The kitchen is considered one of the most significant investments when starting a restaurant. To find the most cost-efficient solution, a restaurant owner should focus on careful initial planning by making accurate projections about the menu items, the required staff, the maximum expected workflow, and most importantly, the restaurant kitchen design, as kitchen is the heart of any restaurant.

This article specifically highlights various designs for restaurant kitchen, importance of a perfect restaurant kitchen, and factors, which affect the selection of ideal kitchen design.

Importance of Ideal Restaurant Kitchen Design

1. Time and cost efficiencies are two essentials, as they facilitate ways for a restaurant to become profitable.
2. A perfect restaurant kitchen will determine how much you can produce and how efficiently you can do that.
3. An ideal kitchen design will help keep your restaurant in manageable order and will maintain cleanliness.
4. The right design will also reflect in the per captia productivity in your restaurant.
5. Health and safety & protection of life and property are integral parts of design. For instance, an ideal kitchen design will always acknowledge the fact that not all water sources serve potable water, and thus will clearly display water not suitable for drinking sign on such water sources.

Factors Affecting Your Choice

1. Type of Restaurant: Your search for an ideal kitchen design depends upon whether you want to open fast food, casual dining, family style, fine dining restaurant, or else.
2. Type of Customer: Whether your customer is going to drive in and collect or dine in, will have direct impact on the type.
3. Possibility of Expansion: Whether you are anticipating expansion of your business in the future will also help modify your choice.
4. Floor Space: How much of space you have with yourself for designing the kitchen.
5. Energy Efficiency: Whether you intend to use solar panels for cooking or utilize natural light for lighting in your cafe or restaurant, engery efficiency is directly going to influence your decision.
6. Ventilation: Surely you would never like your chef and cooking staff to work dark and closed in space. How do you plan ventilation in your restaurant kitchen is a major factor that you would consider.
7. Maintenance: Obviously you would love to have a kitchen design, which could save you extra bucks on regular maintenance. Like installing custom commercial sinks made of materials that are less likely to chip or break from repeated use.
8. Disaster Management: Last but not the least, an ideal restaurant kitchen idea will always have preventive and disaster management system factored in.

5 Cherry-Picked Restaurant Kitchen Design Ideas

Based on the parameters mentioned above, here are chosen restaurant kitchen layout design ideas for you.

Assembly-Line Layout

• Food item assembly is designed to flow along with a single cooking line, especially for restaurants that do not have many items on their menu. This layout works effectively in the restaurant that renders a faster service, like sandwich shops and pizzerias.
• In this layout, kitchen equipment is organized in line with the food preparation area at one end and the service area at the other, allowing cooks to send food down the line quickly.
• The cleaning/washing and storage/receiving areas can be located behind the assembly line to keep them out of the way.
• This layout creates supreme efficiency and keeps the kitchen open for excellent communication and flow. Often, kitchen equipment can be linked together, further eliminating wasted space.

Zone-Style Restaurant Kitchen

• In this layout, workstations are framed in different zones.
• Zones are specified for food washing, cutting, and saute stations.
• Food preparation zones are separated into tables or areas that are most effective.
• The zone-style layout has the sections follow the proper order for increased flow, giving you a dishwashing block, a storage block, a food prep block, etc.
• Communication and supervision are not difficult in this layout because the center of the space is completely open.

Island Style Kitchen Layout

• There is one main block or workspace in the middle in this arrangement.
• The central kitchen block is used only for cooking.
• Mostly, food prepping is done on tables lining the kitchen’s outer wall or with cooking on the exterior walls and prep in the middle.
• Design goals or space filled with kitchen equipment can hold the elegance of an island-style layout.
• Different kitchen equipment can also affect the arrangement, whether it is easier to have prep space in the middle and ranges, refrigerators, ovens, and more along the outer wall of the area.
• This layout works best in a large square shape kitchen but can certainly be modified to fit other shapes and sizes.

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Open Kitchen Design

• Open Restaurant Kitchen has a glass partition and a service station facing the dining area.
• This layout is very open and promotes communication and supervision while leaving plenty of open floor space for easy cleaning.
• One of the design goals of an open kitchen should be to achieve efficient workflow between the front and back of the house.
• The restaurant kitchen in this layout captures or holds one’s attention. Diners spend their quality time watching a chef prepare meals with excitement from anywhere they want to sit.
• In this layout, you have to be cautious, as your Kitchen is supposed to be engaged in creating noise and activity that might be unpleasant for some diners. Remember, dinners would like to enjoy the chef’s skill but do not want to hear the echo of pots and pans banging around. The cook staff should be aware not to be so loud.
• An open kitchen concept can provide advantages to a service station that lies behind a wall. It became easy for a server to see the dining area better from the back of the house and easily spot meals when they were ready.
• In an open kitchen, staff must be trained to practice good hygiene and good behavior. Any neglection on their part can directly display for guests to see.
• There are many ways to layout cooking stations, but the most preferable is perpendicular to dining tables. This enables the cooks to stand and not block the guest’s view.

Ergonomic Kitchen Design

• This layout has been designed to minimize the movement of staff in the kitchen to save time, reduce accidents, and reduce food spills possibilities.
• It is made-to-order to limit the chef’s actions when preparing food. For example, put a refrigerator next to a fryer or prep space to facilitate the fastest possible preparation from a centralized location.

Hope you found the article helpful, and finally found what exactly you looked for.

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