two paths: as a knowledge-based “library” resource and in immersive, interactive applications like virtual reality.

Above all Else

For taking design from good to great, “You need to have the right people on the bus,” says Landgraf, who notes that Ricca’s hiring processes assess if candidates are the right fit for their culture. “That’s a nonnegotiable.”

An in-progress look at the installation of a refrigeration rack system at Boston College.And with customer satisfaction the single-most important factor in a great design, Landgraf and his colleagues put considerable time and attention into addressing negative feedback. “I want to hear it, acknowledge it and, depending on where we’re at, I want to fix it,” he says. To steep this into the culture at Ricca, he wants to resurrect a “Lessons Learned” exchange that, pre-COVID, happened at the conclusion of projects. He’s also seeking to use the chat option on Microsoft Teams for sharing things that can help everyone be forward-thinking.

When you love what you do, take pride in your work, respect the process and seek to innovate, great design is a natural consequence. “I am most inspired by interacting with enthusiastic clients,” says Fitzgerald. With the Deerfield project, for example, “I am gratified by the trust I’ve built with the client. This is a once-in-a-generation project for them, so they are amazingly passionate about it, which motivates me, as well. Whenever the client is engaged, then I am more energized and passionate. For me, being excited about a project leads to better innovation.” 

Today’s Equipment — Tomorrow’s Solutions

Great design relies on having the best solutions for any problem at your fingertips. Norman recalls a corporate project for a manufacturer that renovated a large production facility to include, among other things, a corporate cafeteria and satellite feeding stations on the factory floor. 

Because the project called for feeding more than a thousand people during their shifts, throughput was the biggest factor. “We had to resolve not only how to create the required volume of food but also how to serve it,” says Norman. “It meant creative design for counter setups and using modern equipment that had excellent holding capacity so food would not degrade over the time between prep and service.”

Norman is a big proponent of traveling to other parts of the country and around the world to see how various operations are meeting challenges and taking advantage of innovative equipment solutions. He notes that ventless cooking equipment continues to impact design. “It’s opened up so many spaces that were previously off-limits and has been a lifesaver for a lot of design projects,” he says. “There’s a lot of facility dead space that now can be used for foodservice.”

Norman is also excited by some of the tech advances he sees, citing oven equipment, in particular, that uses AI sensors to identify food items and cook it perfectly, bypassing any programming. “And it learns as it goes. It’s unbelievable. We’re going to see a lot of huge advances in equipment, particularly in terms of precision,” he says.