Operations: Space Savers--Large Kitchen Equipment

Operators get creative with kitchen equipment that handles big tasks without unduly sacrificing square footage.

By Allison Perlik, Senior Editor -- Restaurants & Institutions, 6/1/2007

A meat slicer at Rooster’s Wood-Fired Kitchen handles big jobs in small footprints.

When a significant percentage of operating costs goes to rent and success is calculated by sales per seat, squeezing the highest possible profits and production out of every square foot is essential. Large-scale tools such as deck ovens and walk-in refrigerators sometimes claim a big share of back-of-the-house real estate, but fortunately, operators can round out inventory with equipment that tackles important jobs in smaller footprints.

"Rent costs a fortune, so if you can reduce the size of the kitchen and have more seating, that’s great," says Steve Greenberg, owner of Steve’s Wood Fired Pizza in Boca Raton, Fla.

To turn out 400 to 500 pizzas per day at his upscale pizzeria, Greenberg relies on a compact device found more often in the kitchens of high-volume operations: a dough rounder that molds house-made pizza dough into the smooth, portioned balls necessary for shaping uniform crusts. The machine measures 2½-feet across, 2½-feet wide and 3½-feet tall. Plus, it has wheels, so employees can move it around as needed.

Greenberg purchased the dough rounder (which can turn out 5,000 dough balls per hour compared with 50 that can be made by hand in the same amount of time) so his small staff could work more efficiently. Soon, when Steve’s Wood Fired Pizza begins franchising, he’ll shift the machine to a central commissary where it can be used to its full potential.

Good Things, Small Packages

When the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs introduced toasted sandwiches at food-court brand Sub Connection, students complained of lengthy wait times and long lines. Janette Freyre, retail operations manager at the Gaithersburg, Md.-based Sodexho account, swapped the concept’s conveyor oven for a combination microwave-convection oven that takes up half the counter space and cooks sandwiches in less than half the time.

Not only did sales rise 18%, but Sub Connection also gained space needed for storing ingredients, preparing food and conducting food-temperature checks.

"Space is a huge concern," Freyre says. "We roll out different promotions every month, and sometimes we need room to bring in new products. Now one of our team members doesn’t need to be in back prepping food, if lines get long, they can step in."

At Rooster’s Wood-Fired Kitchen in Charlotte, N.C., Chef-owner Jim Noble treasures his manual meat slicer because it takes up 15% less space than a standard electric version and does an excellent job on cured meats.

"It cuts prosciutto so thin it almost melts in your mouth," he says.

The manual slicer’s blades turn far fewer times than those on electric machines, meaning that less potentially product-affecting heat is produced. The vintage-style slicer’s attractive design also makes the device somewhat of a showpiece in the restaurant’s open kitchen, Noble says.

Large and in Charge

Saving space often is a priority, but sometimes bigger is better. Large-scale wood-burning ovens—featured everywhere from Nancy Silverton and Mario Batali’s Mozza in Los Angeles to the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash.—are very much in vogue but Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba! (r.) in Chicago just might have the mother of them all. Gobbling up 100 square feet of floor space and supplying nearly 20 square feet of cooking area, a wood-burning oven custom-built from imported Spanish stone and brick has been a kitchen centerpiece at the bustling tapas spot for 22 years.

The massive oven is a boon to Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba!’s high-volume production—on busy nights, the kitchen receives as many as 280 orders for baked goat cheese—as it finishes such popular dishes as crab-and-shrimp gratin, short ribs and baked cheese far more efficiently than broilers would. Inside, where the temperature reaches 572F, food cooks in sturdy clay pots called cazuelas on a 5-foot circular stone that employees rotate by means of an exterior lever.

Executive Chef Timothy Cottini, who joined the restaurant recently after logging time in notable Chicago establishments such as NoMI, North Pond and Ambria, remains in awe of the oven’s abilities. “I’ve never encountered anything like it,” he says.