A chef’s kitchen can be a wonderful upgrade to your kitchen space or as an addition to your home. It can serve you by adding in more storage space, more preparation space, and more. Essentially, it can help you to streamline your cooking process and can be great if you entertain guests often.
Read on to learn more about chef’s kitchens, and how to determine whether or not it is a good investment for your space.
What Is a Chef’s Kitchen?
A chef’s kitchen is, as the name implies, is a kitchen that is designed to suit the needs of a professional chef. However, they are not necessarily something that is limited to a restaurant or commercial space. Many people are renovating their homes and adding in chef’s kitchens for use when entertaining guests, or even for daily use! You do not have to be a professional chef to build yourself a chef’s kitchen. One of the key elements of a chef’s kitchen that may differ from a regular home kitchen is that there is enough room for multiple people to prep and cook food at the same time.
Advantages of Building a Chef’s Kitchen
A chef’s kitchen helps to support and enhance your cooking process. It has several different advantages, which we will go over below.
Less Prep or Cook Time
One of the great things that a chef’s kitchen can do for you is cut down significantly on the prep time and cook time when you are preparing a meal. This is because of features such as a double sink, which will give you more adequate space when washing vegetables at once during prep, for instance. Most of these features are absent from the normal kitchens you would find in a house.
More Storage
Another benefit you will find in a chef’s kitchen is lots of additional storage space and more counter space to prepare food comfortably and if you have multiple deep sinks you will likely have larger counters. This can be helpful for you so that you can keep ingredients separate and organized! Plus, you will have more pantry space for snacks. Sometimes when it comes to organizing multiple dishes and utensils a few drawers just doesn’t cut it, a home with a chef’s kitchen will have more drawer space due to the larger counters. This will give you the ability to have multiple cutlery organizers and space for all of your dishes and serveware.
Top Tier Appliances
The appliances in chef’s kitchens are vastly superior (and sometimes larger) and can be a great tool to help you cook up the most perfect meals. They are often able to get your food cooked faster and more efficiently, too, without sacrificing the quality of your meal. Some of these high end appliances may also be ones that are not as commonly found in a regular kitchen. In most chef’s kitchens you can typically find a gas cook range, multiple ovens with a warming drawer to keep food hot, a sub zero refrigerator, a pull out tap that is over the stove to easily fill large pots for cooking and sometimes multiple dishwashers.
Disadvantages of Building a Chef’s Kitchen
There are some disadvantages to a chef’s kitchen as well, which you will need to weigh against the advantages before making any final choice. We will outline the drawbacks of a chef’s kitchen below.
Cost
Many of the features of a chef’s kitchen are not cheap! For instance, if you are replacing your appliances with high quality and chef worthy appliances, these will cost you a good amount of money. You will also have to pay to have them installed correctly. Then, there are other costs involved with renovation, such as the cost to add in more storage and counter space or to break down walls to open up your kitchen space more. It’s good going into it know that a chef’s kitchen cost will be higher than a regular kitchen.
Logistics
Of course, any building project is also going to come with complications. Trying to renovate your kitchen may involve lots of back and forth with your contractor, and if you do not have a lot of space, it can be very difficult to figure out how best to create the space you need for the features of your chef’s kitchen.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the point of a chef’s kitchen?
A chef’s kitchen is, basically, a more glamorous version of the kitchen you would typically see in your home. It serves a function in that it has everything a professional chef would need to cook, which is not always the same as what you might need at home to prepare a meal.
Some of the things that a chef’s kitchen typically offers are more storage for ingredients and more prep and cooking space. One of the most easily recognizable things about a chef’s kitchen is that it has enough room for more than one person to be in the kitchen, cooking or prepping, at the same time.
What does chef’s kitchen mean in real estate?
In real estate, you may see a listing for a home that boasts of a chef’s kitchen inside. This simply means that the homeowners were serious cooks, or perhaps even professional chefs! Unlike the usual kitchens that you may see in most homes, a home that has a chef’s kitchen has a kitchen that is specifically laid out to meet the needs of a professional chef. Even if you are not a professional chef, this kind of kitchen design can help you cook like one!
What is the difference between a chef’s kitchen and a gourmet kitchen?
A chef’s kitchen and a gourmet kitchen may sound like they are interchangeable terms. However, that is actually not the case! These refer to two seperate kinds of kitchen.
A chef’s kitchen, of course, is a kitchen that is designed to be used by a professional chef– or to at least help you cook like one! A gourmet kitchen, on the other hand, is a more casual version of a high end kitchen. They are designed for those who still want to prepare high quality meals and to cook for guests, but do not include the professional equipment that you would see in a chef’s kitchen.
How do you become a chef’s kitchen?
In order to set up or renovate for a chef’s kitchen, you will need to plan out what you want for the new space– and then strategize for how best to achieve this. Some of the things that you should plan for are a large sink and a galley style layout.
Other important elements of this kind of kitchen are fuss free surfaces, bright and well placed lighting, and high quality appliances– often, commercial appliances are best for this type of space. In general, when planning out a chef’s kitchen, you should plan for efficiency above all else.
For more blogs on commercial kitchens, check out Backyard Commercial Kitchen