Layout of a professional kitchen

For a long time, restaurant kitchens were seen merely as production spaces. However, they have evolved into true stages, bringing chefs closer to their guests with an unobstructed view of culinary preparations. As a significant investment, a professional kitchen requires careful consideration in its design to enhance both the working conditions for your staff and the overall experience for your customers.

What is a good layout for a professional kitchen?

Designing the kitchen of a restaurant is one of the initial steps when a professional plans to open their restaurant and starts consulting an architect for the overall restaurant work. Different kitchen designers will offer various kitchen layouts incorporating their equipment. It is always advisable to request multiple proposals and quotes from different companies to compare their offers.

For your kitchen to be functional, the layout must consider traffic flows to adhere to the “forward flow” principle. This means ensuring that clean products do not come into contact with contaminated ones. Typically, the location of your receiving area, storage, and cold rooms should be well separated from the location of your waste area to distinguish the circuits of functional zones. The progression of goods should follow a logical and rational sequence in space and sometimes in time when space is limited. This involves using a dirty circuit only when it is clean and no longer in use. The placement of the decontamination area is crucial to ensure product traceability by being positioned in a filter zone.

The goal of such a layout is to prevent any cross-contamination of food and to adhere to hygiene standards in the restaurant industry. A well-designed layout will also improve production efficiency with clear and functional circuits and reduce professional risks by minimizing movement and, consequently, the risk of accidents.

Our best practices

Often, kitchen designers, while experts in their equipment technology, may not have a deep understanding of your future culinary offerings. Therefore, we recommend involving your head chef in the selection of major equipment to ensure that it aligns with the needs outlined in the technical sheets.

Increasingly popular, open kitchens serve as a showcase to highlight the chef’s work and enhance the customer experience by giving them a privileged view of the action. While this can be a significant asset for an establishment, it is crucial to ensure that the kitchen staff maintains impeccable cleanliness and organization. Additionally, if the kitchen and dining area are not separated by glass, it is important to enforce silence within the kitchen brigade.

In some restaurants, particularly in fine dining, there is often a chef’s table located within the kitchen itself for guests of the chef. Special menus can be developed for these guests, and particular attentions from the service staff can underscore the exclusivity of this experience.

The support we offer you

To ensure that the food offering and the kitchen brigade’s organization align with the design of a professional kitchen, DUCASSE Conseil offers tailored support through a certified AutoCAD consultant chef. This certification provides expertise in computer-aided design and the ability to work with the kitchen plans provided by your architect and/or kitchen designer.

The consultant chef can review the kitchen designer’s plans before construction begins. Based on these plans, they will make recommendations regarding the workflow and layout of the kitchen. They will also assess the current list of equipment and materials to ensure that the food offering and equipment are aligned. We make sure to provide you with a final updated version once the recipes and menus are finalized to ensure overall project relevance.

For example, DUCASSE Conseil assisted the 5-star Daios Cove resort in designing its kitchen while developing a new culinary offering.

Have a project in mind?