A staff restaurant has two audiences that are rarely considered together: the people who work there and the people who eat there. We plan the place where both worlds meet.
In most staff restaurants the guest area is larger than the production kitchen in floor area. It is where acceptance or rejection is decided anyway: at the counter, on the way through the room, at the table. Yet specialist planning frequently stops at the edge of the servery.
We plan both together, and we work backwards from the guest: what should the offer look like, how do people move, where does congestion build, how long do they stay — and what follows from that for production, equipment and staffing.
Two decisions have a longer effect than all the others. One concerns the servery: whether a station is built around a national cuisine or around a cooking method. The other concerns the dining hall: whether it is a room for ninety minutes of lunch or for the whole day. Both are almost impossible to correct later — and both cost nothing extra at the design stage if they are raised in time.
No system is better in principle. The choice follows from guest numbers, available staff, area, breadth of offer and the length of the time window — and from how the food is produced.
A tray slide connects the counters and guests join the line. It needs little area, replenishment happens directly from behind, and portion size can be adjusted in conversation. Under pressure, however, a queue forms — nobody overtakes here. Also known as a cafeteria line or long-line servery.
The defining feature is that the counters are not connected by a continuous tray slide. Everyone walks straight to what they want. It carries high guest numbers and individual stations can be opened or closed as demand shifts — in exchange it requires area, equipment and a circulation layout that avoids crossings during replenishment.
Physically separated counters with their own cooking equipment, their own storage and often their own till. Dishes are produced in front of the guest, holding times are short and surplus production is low. The price: the equipment installed determines what can be cooked there in future.
App pre-ordering with collection, self-checkout, self-service chilled display, micromarket or collection locker. It replaces no counter, but relieves the lunch peak and serves everyone whose working hours do not match the serving window.
Those are four basic forms — in reality well over forty servery formats are in use, and in practice the answer is almost always a combination of several.
Added to this are the distribution systems that set the tone above all in hospitals and care homes — tray system, tray belt, tray and regeneration trolleys, bowl service at the table. In corporate campuses with several sites they matter too, as soon as supply comes from a central kitchen.
Regardless of the built form, a second layer is decided in parallel: central or decentralised, fixed or mobile, hot or cold, cooked fresh or regenerated, pre-portioned or portioned in front of the guest, self-service or served. Only both layers together make a servery concept — and from it follows what the kitchen behind it has to look like.
Whether the dining hall works at peak is not decided at the servery alone. Tray conveyors, paternoster systems and automation in the dishwash area relieve the staff and spread the routes — and they need space, services and a connection that has to be fixed early.
The underlying purpose is the same in every variant: preventing all guests from converging on the same point at the same time. Sometimes a free-standing island in the dining hall is the most effective single measure — deliberately taken out of the main line.
There will be waiting at the lunch peak; that cannot be designed away. How that wait is experienced, however, depends less on its length than on how it is organised.
Several separate queues in front of several counters create the impression of standing in the wrong one. The line next to you moves faster, you cannot switch, and people who arrived later get served first. A single shared queue that feeds several serving points takes the same time on average, but feels fairer and calmer — and it evens out when something stalls at one point.
For planning this means: the queuing area is part of the concept, not the space that happens to be left over. Where the queue forms, how it is guided, whether it crosses the route to the tables and whether those waiting can already see what is on offer decides more about acceptance than the speed of service.
The same applies to the till. In many buildings it is the real bottleneck, not the servery. Self-checkout, recognition systems or a physically separated payment zone relieve exactly that point — provided the area for it was allowed for from the start.
A themed station can be planned in two ways, and the decision has an effect across the entire life of the installation.
Planned around a national cuisine means: „this is the Italian station.“ The equipment is specified for Italian dishes. That gives a clear picture and it works — for as long as Italian remains in demand.
Planned around the method means: „there is an oven at the centre here.“ The pizza oven is then not the Italian station, but the heart of a station where everything that comes out of an oven is produced. Pizza today, tarte flambée tomorrow, filled flatbread the day after, gratins next week.
The same holds for wok, grill, fryer or steam. Build the station around the cooking method rather than around a national cuisine and you get the same appearance — but an installation that can follow new offers without equipment having to be replaced.
Eating habits in staff restaurants change faster than the equipment behind them. What arrives in institutional catering from Thailand, India, Mexico, West Africa or South America is rarely a passing fashion — it stays and becomes part of the regular offer.
The design question is therefore not „do you want a Mexican station?“ but: what does a station need that produces Mexican food today and West African food in six months? Which cooking methods cover both, which refrigeration, which ventilation capacity, how much preparation area — and which of these cannot be changed afterwards.
Our team is international, and we look at how other countries cook. Not out of folklore, but because it answers the question of which equipment will still carry in ten years.
The classic dining hall is full at lunchtime and empty for the rest of the day. That is the most expensive floor area in the whole building — measured against what it delivers.
