chefs and kitchen design
Metropolis has a great piece where some of the country’s best chefs – including Alice Waters, Grant Achatz and Wylie Dufresne – talk about their kitchens. Here’s a snippet from Waters on Chez Panisse…
Architects really need to think about all the waste a restaurant creates. That relates completely to an important part of the restaurant – welcoming the suppliers into the kitchen. I’m obsessed with the fact that the back of the house has to be as beautiful as the front.
And Achatz on the process of designing the Alinea kitchen…
When I had the opportunity to build my own kitchen, I thought, Hey, let’s wipe our heads clean of conventional kitchen design. I’d worked at the French Laundry, Charlie Trotter’s, Trio, so of course I grew up in kitchens, and it shocked me that they were all kind of designed the same. Everyone followed each other.
I felt like nobody really looked at the food, which was a great irony of kitchen design. No one really looked at the style of cooking they were going to do and designed the kitchen around that. We were like, “Let’s really look at the food and decide, based on the style of cooking, what we need. What do we need as far as equipment? What do we need as far as space?”