Small wonders
Originally published in Restaurant magazine (see PDF)
In Soho’s Kingly Court development, Bea Vo’s size zero kitchen serves plus-sized portions to Londoners hungry for authentic US comfort food. The 100sq ft space only has room for three chefs but can knock out up to 400 plates on a busy night.
A large kitchen wasn’t an option for the US-born Vo. Eat-in restaurants don’t get much smaller than Stax Diner – the space is around 780sq ft in total – so compromises had to be made back of house to make the business viable.
“Having a kitchen that’s small allows us to have more seats, which obviously means more revenue,” says Vo. “We’ve had to make some sacrifices for our 36 covers, though. We don’t even have room for a dishwasher so all the plates have to be washed by hand.”
Stax (see panel on right) is admittedly an extreme example, but many restaurateurs are now opting to reduce the size of their kitchens in order to squeeze in more covers in the dining room.
Occupation costs in London and other major UK cities are skyrocketing as the restaurant sector enjoys an unprecedented growth spurt. Space is more precious than ever and it’s getting harder and harder to net a decent return on capital with a restaurant that sticks to the traditional 30% back of house to 70% front of house formula.
The sudden expansion of the restaurant industry has also made it tougher to acquire bricks and mortar. This is causing smaller operators, without vast reserves of capital, to take less obvious sites and turn them into restaurants, which often results in small, awkwardly shaped back-of-house areas (the dry store at Stax had to be placed in a metal cage on the restaurant floor, for example).
“Operators are certainly more willing to take smaller or more awkwardly arranged spaces for their restaurants, which has resulted in some interesting projects for us,” says Gareth Sefton, director of kitchen design company SeftonHornWinch. “We have to be clever in the way that we utilise their space and their labour in order to help them achieve what they need to.”
Storage is usually the biggest headache for those designing (and indeed working within) small kitchens. “Many don’t have the space to store more than a day’s worth of ingredients so bulkier items need to be delivered daily, which is often more expensive,” says Sefton.
Clever utilisation of storage space is essential to the running of Stax. Shelving runs right up to the ceiling on every wall, holding everything from consumables to kitchen kit. “The only problem is I’m not very tall so I’m constantly asking my staff to get items down for me, but this kitchen would be impossible to work in without it,” says Vo.
When designing a smaller kitchen, choosing the right kit is essential. Sefton recommends equipment that can perform multiple functions such as combi-ovens, which can roast, steam, slow-cook and grill food. He also recommends thinking carefully about which items need ventilation and where to put them because ducting is particularly difficult in smaller spaces.
Handily, the need for operators to work with smaller kitchens intersects with a trend for tightly written menus and concepts that serve only one type of dish. Last month saw the opening of Balls & Company (also in Soho), specialist meatball restaurant. Its savoury menu is comprised of five varieties of meatballs, four sauces and a handful of sides. Unsurprisingly, the kitchen is the size of a broom cupboard.
Small can be beautiful, it seems, with chefs quick to point out the benefits of working within a diminutive kitchen. José Pizarro now operates three London restaurants, all of which have unusually small galley-style kitchens (his Bermondsey tapas bar José is particularly tiny, see panel above).
He believes that, when run correctly, small kitchens can be more productive than their larger counterparts. “If you’re smart and use every bit of space efficiently, small kitchens can be better and quicker,” he says. “At some point you can get lost with the orders working in a big kitchen.” Small kitchens also limit how much walking chefs have to do. Working in a small space with everything you need at your fingertips is inherently more efficient than working within a large kitchen.
Obsessive organisation is essential.
José
Head chef: José Pizarro
Size of kitchen: 60sq ft
Number of plates served: Up to 200
Maximum staff capacity: Three
Lifesaving kit: The plancha, a flat grill that’s popular in Spain. It’s multipurpose and largely eliminates the need for pans, which saves on both space and washing up
Principle headache: Being disorganised isn’t an option and José is only able to have 14 items on the menu at any one time
José Pizarro claims that the open kitchen at José is one of the most organised in the world. Serving in excess of 1,400 people per week with just three different pieces of primary cooking kit (a plancha, two induction hobs and a fryer), the Bermondsey-based kitchen is just under 60sq ft – only a little larger than a standard disabled loo.
