Hot kitchen, cold kitchen, how necessary is it to divide zones? You must know this before designing a restaurant!

If you are deciding to open your dream restaurant, there are many important factors that you need to pay attention to.
From cost planning, profit target setting, restaurant concept and food menu.
Including store design, which business owners like us must plan everything carefully.
Because the store structure needs to be laid out from the very beginning.

Especially the kitchen, the heart of running a restaurant, must be designed efficiently and meet the needs of our restaurant's food style as much as possible.
So what is a good kitchen? What about a hot kitchen and a cold kitchen? How important are they? For those who are planning a restaurant, come and learn about them first.

When dividing up the kitchen or food preparation area of ​​a restaurant, you should first know who your target audience is.
To know the number of customer-facing areas or the number of customer orders per day, the basic and popular proportions are:
Calculate the total shop area of ​​100% and reserve the kitchen area at 30% for a normal-sized shop or 40-50% for a take-home shop, etc.
In particular, the location of the kitchen must take into account the water system, drainage pipes, ventilation, and the connection point to the customer lounge.
or the food serving route, which at this point may be a limitation for expanding the kitchen size in the future.

A good kitchen should have clear divisions for use, for ease of cleaning and readiness for preparing food each day.
It is usually divided into a storage area for storing raw ingredients, a fresh food washing area, a dishwashing area, an ingredient preparation area, and a cooking area.
If our kitchen can be divided into distinct zones, the kitchen will be neat and tidy and easy to keep clean.
Our food will be clean and sanitary, which is good for the quality of each dish before serving to customers. The restaurant owner can adjust the position.
The use of each zone should support the characteristics of the menu in the shop. However, it depends on the suitability and convenience of use.

The importance of hot and cold kitchens

The key to running a restaurant business is good food standards, such as taste and cleanliness of the restaurant. Therefore, we should maintain the same standards.
Therefore, it is important to pay special attention to clearly separating the work areas in the kitchen. This will help reduce the chances of food errors caused by temperature and hygiene.
Or other reactions that will cause the quality of our food to change. We can divide the types of kitchen into 2 types according to the cooking process as follows:

Hot Kitchen It is a kitchen that supports the process of using heat to cook food with various ingredients, whether it is boiling, steaming, frying, stir-frying, stewing or grilling, etc.
part Cold Kitchen It is a kitchen that supports cooking processes that do not require heat, often involving smoked ingredients, fresh vegetables, and fruits.
Or related to ingredients that have already gone through a hot cooking process, such as cooked shrimp, boiled eggs, etc.
In this cold kitchen, the focus is on making salads, decorating dishes, or chopping ingredients, etc.

Kitchen design for restaurants with limited space

If our shop is a small restaurant with limited space, the business owner should only pay attention to the heart of the kitchen, which is to make it an efficient kitchen for users.
Clean, hygienic, and meets the needs of the shop, such as a coffee shop with a cold kitchen area for making sandwiches just behind the counter.
But we have prepared more space to accommodate customers than other areas or made-to-order restaurants that have a hot kitchen at the front of the shop and adjusted the proportion of the cold kitchen for cutting ingredients.
Only the space left on the coffee table near the stove.