Call Sales: +1 (833) 437-3835
Call Sales: +1 (833) 437-3835
Revel Systems | October 14, 2022 |
The layout of your kitchen can make or break your entire restaurant operation. Without careful layout planning, your kitchen staff may end up running around unnecessarily, delaying orders and leaving customers unsatisfied.
While it might seem like a trivial arrangement of kitchen equipment and cooking stations, a restaurant kitchen layout is actually quite challenging for chefs and restaurateurs. There's no one-size-fits-all solution, as your kitchen design depends on several factors. Let's start with those.
When people say the kitchen is the heart of a restaurant, it's only partly true. Because the truth is, the menu is the true heart and soul of any food operation. After all, your kitchen exists to bring it into reality.
Therefore, it only makes sense that your restaurant kitchen plan should follow your menu. What equipment you'll get, how large a space you’ll need, and even the kitchen staff you'll hire will depend on the food you intend to serve.
For instance, if you plan to serve pizza, you'll need to account for the space that a pizza oven will occupy. You'll also need ample space for staff to prepare the dough if you're making it in-house.
It's always a good idea to involve your head chef or culinary team when drafting your commercial kitchen plan. After all, they’ll be the ones using it.
Any commercial kitchen floor plan is composed of five key areas or stations. How they're laid out will spell success or failure for your operation.
These areas include:
The best kitchen layouts have a good flow. Restaurant kitchens with a good kitchen flow have staff and ingredients that move from one area to another effortlessly and logically. Flow is vital to promote clear communication and coordination in the kitchen, as well as preventing accidents.
To achieve flow in your restaurant kitchen floor plan, different stations and areas should be placed next to each other logically to support workflow. For instance, when making pizza, the ingredients must move from storage to prep to cooking and service in one direction and not cross over other stations.
Kitchens will undoubtedly form the bulk of your utility expenses, both in the form of electricity (for chillers and freezers) and gas (for stoves and ovens). However, you can help minimize this by optimizing the placement of your equipment.
For instance, you should place the fridge as far away from heat-generating appliances—like the stove—as possible. This helps them maintain their temperature with minimal energy expenditure.
Finally, your commercial kitchen design must comply with all local health and building codes. This helps you get licenses and permits much faster. You should consider aspects of your kitchen that go beyond food safety, such as fire safety and waste disposal.
The good news is that you don't need to reinvent the wheel when designing your commercial kitchen layout. You can base your layout on the proven methods used by other successful restaurants. Here are some examples of different types of kitchen layouts:
This is one of the most straightforward kitchen designs that will work well in most situations. In this setup, all stations involved with food, such as preparation and cooking, are located on an "island" in the middle of the kitchen, hence the name.
This is a classic restaurant kitchen layout that most hotels and fine dining restaurants use. As the name suggests, the kitchen is divided into zones that are dedicated to a particular activity. For instance, you can have pastry zones, salad zones, and meat zones. The main benefit of this kitchen design is that it allows your kitchen to produce a wide variety of menu items.
In a galley kitchen layout plan, all stations are arranged next to each other and placed on only one side of the kitchen. This helps maximize small spaces while promoting a good flow between stations. Food trucks, for example, often adopt a galley layout.
This restaurant kitchen floor plan mimics the assembly line in a factory. Here, stations are arranged in a single row that facilitates the assembly for a dish from preparation to serving. In contrast to the zoning layout, the assembly line layout is best for serving limited menus at high volumes, such as fast food establishments.
This commercial kitchen plan emphasizes the flow and comfort of your staff more than anything else. As such, stations are placed intelligently next to each other to minimize staff movement. All equipment and ingredients are also within easy reach from all stations. The downside to an ergonomic layout is that it often requires a much bigger kitchen space.
This restaurant kitchen floor plan isn't much of a setup as it is a change in perspective. An open kitchen design simply means that there's no wall separating the kitchen and dining areas so that diners can see the kitchen in action. Any kitchen layout can be turned into an open kitchen.
Open restaurant kitchens are great for providing another layer of experience to diners. Chefs can interact freely with customers as well.
The main challenge of most restaurants is making the most of limited kitchen spaces. Unfortunately, bigger kitchens can be costly in terms of rent. What's more, it might be more financially viable to allot more space to the dining area, so you can accommodate a larger capacity of diners.
The key to making small kitchen designs work is good flow. With the limited space available, the movement of staff and dishes within the kitchen must be highly efficient and carefully designed. Fire safety, comfort, and communication must also be considered.
Fortunately, some kitchen layout examples are geared more towards smaller spaces. We'll discuss some of these below.
The galley layout is one of the best kitchen designs for a kitchen with tight spaces. The layout is more straightforward as everything is placed in a row against one wall of the kitchen, which makes the most sense with limited space.
The line configuration promotes a good flow of ingredients from one station to the other. There's also less need for staff to walk around to get their job done.
The next best kitchen layout plan for smaller spaces is an open kitchen. Without any walls, you can maximize the space of your kitchen AND your dining room. For example, one side of your kitchen can also function as a dining table. An open layout is also much more comfortable for your kitchen staff because they won't feel cramped.
The assembly small commercial kitchen layout is a versatile setup that can work with limited spaces as well. You can see this in action with smaller fast food restaurants, like Subway, where the front counter functions both as the food prep area and the checkout.
This type of kitchen layout is the perfect setup for the demands of a catering operation. Zoning promotes specialization, so that kitchen staff are only working on specific dishes or tasks. Different areas can also be reconfigured to accommodate various dishes or cooking methods, expanding the versatility of the catering kitchen.
The ergonomic restaurant kitchen layout helps make kitchen staff more comfortable, which is essential when dealing with catering operations' grueling hours and labor. The wider spaces and good flow also minimizes staff movement, saving time and effort to get a job done.
No matter how efficient your restaurant kitchen layout is, it's useless if it can't deliver dishes to diners on time. That's why a good restaurant POS platform like Revel is vital.
With it, your front-of-house and kitchen staff will always be on top of customer orders, ensuring a proper flow from kitchen to table. Contact us today to learn more about our cloud-native POS platform.
Client Login