In a hybrid working world the task has shifted. People who come to the office rarely come for the desk; they come for the people. That makes the guest area one of the few places where a workforce still meets by chance — an argument that research on workplace catering now puts at the centre as well.
In design terms something very concrete follows: the room has to do more than eating. A meeting between two appointments, focused work in the afternoon, an event in the evening. Spreading the floor area across more use changes the subsidy calculation noticeably — and permanently.
Multi-use is not a furniture question. It arises on three levels, which stay open for different lengths of time:
The order matters. What is forgotten on the third level cannot be caught up on the first. A dining hall without a socket at the table will not become a place to work — whatever furniture is put into it later.
In a room where you cannot hold a conversation, nobody stays longer than necessary. Hard floors, exposed ceilings, large glazed areas and many people at once produce a noise level you have to shout over — and guests come to eat, not to shout. The kitchen then takes criticism for something it did not cause.
Repairing acoustics afterwards is possible, but expensive and usually visible. Designed in at shell stage it costs a fraction.
A good guest area is not one large room with many tables, but several areas with different character: an open centre for a quick lunch, quieter edge zones for conversation, set-apart places for focused work, an area that can be separated off for events.
This zoning simultaneously governs the guest flow: it prevents everyone from moving along the same axis, and thereby relieves the servery as well.
Dining hall and interior design are a service we are currently building up, working with interior designers. What we bring from kitchen planning is the connection between the two sides: design that does not obstruct operation — and workflows that do not ruin the room. Do talk to us if this part carries weight in your project.
The investment happens once; operation runs for decades. That is why we plan the running costs in from the start.
First come energy and staff. Both are fixed at the design stage and can only be influenced to a limited extent in operation: through the choice of equipment, through the length of the routes, and through how many pairs of hands a workflow requires. Second comes avoiding food waste.
How much is actually available here is shown by a study from Weihenstephan-Triesdorf University of Applied Sciences, which measured a real staff restaurant over 17 weeks. After the rebuild, energy consumption per meal was around a quarter lower and water consumption per meal was almost halved. Orders of magnitude, not a guarantee — but they show what is being decided at the design stage.
The study was carried out in cooperation with an equipment manufacturer. We therefore read such figures as an indication rather than a promise — and test them against the actual workflows in each project.
Costs arise in particular from a kitchen or servery planned too large. That sounds counter-intuitive at first — more area feels like more possibilities. In fact every additional square metre has to be heated, ventilated, cleaned and served by staff journeys, for decades. Generosity in the wrong place is a permanent burden.
It is not only areas that are specified too large, but connected loads as well. The same study found that the measured peak demand after the rebuild fell by around a fifth — despite more powerful equipment. The reason: modern appliances only draw their full rating when they actually need it.
As a result the diversity factor — the share of the theoretical total connected load that is actually drawn at the same time — turns out lower than rough estimates suggest. That is not an academic detail: an overstated connected load means larger cable cross-sections, larger protection, more material. Costs that arise during construction and benefit nobody in operation.
That is why we calculate this figure for each project rather than by rule of thumb. It is one of the places where nothing can be corrected afterwards.
When cuts are made at the design stage, experience shows they hit the equipment nobody sees first. The result is regularly a deterioration in viability: appliances with higher consumption, workflows that tie up more staff, solutions that have to be replaced sooner. A saving in the investment that permanently raises the cost of operation is not a saving.
We therefore calculate what proposed savings mean in operation — so that the decision rests on a sound basis and not on the capital sum alone.
Requirements differ more than it appears from outside. Shift work in manufacturing means several mealtimes and a different offer from a bank or insurer with a concentrated lunch break and a higher expectation of representation. Added to this are executive and conference areas that follow rules of their own.
Location shapes things too: eating habits vary regionally, and an offer that is well received at one plant can miss at the next site. We therefore do not plan a standard concept, but first establish who actually eats here — and when.
In corporate catering a contract caterer often stands behind the offer. We plan independently of manufacturers and of operators. If the operator has already been appointed, we coordinate the design with them; if not, we plan so that the installation is not tied to a single operating model.
Of all the areas in a building, the kitchen has among the most interfaces: ventilation, electrical, plumbing, drainage, refrigeration, structure, fire protection — and the largest number of specialist planners who all have to work together in the smallest space. That takes time, and that time is routinely underestimated.
From detailed design onwards a concept can practically no longer be changed in any fundamental way. The walls are up, the shafts are set, the services routing is coordinated. Anyone joining later can only optimise within someone else's constraints.
We see it regularly: the room layout was made carefully and to the best of everyone's knowledge, but without experience of kitchen workflows. The result is workflows that do not add up in operation, and rooms that are too small for their job or unnecessarily large. Both could have been settled in a few hours of early coordination — later it is a change to a completed design.
More on this in our article Why commercial kitchen planning belongs in the project early.
The specialist design behind it — every work stage from feasibility study to aftercare.
Mehr erfahrenConcept, viability, operator search — when the question is still whether and what.
Mehr erfahrenCorporate catering for industry, banks and insurers — a selection of our projects.
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