The kitchen is the key element of every restaurant or food business as it is a command center. Moreover, the kitchen’s energy affects everything in the restaurant, including the food served, the behavior of the staff, and activities in the restaurant.
So, if you are running a restaurant, or going to start one, make sure you make your kitchen most effective and efficient no matter how big or small your restaurant is.
Optimize Your Restaurant’s Kitchen Layout for Space and Efficiency
However, if you have a small restaurant kitchen and are facing issues fitting all your kitchen equipment and operating the kitchen smoothly. Then, you need not worry, here are a few tips to optimize space in a restaurant kitchen and make your kitchen efficient.
Moreover, optimizing kitchen space is the best way you can make the most of it if you have a small restaurant kitchen. However, it’s challenging to design a restaurant kitchen with a small space, but here are a few things you can do to make your kitchen space productive and organized.
Tips To Optimize Space In Restaurant Kitchen
A restaurant kitchen is the heart of every restaurant which offers efficiency, productivity, and profitability to the business. Moreover, it’s essential to design and optimize the space and make the best of your small restaurant kitchen. A well-designed and optimized kitchen not only improves cooking space but also reduces food wastage, and unnecessary costs and enhances the restaurant’s profit.
In addition, by reorganizing and restructuring the kitchen setup, it’s possible to get more counter space and improve the cooking station. Thus, here are some tips to optimize space in a restaurant kitchen and enhance its productivity.
1. Redesign Your Kitchen Layout
The kitchen layout is a blueprint that serves as the backbone of all the operations that are going to occur in the restaurant kitchen. And, redesigning the kitchen layout may be a game changer for the restaurant business. In addition, optimizing the kitchen layout is important as it creates space streamlining the workflow smoothly.
However, designing a kitchen layout doesn’t mean organizing things in any manner. It means to strategize and have an effective mapping of kitchen flow. There is no right or wrong method of kitchen layout design, but there are a few layouts that can create a functional impact on your small commercial kitchen.
- Assembly Line Layout Design
This design layout suggests moving the non-cooking zone including cleaning and storage to the other side or away from the cooking area. And, keep order receiving or serving counter side to the cooking counter. Thus, keeping the kitchen in one line may improve the efficiency of workflow.
- Island-Style Kitchen Layout Design
This kitchen layout design is best for commercial restaurant kitchens. The layout includes placing all the essential equipment and machinery on one end of the kitchen, and food cooking counters on the other end. Thus, it helps to create space for staff to move freely and not collide with each other spilling food during rush hours.
2. Using Vertical Storage In The Kitchen
Storage consumes a lot of space in your commercial kitchen making other operations slow. Moreover, rearranging and organizing storage in a planned way can be very helpful if you want to create some space in your restaurant kitchen. And one of the effective ways to organize your storage is by using Vertical storage.
In addition, vertical storage includes moveable shelves, racks, and wall-mounted storage shelves enabling the creation of a neat storage layout area and a smooth workflow. In addition, there are ways to use a vertical storage layout in your kitchen to save space:-
- Wall-mounted kitchen racks above cooking counters help in using storage space as well as are easily accessible to staff while cooking.
- Choose rolling shelves making them mobile and can be adjusted wherever there is space.
- Arrange the kitchen equipment and items on a daily usage basis.
However, the goal of rearranging things should not be just to create space, but also to make things accessible easily for smooth kitchen operations and thus, enhance productivity.
3. Choose Necessary And Smaller Equipment
Kitchen equipment is necessary as it makes cooking easy and efficient. However, there are multiple kitchen equipment that are used in commercial kitchens, but if you want to create space in a small kitchen, you need to rule out some equipment and upgrade with compact size equipment.
In addition, it’s advantageous for your small kitchen to bring multifunctional kitchen equipment rather than keeping different equipment for different work. Thus, focusing on minute details and investing in the right kitchen equipment can help you create space in your commercial kitchen enhancing the efficient workflow and better productivity.
4. Arrange Your Storage Space Systematically
Storage space such as dry food storage or cold food storage takes a huge part of your commercial kitchen making it difficult to carry out other necessary kitchen duties.
However, it’s important to make your storage space more organized so that things can be easily accessible, reducing the time wastage in getting things and thus, enhancing productivity. In addition, there are the following ways you can arrange your storage space:-
- Cold Storage
Separate and categorize the items or ingredients that you need daily and store them in a deep freezer or commercial refrigerator such that it is visible and easy to find. In addition, keep different types of food items on different racks and label them with their name.
- Dry Storage
Make a pantry storage area where you can organize kitchen items on shelves in an organized way. Arrange the items to keep larger items and supplies on bottom racks and label every item. In addition, investing in moveable shelves or wall-mounted racks also saves a lot of space.
5. Maximize Your Kitchen Cooking Counter Space
No matter whether your cooking counter is small or big, you can still make the most of it by following a few things:-
- Invest in a cooking table that comes with built-in shelves to store ingredients or containers used in cooking.
- Install tables with a refrigerator or dishwasher beneath that could save much of your space.
- Use wall-mounted holders to hang utensils.
Conclusion
No matter how big or small your restaurant kitchen is, it’s very necessary to arrange to create ample space.
Moreover, optimizing kitchen space makes your kitchen more efficient and productive, thus, generating more revenue. Kitchen space is not only important for better cooking but also keeps the kitchen look clean and maintains a positive environment for kitchen staff.
However, there is always confusion on how to arrange the commercial kitchen to make the most of it, so, here are a few tips to optimize space in your restaurant kitchen that will help you to maximize the space in your small kitchen and make it a more accessible and effective kitchen.
