By Sara Perez Webber
No matter the size, the kitchen is the heart of every catering business and restaurant. Each has its own personality and flow. To get a sense of how various caterers make their spaces work, we asked a handful across the country: What do you love most about your kitchen?
Hill’s Kitchen
The kitchen
In March, three years after opening the award-winning Hearth and Hill restaurant in Park City, Utah, Brooks Kirchheimer debuted Hill’s Kitchen. Just steps from the restaurant, Hill’s Kitchen features a catering kitchen capable of executing events for up to 500 people and a 25-seat daytime café. “The one thing that catches everyone’s eye is the 100% open view into our kitchen area,” says Kirchheimer. “The pastry display up front is also great. Guests get a clear view of all of our homemade pastries and of the team working on them right behind the case.”
With a growing output of 500-plus pastries, about 100 smoothies, and hundreds of salads and sandwiches weekly, the kitchen features “amazing equipment,” says Kirchheimer, including a floor mixer, dough sheeter, batch freezer, smoker, Rational oven and more. Raw food, prepared food and frozen items are kept separate in three walk-ins. Efficiency is heightened by the kitchen’s separate sections, with the pastry and savory teams each working in their own areas. As a result, “our team is not having to run around a lot, and this also helps to keep our team from bumping into each other,” says Kirchheimer.
What do you love most about your kitchen?
“I love the flexibility and space that it now provides our team, and the ability it gives them to be as creative as they can be. They have all the tools they want and need to make just about anything they would ever want to make. The smiles on our culinary team’s faces make me happy every day!”
—Brooks Kirchheimer, co-founder of Hill’s Kitchen parent company Leave Room For Dessert Eateries
Minkle Boys Catering
The kitchen
Six years after founding his catering company, Dan Minkle was able to do something many chefs dream about—design his own kitchen. Minkle Boys Catering moved into the new kitchen in November 2021, sharing space with Stone Path Malt, a malt company and taproom in Wareham, Massachusetts. “The dream was to have a kitchen to call my own, but I set it up to do catering and a la carte service,” says Minkle, a Johnson & Wales grad who’s worked in kitchens since he was 13.
Minkle caters on- and off-site events from the kitchen; his most popular catering menu items are meatballs, pulled pork, risotto balls and chicken wings. For Stone Path Malt customers, he also serves an a la carte menu on Fridays and Saturdays. A favorite is the Stone Path Malt Grilled Cheese, with sharp cheddar, Munster, bacon and caramelized onions. Minkle appreciates the size and space of the new kitchen—especially the nearby storage. Another key benefit is a loading dock door leading directly into the kitchen for deliveries.
What do you love most about your kitchen?
“The fact that it’s MY kitchen, and the folks that helped me to make it happen and offered the space.”
—Dan Minkle, chef and owner of Minkle Boys Catering
Bold Catering & Design
The kitchen
Based in the King Plow Arts Center, built in 1903, the kitchen for Atlanta-based Bold Catering faces challenges common to historic buildings. The ability to customize the space is limited and there’s no loading dock, for example. “It could be described as a ‘cavernous maze,’ with many small rooms, tight corners and hallways that do make simple tasks more challenging than they would otherwise be,” notes Executive Chef Robert Mitchell.
Yet the Bold team makes it work, having catered more than 900 events annually and executing a record 425 weddings in 2021. Bold’s tasting room, sales office and events space, the Frances King Shaw Gallery, are also in the historic building, and two commercial lifts move equipment from the basement-level kitchen to the main level events space and loading area. Mitchell describes it as “an elevator with no doors.” As for the chef’s favorite piece of equipment in the Bold kitchen? “Definitely the Southern Pride Smoker—it can hold 500 pounds of brisket and pork butt!”
What do you love most about your kitchen?
“What I really love most about our building, besides the history and uniqueness of it (and how much space we have), is the people in it. We have several employees who started with us in 1996 and are still with the team today.”
—Robert Mitchell, executive chef of Bold Catering & Design
Great Performances
The kitchen
When New York-based Great Performances opened a new 51,000-square-foot headquarters in the South Bronx in May 2021, the caterer tripled the size of its previous Manhattan kitchen. With the larger space and well-planned layout, “our prep teams have direct access to their own cooking equipment without having to wait for it to become available,” says Chris Harkness, culinary director. “Another great new attribute is the walk-in space. We now have direct access to our walk-ins from the receiving area that leads directly into the kitchen; it’s a game-changer in terms of saving time and increasing efficiency.”
The space is divided into a “hot area”—a full cooking kitchen—and a “cold area,” exclusively for foods that are either ready to eat or don’t require cooking. The busy kitchen’s state-of-the-art equipment includes programmable full-size Rational ovens, which give the cooks “more freedom to work on the next project without the stress of watching the ovens,” notes Harkness, as well as blast chillers that lead directly to the walk-ins for a cold-to-cold food flow. Three walk-in units keep like foods together, so they’re maintained at their ideal temperatures. “Food flow is key,” says Harkness.
What do you love most about your kitchen?
“The ability to oversee all of the foods through their ‘life cycle’ at Great Performances, from receiving to production to the finished product. The flow of the food allows checkpoints at every phase of our production, all the way to the finishing walk-in, where our team packs and checks all of our products before loading onto refrigerated trucks, which back directly into the finishing walk-in.”
–Chris Harkness, culinary director for Great Performances
Kitchen With a View
Jean-Georges Philadelphia, on the 59th floor of the Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia at Comcast Center, reopened in March after a two-year hiatus due to the COVID pandemic. The opening marked the debut of Chef de Cuisine Cornelia Sühr, who was appointed in summer 2021 and worked with Michelin-starred Chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten to design the restaurant’s new six-course tasting menu.
CFE asked Sühr: What do you love most about your kitchen?
“The view. Most restaurant kitchens are in a basement with no natural light. Where our kitchen is situated, not only do I have visibility into Jean-Georges Philadelphia, but our guests can also see my team preparing the finishing touches in advance of their service. The guests, my team and I also have a front-row seat to the beautiful backdrop of Philadelphia from 1,000 feet in the air.”
