Back of the House: Gathering Place

Benihana’s new kitchen centralizes the equipment so servers can take fewer steps and make fewer stops.

By Mary Boltz Chapman, Editor-in-Chief -- Chain Leader, 1/1/2007

The focus of an everyday kitchen redesign is on the back-of-the-house staff, ensuring they can do their jobs efficiently. Benihana’s new kitchen aids the prep cooks, sure, but it’s helping the front-of-the-house staff—thus the customer—even more.

The back of the house was a significant part of Benihana’s redesign, begun early in 2004 and debuted in spring 2006. Because teppanyaki chefs in the dining room do much of the cooking, the kitchen didn’t require the space it would in a typical casual-dining restaurant.

Scaled-Down Model

"The space in the kitchen was dictated by more traditional benchmarks, a percent of kitchen space," says Mark Godward, president of Miami-based Strategic Restaurant Engineering, which designed the kitchen. "The first step was to reduce what was the back of the house to what was really needed for food-prep activities and storage." In the end, the kitchen is 900 to 1,000 square feet smaller than in the old design."With the new prototype, the idea is to maximize every square inch of that restaurant, minimize the size of the kitchen as much as possible to be more efficient," says Douglas Medina, Benihana’s senior director of supply chain and operations improvement support.The back-of-the-house work is mostly food preparation and some limited cooking such as steaming rice, simmering soups and toasting sesame seeds.Limited cooking in the kitchen did not make the redesign easier. "It was difficult coordinating what happens at the teppenyaki table with the items that go in as appetizer orders, the items that go in as sushi orders and the bar drinks," Godward explains.

In most restaurants, servers collect everything from the central kitchen or the bar. At Benihana raw ingredients go to the table to be cooked, appetizers used to come from the back kitchen, sushi came from the sushi bar, and drinks from the bar. If someone came in for the teppanyaki experience and another customer at the table wanted sushi, it was difficult to coordinate.

Back to Front

Now the bar, the kitchen proper and the sushi bar, which also acts as a display kitchen in cooking appetizers and takeout orders, are located in very close proximity. When a server goes to that general area, he or she can pick up all the things that go to the table."It’s a good example of how we leverage the back of the house and the whole functionality to provide a greater variety of consumer experiences," Godward says. Medina adds that new refrigeration prep equipment for the teppenyaki chefs enables them to gather their cut ingredients quicker. "So the chef can get out to the dining room in less time," he says. The centralized kitchen has improved table turns to 75 or 80 minutes from 90 to 100 minutes. Godward also credits a new cash-register system: Instead of cashing out with a cashier in the back of the house, at busy times even waiting in line, servers now ring up their checks at POS terminals in the dining room.

Looking ahead, Benihana will reconfigure the pass through that goes from the center of the sushi bar to the back into two, one on either side of the sushi bar, because it needed a little more space in the kitchen. The tighter kitchen has also led Benihana to look at the supply chain for ways to minimize the prep that’s done in the kitchen, perhaps passing some of it to vendors.