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Designing a Startup Kitchen that Works With - Not Against - You

If your startup's rent factor and cost of labor are not keeping you awake at night, consider yourself lucky. Rising minimum wages, stiffer competition for good employees, and the expense of operating a restaurant at a premium location all chip away at your gross margin.

That's why the smart money in this business maximizes space and labor wherever possible, particularly in the kitchen. Tactics for executing this strategy include designing effective kitchens with smaller footprints and maximizing labor via carefully planned kitchen layout and equipment purchases.

First Focus on the Menu

There are a few axioms in the restaurant business; however, among them is your menu drives your kitchen design, equipment and layout.

Strategies for kitchen efficiency start with focusing on your desired menu and embracing your space limitations.

"The first thing the startup operator must understand and develop is the menu," says Rangel Rivera, vice-president of design, at commercial kitchen planning and design firm LGM Design Group. "If you're doing Italian, maybe you have more burners. If you're doing Mexican, you may have more griddles and char-broilers."

That said, a common trap for the unwary operator is trying to create a menu that hopes to be all things to everyone. Not only do you require an inventory that is impossible to manage, but you need a lot of equipment and stations - and people - to executive the menu, says Stephani Robson, senior lecturer in the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University.

At the risk of understatement, Robson says starting with an overly wide-ranging menu "can be a mistake."

"People chase trends, instead of deciding what they want the restaurant to be and why," she says. "Anybody who is good in a kitchen can produce anything in the space they have, but you want to be able to do it consistently, safely, and in a way that your employees aren't going to hate you."

Robson adds, "The biggest problem I see is that restaurateurs don't take a step back and decide what they want this kitchen to be able to do. There's no such thing as a kitchen that can do everything. First, decide what you want the kitchen to do, then narrow that down to the things that are the most flexible, so that as your menu, food costs, and labor change, you're able to execute."