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Next time you eat at a restaurant, look around. Do you see the chef? He’s probably sweating publicly by the fireplace. He’s unlikely to be swearing or shouting. Such courtesies were a rarity when I was working as a waitress a decade ago. Most of the kitchens I worked in were in windowless basements, breeding grounds for some nasty tempers. Horrors ranged from raised voices and broken plates to, on one occasion, airborne panna cotta. I doubt a chef would throw a pudding in an open kitchen.
“I always knew that if I could open a restaurant, I would open the kitchen,” says Chris Leach, chef and founder of Manteca Restaurant in Shoreditchwhere chefs roll the pasta and cut it sausages and fire up the grill in full view of customers. The layout has had a direct impact on the way Leach’s staff treat each other: “The relationship between the front-of-house and back-of-house staff is very healthy,” he says. “That’s because of the way they work together.”
Much of Leach’s desire to create a kinder cuisine came from his experiences working in places “ruled by fear.” Similarly, Charles Pearce, executive chef at Piedmont’s Nordelaia hotel, has “learned the hard way.” LortoThe hotel’s “chic, relaxed restaurant” places the large pink-tiled kitchen at the centre of the room. “We have a lot of guests who say it’s amazing to watch us work,” says Pearce. “Everyone knows what they’re doing, there’s very little talking, just eye contact. It’s like a dance, like a play.”
Open kitchens as we know them have been around since the 1980s, when breakfast bars at home became fashionable and Wolfgang Puck opened Espago in Beverly Hills. Other iterations date back to the 1900s, when early American diners moved from food carts to brick-and-mortar restaurants. They’re a different breed than counter-service restaurants — intimate spaces where all the seating borders the kitchen — but can be just as focused on entertainment and showcase thoughtful design. Bludorn Bar In Houston, chefs prepare their dishes under lights that look like spotlights. The Haberdashery In New York, the serene aqua-blue kitchen is the work of cult design duo Roman and Williams. And in Soho Dear JackieChefs cook behind an extravagant red curtain over Giallo Siena marble countertops, “a far cry from sharp-edged stainless steel commercial kitchens,” says chef Harry Faddy.
For Cynthia Shanmugalingam, founder of rambutanThe open kitchen at his restaurant is a nod to Sri Lanka, his inspiration. “There are relatively few South Asian restaurants with open kitchens in London,” he says. “If you go to Sri Lanka or South India, it’s amazing to see people cooking on the street.” Basement kitchens seem to be more of a Western invention. In most other culinary cultures, whether it’s a sushi bar in Japan or a Mexican taco stand, most of the food is on display.
Jean Whitehead, author of Creating interior atmosphereHe has followed the rise of “ambient psychology” in design projects – spaces built with human experience in mind. “Design is increasingly concerned not just with the creation of physical space, but with psychological space,” he says, pointing to Maggie’s cancer centres, where informal kitchens are placed at the heart of each building to “make users feel comfortable”. But Whitehead also highlights the “deliberate voyeurism” of open kitchens, drawing a comparison to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. “Is there a Big Brother aspect to open kitchen design, of pervasive surveillance encouraging better behaviour?” he asks.
The rise of open kitchens is a positive step for the restaurant industry as a whole. Shanmugalingam, Leach, Pearce and Faddy point to the “challenging hiring climate”: after lockdown, an estimated 40 per cent of hospitality workers left the sector in the UK alone. The industry needed a shake-up. “That sort of Anthony Bourdain cliché is no longer what defines chefs in modern restaurants,” says Shanmugalingam.Rambutan “It’s not about super-talented chefs, it’s about a new generation. They’re more emotionally intelligent, they’re kinder to each other, almost 50 percent are women. That’s transformed the energy.”
But open kitchens don’t mean complete ego death; performative cooking can provide a sense of accomplishment. “Cooking pasta for an audience and seeing that dish bring joy to guests is an endless source of excitement,” says Victor Lugger, co-founder of Big Mamma Group and its design firm Studio Kiki, which owns restaurants with open kitchens across Europe. “Ask any chef who has worked in an open kitchen; they’ll agree that they feel like a rock star.” Adds Manteca’s Leach: “They can show off, and I mean that in the best way. It adds pride to what they’re doing.”
“Obviously there are diners who don’t pay attention,” says Rafael Cagali, chef and owner of From the Earth in Bethnal Green, where the dining space is designed like a kitchen-diner. “They’re on the phone or talking to a friend. But that’s the beauty of our industry – we’re adaptable.” Cagali offers additional training to give her staff confidence to deal with customers without getting nervous. Still, she admits that the lack of customer awareness can be “frustrating”.
Perhaps a better question would be: does an open kitchen make us more welcoming diners? I recently sat at the kitchen counter of a restaurant and ate something truly disgusting. “What do you think?” the person who prepared the dish asked me. “Delicious,” I replied. After all I’ve witnessed, why would I argue?