Food Arts

Five Top Kitchen Designers Zero in on the Whys and Wherefores of Their Latest Projects.

“Consider the kitchen Jonathan Benno commands at Lincoln at Lincoln Center in New York City—a kitchen of such modernistic design that it appears to float in space. Which, as kitchen designer Jimi Yui explains, it essentially does… Yui created not just a kitchen—but a dramatic example of culinary design.”

Yui explained that developer Patina Group’s Chef/Restaurateur Joachim Splichal “‘…was happy to have an open kitchen—to see that the food being cooked tells a wonderful story. The geometry was such that we needed to create something rectilinear. We wanted to create a standing sculpture that floated. It doesn't touch anything but the floor…we built it so the hood isn't attached to the ceiling. It appears to be suspended in space. 

The notion was that the kitchen would be organized as a brigade kitchen with islands that represented the various stations—the saucier, the garde-manger, the pâtissier, the poissonnier, the entremetier…There's always the need to be cognizant of green issues and try to be as energy-saving as possible. So we used a parallel refrigeration system. [They] consume a lot less energy. And our exhaust systems have intelligence in them to change the volume of air circulated, so the impact is minimal…I like that we created an iconic kitchen for an iconic chef—a jewel box of a kitchen for Jonathan to cook in.’”