One Aldwych’s executive chef, Dominic Teague, has taken delivery of an Athenor cook suite from Grande Cuisine.
Gareth Sefton of consultants Sefton Horn Winch contacted Grande Cuisine when Teague want to upgrade the kitchen serving the Indigo restaurant. The overall scope of kitchen, which caters for breakfast, lunch and dinner, as well as afternoon tea and serves three private dining rooms along with room service for guests of the hotel. The refurbishment needed to offer better organisation and workflow, with less reliance on pans and levels of pan traffic between the hot kitchen and adjacent pan wash area.
Heat generation was also an issue and needed to be limited, allowing for kitchen staff to work in more comfortable conditions all round. After visiting several sites with Athanor cook suites installed and in use, and demonstrating to the client different styles of equipment, Grande Cuisine proposed increasing the number of electric components, rather than continuing with gas.
The resultant Athanor suite allows for ‘traditional style’ solid top cooking, with the added flexibility of being able to use as a direct cooking surface during the busy service periods – this was achieved through the inclusion of three high performance double Plaque Athanor plancha cook plates.
The island cook suite is relatively small, measuring 2500mm x 1650mm and includes two single 4kW radiant hobs, a multi-cooker, a twin tank deep fat fryer, along with a traditional cast iron roasting oven and a set of hot holding drawers, as well as its Plaque Athanor additions. With its radiant hobs and hot holding drawers at the service end of the newly supplied suite, breakfast is able to operate without constraining the rest of the suite’s activity, which means mise-en-place can start and continue while breakfast and room service orders are prepared.
During mise-en-place, the island suite truly shines, with its large amount of production space (on the Plaque Athanor planchas), with the added advantage of the multicooker, which is used for bulk water based cooking in the morning, and then can be used for holding sauces during service period, as well as cooking pasta or blanching and/or steaming vegetables. “The new kitchen space is incredible and such an improvement on the original. We gave Sefton Horn Winch an overall brief and the solution delivered has incredible versatility and it’s a real pleasure to work in and the Athanor is a dream too,” said Teague.
“The team is really starting to understand the benefits of working with this new suite – the overall heat is considerably less and the flexibility is far beyond what I expected,” concluded Teague.