A Kitchen Without Borders
By Derek Gale, Senior Associate Editor -- Hotels, 11/1/2007
Usually when a kitchen designer is enrolled to plan the cooking facilities for a three-star Michelin chef, the designer can count on spending some quality time getting to know the chef and his or her cooking philosophies. But Michael Egan had no such luck with the highly anticipated 7,500-sq. ft. (697-sq. m) Guy Martin restaurant in the Regent Boston Hotel at Battery Wharf.“We had to design the kitchen without having a chef,” explains Egan, vice president at White Plains, New York-based Clevenger, Frable, LaVallee Inc. “I only met Guy once, for an hour and a half. This is not your typical ‘designer works with chef’ story.”
Indeed it is not. Martin is a partner in the yet-to-be-named restaurant, and will oversee the dinner-only menu focusing on “cuisine sans frontiere,” but it is unlikely he’ll spend much time cooking there. Instead, he plans to appoint one of his disciples from Paris to lead the kitchen at the new restaurant, and travel back-and-forth as is necessary.
Because of the lack of face time with Martin, Egan said his team’s design needed to provide a preparation and cooking space to which any highly talented and experienced chef could easily adapt. Making this more difficult, however, were space constraints particular to the property based on city ordinances and state regulations.
“The vertical clearance between each floor was restricted,” Egan explains, “making the foodservice design challenging as it related to cooking exhaust ventilation and lighting. We prepared many design options to maximize the use of very limited space to make sure we achieved maximum efficiency.”
Egan’s past experiences designing display kitchens led him to consider that as an option for the project, despite the fact that having such a kitchen was not a high priority for the owner. “A display kitchen eliminates the need for circulation space normally needed for servers to enter the kitchen and pick up menu orders,” he explains. “Display kitchens cross-utilize open space in the dining room.”
Of course, Egan also touts the added benefits of animation and aroma that come from an open kitchen. “[It] conveys the message that food is always fresh, prepared to order.” At the same time, he recognizes what an open kitchen means to the cooks: “Display kitchens do require a high level of cleanliness, being exposed to patrons, so the staff will need to adapt a ‘clean-as-you-go’ mentality.”
Connected to the restaurant’s kitchen will be a highly visible bar area, designed with custom, stainless steel, stone-topped under-bar equipment for both visibility and durability. “It was important to make the under-bar appear less commercial and more like pieces of furniture, which is more commonly found in European restaurants,” Egan notes.
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