We build professional kitchens for hotels. Layout design, bespoke stainless steel, refrigeration, cooking, dishwash, wine cabinets, installation and after-sales service: the same trade we have practised since 1974, applied to the one place where the kitchen never closes, because when the evening service ends the breakfast preparation begins.
Below is the ground floor of a hotel we designed: a three-dimensional model you can step into and walk through. The equipment carries the real dimensions of the catalogues we work with. It shows how we lay out a hotel kitchen before it is built, and it is exactly what we hand back to anyone who brings us a floor plan.
Tap the model to step inside, then drag to turn. Two fingers to zoom and pan.
Navigable three-dimensional model of the hotel ground floor.
It loads when you get here, so the page opens fast.
The hotel in this study does not exist: it is an example we designed, like our demonstration restaurant and our yacht galley. What the model states precisely is the kitchen, and the way it serves four different outlets. Structure, building services and permits stay where they belong, on the architect's desk, and our work fits into theirs.
Why a hotel kitchen is not a restaurant kitchen
A restaurant has two services and one dining room. A hotel has one kitchen serving four outlets: the restaurant, the indoor lounge bar, the cocktail bar on the terrace and room service on the floors above. And it has no closing time: at five in the morning the pastry section is baking for breakfast, at seven the buffet is out, at midday lunch, in the evening the restaurant, and the bar runs late. The same brigade changes size five times in a day.
Everything you see in the model follows from that, and none of it is styling. The pastry room is a room of its own, with its own ovens and blast chiller, because it works to its own hours and cannot occupy the hot line. Room service has its own counter and the dumbwaiter, because a tray going upstairs is not assembled on the restaurant pass. The cooking sits on a single island under a single hood, seven metres forty, because one line can be run by two people at six in the morning and by eight at eight in the evening; broken into small islands, it cannot. And the whole back of house opens onto a single service corridor, so goods coming in never cross the kitchen.
The flow
Goods come in at the loading bay on the west side and take the service corridor. From there they go into the four cold rooms and the dry store, and they never travel back. Preparation runs along the north wall of the kitchen, under the ribbon windows; the centre is the cooking block; between the cooking and the pass there is a second counter, which at breakfast is the egg station, at lunch the garde manger and in the evening the plating bench.
Finished plates go out on the pass, where the chef checks them. There is no serving hatch on show in the dining room: in a five-star hotel the waiters collect at the counter inside the kitchen and come through the service door, and the wall facing the dining room stays blind. It is that blind wall that then carries the wine cabinets. Dirty plates come back through the same door, turn behind the pass and reach the dishwash without crossing the cooking line.
The lounge bar has its back bar against the back-of-house wall, so it is restocked from the service corridor without walking in front of the guests. The terrace cocktail bar sits directly in front of the lounge: ten paces, one door, and you never cross the dining room. Those are the two routes a hotel walks a hundred times a day, and they are the reason the bar sits where it sits on the plan.
The wine cabinets
There are two banks of them in the model: one in the dining room, on the blind kitchen wall, and one in the walk-in wine room next door. They are refrigerated cabinets in 1200 mm modules, with a mirrored back, an LED strip on the edge of every shelf and the bottles lying at 96 mm centres, which is the real pitch. The mirror is what makes a cellar look full, and it changes everything to the eye.
This part is not a study: it is something we have done. At the Four Seasons Hotel Milano we supplied and installed IGLU wine cabinets in three separate areas of the hotel. The record is among our projects, with the rest of our work.
Through the eyes of the people who work there
Under the frame there is a list, Through the eyes of. Pick one of the people in the scene — the chef at the pass, the cook at the cooking block, the pastry chef, the dishwasher, the lounge barman, the cocktail barman, the porter in the service corridor — and the model puts you in their place, at their eye height, facing the way they face. From there you walk with the arrow keys, run holding Shift, look around by dragging, and leave with Esc.
It is not an effect. It is how you answer questions that never come to mind in front of a printed plan. Can the porter push a trolley past the staff canteen door while it is propped open? Can the barman turn round between counter and back bar without hitting either? Does the waiter coming out of the service door with a tray find a table in the way? Every position in the model has at least 0.31 m clear all round, columns and walls included: that is the space a person needs to touch nothing, and below it two people brush against each other.
Some views
The same views from the model, for anyone who prefers still images.
What we do, from the plan to the handover
Italfrigo Service has worked in professional kitchens and refrigeration since 1974. Layout: reading the space, work flows, forward flow, clean and dirty kept apart. Bespoke stainless steel: counters, sinks and cooking blocks welded to drawing, as a partner of Marrone Cucine. Refrigeration: cold rooms, cabinets, wine cabinets and plant — the trade the company was founded on. Cooking and dishwash: sizing, installation, commissioning. Bar counters: lounge, cocktail bar and terrace, with the working top at 0.90 m and the raised bar top at 1.10 m, which is the right height when someone sits at it. Service: after the handover.
In a hotel that is trading, the work has to fit around everything else: in phases, at night or during closing periods, and with the management deciding when an outlet can be taken out of service. The rest of our work is in the projects section, from the Four Seasons in Milan to Michelin-starred restaurants.
If you have a project under way
Send us a plan of the kitchen area, even a preliminary one, even just a PDF. We send back a model like this one, navigable from a phone, to turn around in a meeting with the management or the chef, together with the equipment list and its real dimensions. We speak English.