Bolt-on wonders

WHEN the Queen's hotel in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, lost its original kitchen to a new Le Petit Blanc outlet, the solution was to commission a modular kitchen from the Kitchen Systems division of the PKL Group. Amazingly, it took just nine weeks for the 50sq m extension to be planned, erected and fitted - less than half the time of a conventional building.

Tony Aspden, regional general manager at the Queen's, says that planning permission for Le Petit Blanc came through more quickly than expected, so the hotel, a Forte Heritage property, was faced with little time to create an alternative kitchen.

Le Petit Blanc took over the whole rear portion of the hotel's ground floor, including the kitchen and former ballroom, and made it into a self-contained restaurant which opened in February. Meanwhile, the Queen's embarked on a £450,000 reorganisation of its remaining areas.

Its restaurant was turned into a conference and function room, serviced by the existing small forward kitchen. A new restaurant was created from the former bar, with the modular kitchen built behind. While the work was going on, the forward kitchen was used temporarily to produce restaurant meals.

"We decided on the modular kitchen because a conventional building would have taken too long and been more expensive," explains Aspden. "Also, we had two disused oil tanks under the ground and they would not have taken the weight of a traditional building unless we filled them with concrete. In fact, we took out one of the tanks and made what would otherwise have been dead space into an underground beer cellar."

The idea of a "bolt-on" kitchen was not alien to Forte because many of the bedroom extensions to its Posthouses use this construction technique. Manufacturer PKL has installed modular kitchens for popular food service outlets before, but this was the first for a four-star hotel. The cost of the kitchen, including its walk-in coldroom and new cooking equipment (also supplied by PKL), was £130,000.

The ground was prepared and a concrete slab laid while the modular kitchen was built off-site. Then, on 24 November, the building arrived. "It was quite spectacular," says Queen's catering operations manager Jens Eberhardt. "It was in two halves, each loaded on a truck. They were lifted into position by a crane while people on the ground held them in position with ropes."

Finishing off the construction and fitting out the kitchen took a further three weeks, with the kitchen ready for use on 15 December.

The new kitchen and its team of seven chefs copes well with the demands of the Queen's restaurant, which holds an AA rosette. Typical dishes from its table d'hôte menu include rich game broth with port wine, lobster and prawn salad with lemon and tarragon mayonnaise, marinated venison steak with a rich Bordeaux and thyme glaze, and baked avocado pear with a ragôut of wild mushrooms and basil. Normally the restaurant seats 40, but this can be increased to 70 by extending into the lounge.

However, the kitchen has not been designed to cater for the 126-capacity function room. Instead, the hotel uses its forward kitchen to regenerate cook-chill meals supplied by Ring & Brymer. These come on multi-portion Chomette dishes and are regenerated in two Rational combi-ovens.

The forward kitchen is also used for lounge and room-service food. It has its own coldroom, and its other equipment includes a Falcon six-burner range and grill, two Foster under-counter fridges and an upright freezer, a Derek Wright slicer, a Hobart mixer and a Melitta Cafina automatic cappuccino machine.

In addition, there is a separate dishwashing room, used by both the function room and restaurant. This is equipped with two Hobart pass-through dishwashers - one for dishes and one for just glasses. It is also home to a Hoshizaki ice-maker.

Having experienced the installation of a modular kitchen, Aspden is keen to recommend this approach to other hoteliers. "There is no way we could have completed a conventional building in the timescale and it would probably have cost us twice as much," he explains. "We've now got a very good kitchen, planned to give us the maximum amount of equipment in the space available." n