5 star One Aldwych installs Athanor in Indigo kitchen

One Aldwych is a boutique hotel nestled in the heart of London’s theatre district, on the edge of Covent Garden the West End and City. With just over 100 rooms, the hotel bills itself as ‘big enough to excite, yet small enough to care’.

Independently owned, the 5 star hotel caters primarily to business visitors during the week, with a greater proportion of leisure guests at weekends.

Featuring an underground swimming pool with a unique underwater music experience, a guest-only lounge, eclectic and exciting afternoon teas, along with chic bar and stylish Indigo restaurant, One Aldwych is a truly exciting venue.

Motivation for investment:

Grande Cuisine was contacted by Gareth Sefton of Sefton Horn Winch to undertake kitchen a visits with One Aldwych’s Executive Chef, Dominic Teague, who initially wanted a predominantly gas-based cook suite to upgrade his existing kitchen equipment.

The overall scope of the project was to upgrade Indigo’s restaurant kitchen, which caters for breakfast, lunch and dinner, as well as afternoon tea and serves three private dining rooms along with room service for guests of the hotel.

Challenges identified:

Indigo’s existing equipment and kitchen layout wasn’t optimised to the needs of a contemporary hotel kitchen, so the refurbishment needed to offer better organisation and workflow, with less reliance on pans and levels of pan traffic between the hot kitchen and adjacent pan wash area.

Heat generation was also an issue and needed to be limited, allowing for kitchen staff to work in more comfortable conditions all round.

Finally, the new kitchen needed to be robust and easy to maintain, minimising the risk of issues during service, allowing for both easy access and space efficiency.

Sefton Horn Winch  was consultant for this reburbishment, with the fit out of the kitchen being undertaken by Berkeley Projects.

Solutions:

After visiting several sites with Athanor cook suites installed and in use, and demonstrating to the client different styles of equipment that could be installed, Grande Cuisine proposed increasing the number of electric components, rather than continuing with a reliance on gas.

The proposed and ultimately supplied Athanor suite allowed for ‘traditional style’ solid top cooking, with the added flexibility of being able to use as a direct cooking surface during the busy service periods – this was achieved through the inclusion of three high performance double Plaque Athanor plancha cook plates.

The island cook suite is relatively small, measuring 2500mm (long) x 1650mm (wide) and comprises; 2 single 4kW radiant hobs, a multi-cooker, a twin tank deep fat fryer, along with a traditional cast iron ‘roasting oven’ and a set of hot holding drawers, as well as its Plaque Athanor additions.

Benefits for the customer:

With its radiant hobs and hot holding drawers at the service end of the newly supplied suite, breakfast is able to operate without constraining the rest of the suite’s activity, which means mise-en-place can start and continue while breakfast and room service orders are prepared.

During mise-en-place, the island suite truly shines, with its large amount of production space (on the Plaque Athanor planchas), with the added advantage of the Multicooker, this is used for bulk water based cooking in the morning, and then can be used for holding sauces during service period , as well as cooking pasta or blanching and/or steaming vegetables.

“The new kitchen space is incredible and such an improvement on the original. We gave Sefton Horn Winch an overall brief and the solution delivered has incredible versatility and it’s a real pleasure to work within and the Athanor is a dream too” said Teague.

“The team are really starting to understand the benefits of working with this new suite – the overall heat is considerably less and the flexibility is far beyond what I expected,” concluded Teague.

Steve Hobbs, Managing Director
E-mail: steve@grandecuisine.co.uk
Tel: 01908 745540
www.grandecuisine.co.uk
@Grande_Cuisine

About Grande Cuisine

Formed in 2013, Grand Cuisine builds upon director Steve Hobbs’ 20 years in the commercial catering industry. Steve previously built Signature FSE Ltd into one of the leading influencers in the marketplace.

Grande Cuisine is the exclusive UK distributors for specialist manufacturers

 - Adventys - Every day – plug and play, table-top induction hobs range;
- Athanor - High end – bespoke cooking suites for master and aspirational chefs, high end domestic customers;
- CAPIC – leading manufacturers of Heavy duty modular prime cooking equipment.

All supported by a national network of service engineers.

With over 50 years of combined experience the team behind Grande Cuisine can assist you with design and specification whilst harnessing the quality and environmental credentials of their products.

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