Centre spread

THE revamped Great Eastern hotel in the City of London incorporates such a huge food operation that there really was only one way to organise it. At the heart of the operation - a joint venture between Conran Holdings and Wyndham International - is a central production kitchen costing £1.5m, which will serve all the hotel's restaurants. The first two, the 176-seat Aurora fine-dining restaurant and the 140-seat Terminus bar and grill, opened in November.

"It takes the pressure off so many areas," says executive chef Jonathan Wright, who will eventually lead a brigade of 110 chefs in a total of 10 kitchens. Scheduled to open early this year is a Japanese restaurant, an English bar called the George, plus a fish restaurant and oyster bar, bringing total capacity to about 650 covers. There will also be 15 private dining rooms, expected to do 1,000 covers a day.

"They are all being fed to a greater or lesser extent from the production kitchen," says Wright. He explains that the production kitchen also ensures that standards and recipes are consistent and that it helps with staff levels. "Without the production kitchen, we'd need 50 chefs in Aurora rather than 26," he says.

There is a separate pastry and bakery kitchen, but the production kitchen will have an extra bakery section added to cope with the demand for bread. Located in the basement, the production kitchen depends on two lifts to transport food to other kitchens, plus a third to link it with the loading bay.

The kitchens were designed by the Manser Practice working with Conran's Matthew Jeffries. Installation was by Ali Contracts UK and small equipment was supplied by Nisbets. There is a huge amount of refrigeration throughout the hotel's kitchens, with 21 Foster walk-in coldrooms in total. There are also numerous upright and under-counter fridges, all supplied by Mareno. All refrigeration is monitored by a Monika system from Gamble Food Control.

By contrast, there is only one small freezer, measuring about 6ft x 6ft, in the production kitchen, which is used for emergency supplies such as bread and for staff food, plus a freezer in the pastry kitchen. The pastry kitchen and bakery is also in the basement and has a slope to cope with the difference in floor levels. Each section is housed in a separate room, with a third room being used for ice-cream production.

Dessert components and finished desserts are made in the pastry kitchen: about 50% of the desserts for Aurora are supplied fully finished, while 80% of Terminus's desserts are supplied in this way.

Balancing the books

The restaurants are all run as separate profit centres, so allocating the purchase of ingredients and the cost of production kitchen labour is a complex business, for which a Micros Fidelio computer system is used.

For instance, all meat goes to the production kitchen, then is sold on to individual restaurants at a price that includes the cost of labour to prepare or cook the meat. Other ingredients may be purchased directly by one of the restaurants, in which case the restaurant is billed by the production kitchen only for the time to prepare them.

Aurora's kitchens are housed in a long, narrow room on the ground floor with separate sections for stills, cold desserts and hot and cold starters, plus a hot kitchen and potwash area. In the hot kitchen a Rorgue bespoke range runs along the wall with the pass parallel to it. Included in the range are a pasta cooker, four solid tops, a chargrill, two salamanders, a fryer, two open burners and four ovens.

At the far end of Aurora's kitchen is a dishwashing area, with a Meiko rack conveyor dishwasher, which serves both Aurora and Terminus. The kitchen for Terminus is theatre-style and the main equipment here includes two fryers, a griddle, a chargrill, two open burners and a solid top with ovens underneath, plus a Lainox combi-oven.

There are five more kitchens still to be completed at the Great Eastern - the Japanese restaurant, the George, the Fish Market restaurant and oyster bar, private dining and events, plus room service. So far, Wright is happy with the way the production system operates and is confident it will continue to work well when the remaining kitchens open. n