Open

"There's a great deal of honesty with an open kitchen because you can't hide anything," says Mike Bennett, restaurant manager at the new Ikea furniture store in Nottingham.

Opened in August last year, Nottingham is Ikea's eighth site in the UK, and its £400,000 kitchen and servery has been designed as a prototype for eight more stores to be built in the next five years. Of the 200 Ikea stores worldwide, only two others have open-plan kitchens.

The company insists on certain kitchen standards, such as the amount of storage space. Ikea also insists on Swedish dishes forming 30% of the menu. Otherwise, the kitchen layout and menu is the responsibility of the local management team - in this case Bennett, who previously ran the restaurant at Ikea's Birmingham store, store manager Ian Duffy, and Tony Bowsher, UK restaurant country manager.

In front of the kitchen is a horseshoe-shaped service counter with a carvery in the middle and identical countering on each side, enabling customers to approach from both sides. The kitchen can service the counter without chefs having to cross the room - there are fryers and ovens, for example, on both sides.

As well as serving the 285-seat restaurant, with its 14,000-20,000 customers per week, the kitchen also serves a 70-seat staff restaurant. This, too, is open-plan - customers standing to the right of the service counter can see through to the staff restaurant. "In our original plan, we were going to have a wall to block the line of sight, but eventually we decided to go the whole hog and eliminate walls," says Bennett.