The bustling tapas bars near Barcelona’s famed La Boquería market inspired Pizarro’s inaugural restaurant, and one of the most important aspects it borrows from these iconic establishments is counter seating around the kitchen.
The kitchens at his other restaurants – the nearby Pizarro and José Pizarro, which recently opened in the City – are a little bigger than José but much smaller than most busy London restaurants. They too are open, utilising counter seating and long galley kitchens.
“It’s an extremely efficient use of the space. And people love to sit at the counters. It’s always nicer and more sociable,” says Pizarro. “I don’t see myself having a restaurant without a counter and open kitchen.”
All sites offer small menus prepared on a handful of cooking appliances.
Stax
Diner Head chef: Bea Vo
Size of kitchen: 100sq ft
Number of plates served on a busy night: Up to 400
Maximum number of chefs in the kitchen: Three
Lifesaving kit: The kitchen has two modes – prep and service. As such, portable induction stoves and other bits of kit that can be moved easily are essential
Principle headache: Stax is open seven days a week, which puts a huge amount of pressure on those doing the prep because once service starts there is no room to prepare anything
“The typical formula for back of house space relative to dining space is 30% to 70%. At Stax, it’s more like 15% to 85%,” says Bea Vo, the US-born restaurateur behind Stax Diner. “The maximum capacity of our kitchen is three chefs, any more than that and no one can move.”
The units at Kingly Court were originally designed for small retail shops but owner Shaftesbury switched the focus of the Soho-based development to food in 2013. Stax Diner is diminutive in the extreme, just 780sq ft in total with a tiny 100sq ft semi-open kitchen (which includes the wash-up area) and a caged storage area right in the middle of the dining area which seats 36.
On a busy night, tables are turned as many as five times and all the washing up is done by hand because a dishwasher would have taken up too much space.
The tininess of the kitchen has also greatly limited the menu choices. The offering at Stax is very tight – burgers, fried chicken and a handful of sides plus a couple of desserts. Vo says that there are lots of dishes she’d like to put on the menu – including slow-cooked dishes such as chilli con carne – but there isn’t room on the stove.
“We’ve also had to take the blooming onion dish off the menu because it took up too much of our frying capacity,” she says. “We’re looking forward to reinstating it at our next site, which is thankfully going to be a bit bigger.”
Bocca di Lupo
Chef: Jacob Kenedy
Size of kitchen: 200sq ft
Number of plates served: Up to 1,200
Maximum number of chefs in the kitchen: Four
Lifesaving kit: A powerful pasta boiler and a grill enable ingredients to be cooked very quickly Principle headache: The restaurant’s 40-item menu changes twice daily, requiring precise time management when planning the rota
Bocca di Lupo’s open-service kitchen serves upwards of 1,200 dishes in a single service, a level of output that would be impressive in a kitchen twice the size. Chef-patron Jacob Kenedy says his decision to install a small service kitchen in the upstairs dining room and a basement prep kitchen was partly driven by the configuration of the building – it’s by no means a large restaurant so preparing and serving all the food from the basement kitchen would have been challenging – but mostly because he wanted to be able to see and interact with his customers.
The Soho restaurant’s menu is divided into small and large plates, with guests typically ordering six dishes each. The service kitchen is split into two sections, one for pasta and risotto, and another for grilled and roasted dishes. Each is manned by just two chefs on busy nights but the simplicity of the dishes and the team’s minimalist plating style means Kenedy and crew can cook for as many as 250 people.
“There’s usually just one thing on a plate,” says Kenedy. “The cooking here is simple. We use great ingredients so there’s no need to embellish or compose our dishes so the plating here is very quick.”
With only four chefs working service, the 400sq ft basement kitchen is crucial for prep. Kenedy is continually tweaking his rota and set-up to maximise his small team’s output.