Cooking School Nights: Good Kitchen Design

When I started at FE&S, I had no idea so much thought, money and work went into building a kitchen. I thought if you’re a restaurant owner you just call up a store or something, buy a bunch of equipment, stick it in the kitchen, and get to cooking.

Imagine my surprise in finding out the E&S industry is a multi-billion-dollar one with many players all interacting with each other, and that building a kitchen means and is so much more.

Now that I’m in culinary school working in a commercial kitchen, I realize this firsthand. I realize, in particular, the importance of good kitchen design. 

A couple weeks ago I was a minute late getting to my French Bistro class and since it was only the second night, we didn’t have our “station partners” sorted out yet. Station partners are teams of about two people who often work together to create multiple dishes. Unfortunately, I got stuck at the station without the range.

Instead, my station consisted of a prep table with a shelf below it and if I wanted to cook something, I had to bring all my mise en place, including salt and pepper, and all the utensils I anticipated I needed with me to the stove about five or six feet away. If I needed something, I’d have to shove through the other students working, shouting “behind you!” to get back to my station and retrieve my things. 

That stunk.

Who knew what a difference five feet makes when you’re in the “mock weeds” as my instructor likes to call it. He does this by giving us a list of dishes to prepare and plate for him, all in a short span of time so we get a sense of what it’s like to work in a real restaurant. 

When you have to simmer a bouillabaisse and you’re working with four different seafood items that need to be cooked separately, that takes time. But having to run back and forth to prep or grab stuff from your station to the pot on the range, well, that takes a lot of extra time.

And when you frequently lose your tongs because surely someone grabs them when you’re away from the range, well, that takes more time. Then when I would leave my station to use the range and oven, I would often return to someone who had decidedly taken it over, once even using my knives. A big faux pas. Rookie. But still, was it really his fault?

It’s a small space, one of the smaller kitchens at Kendall College in Chicago (most are very large, spacious and well-organized), and perhaps that’s where the challenge in designing came into play. Essentially, it seems as if someone lined up some ranges and ovens along the adjacent, back two walls, and then stuck the prep tables in the middle somewhere. The result is chaos during the crunch time before plating our final plates for the chef. 

This is not to say Kendall is a bad school or has bad kitchen design everywhere. This just happens to be the nature of our class being perhaps a little too large for that particular kitchen. But such is life. 

Being in culinary school not only gives me the opportunities to eat delicious food and know how to make it, but it also allows me to understand the workings of kitchens in their real form, not just in the abstract way as I do when I write about them every day at work. 

I hope to share more of these experiences down the road, and hope you find them to be as enlightening as I find them. And please, feel free to share any thoughts and comments you have about working in commercial kitchens.