New Kitchen: The Chubby Cook?s Kitchen

Starting up this week, I wanted to get up some pictures of the transformation of the actual kitchen that we will be cooking in.  It’s a really nice kitchen that has undergone a lot of work in the last four or five weeks.  The funny thing is that nobody really knows what to expect when they walk in the front door.  The typical response when anybody first walks into the retail space out front is that it is a nice space.  Then we continue the tour back into the kitchen and I usually get a “wow, this is awesome.”  Yeah, that’s exactly why we picked up the lease.  The kitchen is awesome.  It’s got a lot of space and enough counter top room to pump out a lot of food.

When I first walked into the kitchen, it looked as if the people before me had just walked outside to take a break or something.  The shelves were full of equipment and there were aprons and other items sitting on the counters.  It was a little bit eerie.  There was also a lot of work that needed to be done.  The equipment looked a bit neglected and there was a good amount of grease and grime coating the entire kitchen.

Fully stocked with dirty pots and pans when I first walked in.

Before the lease was even signed, we brought in a professional cleaning crew to get started.  They had eight people scrubbing the kitchen from ceiling to floor for four, ten hour days.  When they were done, it looked incredible.  The equipment looked shiny, the walls were gleaming white and there was no grease anywhere.  They definitely did a bang up job.

The cleaning crew finished up and things are starting to look better.

I wanted the kitchen to feel a little less institutional, so we started to do some work in here.  First, we added in some color.  Then we moved some equipment around.  And some more equipment around.  After moving it several times, I decided that we needed to paint the floor in the kitchen so we moved the equipment around some more.  Lots of moving equipment around- but it was fairly incredible to watch this transformation.

Color on the walls and a kitchen in chaos.

Ahh- a fresh coat of paint on the floor and we're ready to move more equipment.

After the floor was done, we tried multiple layouts before deciding that this was a good one.  With this layout, we can fit 15 people in the kitchen comfortably for participation classes.  When the classes aren’t running (or until we get them setup), we will be using the kitchen primarily for catering.  We’ll be working on the layout in the months to come as we continue to break in the kitchen a little bit.

Looks shiny and new.

Bang!  We’ve got stuff in here now.  The shelves are starting to fill up with pantry items, new kitchen utensils and equipment.  Our UPS and FedEx guys are working overtime for us.  It takes a lot of work to fill up a pantry this size.  Check out the huge bay leaf container- we’ve got enough to hold us over for a while to come.

Filling up the shelves and gearing up to open the doors.

Up next, we are waiting on the flat screen and camera to get installed for the cooking classes.  We still have more equipment on the way and need to fill in our catering supplies.  But, it’s all coming together!   We will have our lunchtime catering menu up on the site hopefully by mid-week!