Planning hotel kitchens.
A hotel is not one operation but several under one roof — each with its own rhythm, its own equipment and its own logistics. The kitchen has to serve all of them at once, from one goods entrance and with one team.
Five operations, one goods entrance.
Breakfast, à la carte, banqueting, room service, bar — and often a staff restaurant as well. Each of these has its own rhythm, its own equipment and its own guests. They share the goods entrance, the stores, the refrigeration, the dishwash and the team.
That is where the real planning task lies. The individual kitchen is not the difficult part; their simultaneity is: while banqueting plates for three hundred, the restaurant is running à la carte, a room service order comes in, and preparation for tomorrow's breakfast service is under way. All of it through the same dishwash, the same lifts, the same stores.
Plan a hotel kitchen like a large restaurant kitchen and you get an installation that works in normal service and jams on every busy weekend. Plan it like institutional catering and you get throughput and lose the product.
Why hospitality is not institutional catering.
In institutional catering the same dish is produced in large numbers at a defined time. The design optimises for throughput, short routes and repeatability. The equipment follows that logic: large kettles, tilting pans, flight-type dishwashers, regeneration technology.
In hospitality, different dishes are produced in small numbers on call. The design optimises for flexibility and for several dishes finishing at one section at the same time. The equipment is different too: a cooking suite and induction in fine gradations, salamander, contact grill, low-temperature cooking, blast freezing, plenty of refrigeration within reach rather than one large cold room at the end of a corridor.
The difference is not quality but task. We have built both — and because we know both, we also see where a hotel kitchen benefits from the methods of institutional catering. Banqueting, for instance, is by its logic institutional catering with the quality expectations of an à la carte kitchen.
Banqueting is a kitchen of its own that only works sometimes.
Banqueting is the area that decides a hotel's occupancy — and the one that shapes the installation most strongly. The demand is extreme: several hundred plates in a very short window, at consistent quality, at a defined temperature when they reach the table. And then the space stands idle for days.
In design terms that means three things. First, plating areas and hot holding on a scale that looks oversized in everyday service and is tight on the day of the event. Second, trolley logistics: where do the transport trolleys stand when not in use, how do they reach the function room loaded, and where are they returned and cleaned afterwards? Third, the vertical connection.
The last point is the one settled too late most often. Lift dimensions, door widths, turning circles and the gradient of the routes are fixed at shell stage — and they decide whether a loaded food trolley can reach the room at all. A lift two centimetres too small is not a detail. It is a permanent change to the operating concept.
Room service and bar follow their own rules.
Room service has the least favourable ratio of effort to volume: small orders, long routes, unpredictable timing, and the dish still has to be right after several minutes in transit. That cannot be solved with more staff, only with proximity and equipment — a night kitchen at a workable distance, transport solutions that hold temperature, a lift that is not occupied by deliveries at night.
The bar is routinely underestimated in planning, because apparently no cooking happens there. In fact it is a technically dense area: refrigeration in a very tight space, ice production and ice storage, glasswash with its own water treatment, glass storage in quantity, drinks delivery and empties return. Where the bar trades into the night, acoustic separation, extract air and escape routes are affected as well.
And breakfast is in many houses the service with the highest guest count of all — with a peak shorter than any lunch peak in institutional catering. It is worth not treating it as a sideshow of the restaurant kitchen.
Design here is part of the task, not the finishing touch.
In hospitality, eating is an experience rather than a process. Concepts are correspondingly themed, and kitchens are correspondingly often visible: open kitchens, show kitchens, front cooking in the restaurant, chef's table, live stations at breakfast. We enjoy planning this — it is the part of the work where craft can be shown.
The point where it regularly grinds is the friction between design and operation. An open kitchen brings noise, smells and heat into the guest area. It demands extract routing that does not intrude, surfaces that still look right after two years, and a working discipline that holds up under observation. Visibility raises the demand on the team — every day.
We therefore work closely with interior designers, and our role is often that of translator: we say early what a design intention will mean in operation — and we look for the solution that carries both, rather than overruling one side. In our experience that is the difference between a kitchen that photographs well and one that still works after five years.
We come from this trade.
This practice did not arrive in hospitality from plant engineering, but the other way round. Its founder came from Swiss hospitality: a chef's apprenticeship in starred restaurants, hotel management school in Lausanne, then posts as a hotel director for Hilton International in Europe as well as North and South America.
That explains why we think from the guest rather than from the equipment — and why we know what an operation feels like at two in the morning when an event runs longer than planned. Anyone who has stood in service and in the kitchen themselves plans different routes.
Two things have remained from that origin and are not negotiable for us. The first is independence: we depend on no manufacturer, and we deliberately keep it that way. The second is depth of detail — drawings precise enough that nothing on site has to be interpreted. Both sound unspectacular. Both are the reason clients call us again many years later.
More about our history and the team on our page About us.
How private clients decide.
Hotel projects run differently from public schemes, and the differences go beyond tone. Decisions are made faster and in smaller groups, procurement is often restricted, and the opening date is rarely negotiable — a building that does not open earns nothing.
This has a pleasant effect: tight teams and short decision paths mean that work on site runs more smoothly. And there is more openness to new ideas, because nobody has to convince a committee.
What counts is reliability under time pressure. Our emphasis is on delivery: drawings with a high level of detail, supervision of the works, and remaining reachable after handover. Direct contact instead of project manager number seven — with private clients that is regularly the argument that decides it.
About hotel kitchens.
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Kitchen planning
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Swiss hospitality, second generation, an international team — how this practice works.
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Hotels and restaurants across Europe — a selection of our projects.
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