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Tolstoy kitchen concept

A right kitchen concept is a deal breaker in the food service industry.

Inefficient kitchen organization can make a difference on the multiple levels:

  • Customer experience – waiting times increase leaving the customers unhappy;
  • Operational costs – number of employees required to work in the kitchen goes up, therefore increasing operational costs;
  • Lack of automation – all the processes are highly manual and require thinking at all stages, overburdening the employees;
  • Lack of flexibility – inefficient workflows impede innovation. If you cannot simplify the basics, you will not have the energy to come up with the new solutions.

Therefore, we spent a lot of time thinking about the Tolstoy kitchen concept. We took inspiration from 3 sources:

  • Shake Shack – with its principle of organizing the dish assembly line in the middle of the kitchen, so that it can be worked on from both sides simultaneously;
  • Dodo Pizza – with its digital management of process workflows. Each kitchen station has a tablet attached to it, where a kitchen employee needs to mark his or her progress;
  • And, of course, McDonalds – with its principle of one-directional workflow (no step can be made into a different direction vs the rest of the workflow).

Tolstoy kitchen has 6 main interconnected stations: text

  1. Central assembly line – our pinsas and bowls are assembled here;
  2. Baking & packaging shop – the station where the pinsas are baked and then packaged;
  3. Cold shop – the station, where cold mise-en-place as well as ready-to-serve salads are prepared;
  4. Hot shop – the station for hot mise-en-place (minimum in-restaurant, most outsourced) and sort of an R&D station for creating the new seasonal recipes;
  5. Serving & coffee station – as the name says it, orders and hot drinks are being served here. A customer is also able to take his ready-to-serve salad or a cold drink from an open fridge;
  6. Washing station – here gastronome containers and kitchen utensils are being washed. We will not have cutlery or tableware for customers. Disposable tableware will be thrown away once the customer finishes his or her dish.

At the maximum capacity 7 people can work in the kitchen simultaneously, serving up to 250 customers per day. However, at the minimum capacity only 1 person is required.

We were lucky to find a strong kitchen planner Hutterer, who was ready to think this through with us and to collaborate together to create unconventional solutions.

The kitchen is being installed at our location at this very moment. Tolstoy’s first restaurant will open this Summer at Rechte Wienzeile 1b in Vienna, – after the corona is over.