Kitchens Designed for Purpose

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You will need an efficiently laid out kitchen, which is equipped with the machinery you will need to enable you to produce all the items on your menu quickly.I have seen plenty of kitchens that are really badly laid out so that the chef has to walk backwards and forwards all the time whilst working and of course this means that it takes longer to get orders out so, you sell less food and take less money.

My suggestion is that you develop a clear idea of what you are going to have on you menu and then give a lot of thought to how the kitchen will need to be both equipped and laid out. You’ll need to take into account:

  • Where you want food fridges, freezers to be.
  • Where you want to store vegetables, dried pasta etc.
  • Location of bottle fridges if they are to be in the kitchen.
  • Location of sink and dishwasher, plus space for d/washer baskets.
  • Location of hob, grille, deep fryer, food warmers and oven.
  • Location of microwave oven.
  • Plate storage area.

Our business sells a lot of food, so we need all the stuff listed above in our kitchen, and the layout has been honed and improved over many years, until now we have a kitchen that is really easy to work in. However if you are not planning to offer a lot of food then you will be able to live without much of the above equipment and your kitchen design will become a much simpler job.

Try to find a bar which is kitchen-wise more or less as you want it, but if you can’t then be prepared to re-model to suit your needs. The money you invest will pay you back many times over.

The Layout of Your Spanish Bar

Bar layout is very important and you must end up with a design scheme that will work with the theme you have chosen for your bar.If you can find a bar that is laid out in a way that supports what you want to do, then obviously that will save you a lot of money in not having to close, lose trade and also pay people to refit your bar, before you can start taking money.

Here is just one example to help illustrate and I’m going to use our bar and restaurant as the example.

We are a food orientated bar/restaurant and we like to be able to run the place with just one member of staff at quiet times of the day so we need the kitchen to be located at the front of the premises for three reasons:

  • One person can cook and serve food and drinks easily if they have to. (If the kitchen were to be at the back because of the lack of visibility to the terrace area and the longer distance to walk backwards and forward it would need a minimum of two people at all times to function properly).
  • We like our customers to see how we prepare their food and with the kitchen at the front they can see everything easily.
  • The aromas coming from the kitchen entice passing people to stop at our bar.

So my tip today is simply to look closely at the layout of a bar and decide weather it will be suitable for the way you wish to run your business.

If you can see that you are going to have to make changes to the layout to achieve what you want, then you must calculate carefully the cost of lost trade due to your bar being closed together with the cost of refitting your bar to achieve the layout you want.

Layout of Grahams Pizzeria in Spain