Kitchen Design Consultants and why as a Chef you need one.

"The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it." --Theodore Roosevelt

When this project was looked at initially I brought to our team an above average understanding of commercial food service equipment as well as a rudimentary knowledge of overall kitchen design. I soon realized this was not enough! In the beginning we had a world class “Interior Designer” in Thomas Shoos out of Hollywood, California who designed "TAO" in NYC as well as a list of award winning designed hotels & restaurants around the world. His FOH designs where “off the chart and eye popping” yet his concept of a working kitchen was quite small for what I needed. It was at this point I brought in what I considered the best "Man" for the job and in this case it was a woman named Jennifer Safran, project designer, JEM Consulting Group in Las Vegas, NV. Jennifer initiated a meeting between her team the interior design team & me to coordinate what needed to happen between the two to get this project not only to function correctly but to pass all the applicable codes as well. A smartly designed restaurant is very important to how people react to your restaurant and if they are uncomfortable or you convey the "wrong message" you, you’re design as well as restaurant could be out of business quickly! What makes this complicated however is that to a Chef the "heart" of a restaurant is the kitchen.

After much wrangling we managed to carve out a kitchen that I believe will work.What we needed to accomplish in the FOH and BOH was a merging of flow and function in the layout design and the use of recycled materials to create a creative, interactive, contemporary and invigorating environment. While we hope for the accolades from the FOH we still had to consider the approaches needed to incorporate solutions in the BOH necessary to stick with City Center's "Green Build” and maintain their LEED status.

City Center is making some pretty big efforts to tout itself as a model of sustainability. Green building practices like recycling construction waste, using Eco-friendly materials, boosting natural lighting, and incorporating an on site co-generation power plant are just a few of the ways that the project is earning its Eco-credentials. Materials from the imploded Boardwalk Hotel (cleared for the site of City Center) are being recycled into the project, crushed to be recycled into material going into the project, and bathroom fixtures are being shipped to other countries wrapped in the old drapes and carpeting from the original hotel to be used again.

From the start our Architect & Designers kept the focus on staying as green as possible from the products used in construction to even the actual equipment in my kitchen IE: using Manitowoc Ice machines instead of HOSHIZAKI because they use far less water and run much cleaner with less mold which means less hours committed with our dollars to cleaning & maintaining them

We are also using filtration instead of a "RO" or reverse osmosis system which dumps 5 gallons of water for every gallon used and being that we live in a desert that does not help anyone. These recommendations not only help save the environment they help lower our utility costs as well.

Commercial kitchens are one of the highest energy consumers in buildings—using approximately 250,000 Btu/sq.ft, approximately 2.5 times more energy per square foot than commercial buildings without kitchen. One of the things we looked for is an Energy Star rating on all our kitchen equipment as that helps show us we are going in the right direction.

What I did not know in the beginning was how detailed the kitchen drawing needed to be and how many times we would have to rethink a spot because of codes, menu changes and flow of the kitchen. The scope of our project took a turn when we added "The Cup" to the mix as it was a much smaller space requiring some unique placement of equipment to make it work.From the very start I had a key role in how my kitchen in "The World News Kaffee"was to be designed.

After asking for my input on the equipment I liked to work with & with the draft menu I gave them JEM showed us what we needed to get the job done ,within budget of course. Jennifer and her staff, mainly Jason Geckler, set to work designing a very efficient kitchen that can accomplish what I needed no matter which day part we are cooking. They met with our Architect, walked the plans through the health department for both locations and even helped when the city "Changed their mind" on some existing codes a month after being already submitted.

Overall our experience with a kitchen design team has been very positive and I would recommend it to anyone involved with a start-up as well as if you are redesigning a kitchen.