Keeping Up With Club Kitchen Design

Club chefs talk kitchen reno regrets, design trends with staying power and the equipment they’re making room for.

By Isabelle Gustafson, Senior Editor

Kitchens Should Be Constructed

CLUB with a dual focus: meeting current food-and-beverage requirements while proactively anticipating and addressing future needs. For many clubs, this means expanding the back-of-house footprint, making room for enhanced banquet and pastry operations, garde manger and pizza programs while optimizing e ciency with new, modern equipment.

During his four-year tenure as Executive Chef of Belleair Country Club, Paul Liptak, CEC, has spearheaded mul- tiple renovations and upgrades to the culinary facilities. Under his leadership, the main kitchen, largely untouched since 1976, underwent a comprehensive renovation in 2020. A year later, Belleair revitalized ‘The 19th Hole’ restaurant’s kitchen. And most recently, the club completed a renovation of one of its two snack shacks with plans to renovate the second shack later this summer.

While Liptak has done kitchen renovations at clubs in the past, the work done at Belleair, in its main kitchen in particular, was “by far the biggest.”

The primary goal of the renovation was to improve flow and e ciency and to better serve the club’s 3,000 members. This also meant investing in new equipment, such as a 1400°F infrared broiler. “We do a fair amount of prime steaks a la carte,” says Liptak. “[The broiler] took our steaks to a whole other level. We could add a nicely seared crust and improve overall texture and cook time.”

The club also invested in a “high-end, programmable Italian pressure cooker [for] pressure-cooking meats, short ribs, stocks for sauces,” he adds, which has drastically improved consistency, as well as a pressure braising pan, combi ovens with built-in hood systems and countertop pizza ovens.

“I can cook a pizza from raw to ready to serve in about two-and-a-half minutes,” Liptak says.

The club’s main menu now features artisan pizzas crafted with a signature sourdough crust. Current options include ‘pizza bianco,’ featuring stracciatella, pickled Bermuda onions, toasted pistachios, and rosemary sourced directly from the club’s on-site herb garden, and ‘pizza burrata’ with heirloom tomatoes, burrata, fresh basil pesto and extra virgin olive oil.

“We saw a need for more casual food, and [pizza] is a natural fit,” says Liptak. “We went from no pizzas on the menu to about 300 [pies] a week.”

Liptak says he was fortunate to have full support from Belleair CC’s leadership team and members throughout each renovation. “I am very comfortable moving through the dining room and in meeting with the members,” he notes, an element of the job he says is “instrumental, especially in a club environment.”

Similarly, Executive Chef Michael Matarazzo, CEC, says Farmington’s Country Club’s membership helped push through plans for the Charlottesville, Va.-based club’s $10.5 million kitchen renovation project, which it completed in 2020.

“I was fortunate,” says Matarazzo. “When I [joined as Executive Chef], I was told that surveys were given out periodically to the membership for the past several years to ask them to prioritize their top capital projects for the next 10 years. And on all of those surveys, the majority voted for a new kitchen.”

He notes that not all memberships know the value of a well-designed, upto-date back-of-house. Fortunately for Matarazzo, the renovation was a long time coming, and members were ready. Fortunately for the club, Matarazzo’s a reno pro; this was his fifth kitchen design project.

One of Matarazzo’s most e ective strategies is to engage in mental visualization during the design process by immersing himself in the space.

“Follow the flow of everything you do in your operation and review it in your head repeatedly,” he says. “Once construction begins, after the crew goes home each day, physically walk through the space, keeping in mind where each piece of equipment will go, to catch any potential mistakes.”

Above all, Matarazzo says, clubs must ensure the chef is heavily involved throughout the design process.

“I was given complete autonomy to design this kitchen, and we now have the ideal kitchen for our operation,” he says. “I have seen other general managers or food-and-beverage directors dictating what is or isn’t needed in the kitchen. More times than not, you end up with a kitchen that doesn’t work for the chef who you hired to do the job.”

Making Space For Pastry

The primary goal of Farmington’s renovation was to expand the available space, with a particular focus on storage. The banquet kitchen underwent a remarkable transformation, increasing its size from 1,100 square feet to an expansive 7,000 square feet. Additionally, the renovation prioritized enhancing employee areas, such as break rooms and locker rooms, to ensure a comfortable and accommodating environment for the team.

Farmington’s original banquet kitchen had two ovens, six burners and one deep fryer, notes Matarazzo. Today, it features 12 burners, four deep-fryers, an indoor smoker, nine ovens, a chargriller, a flat-top grill, a salamander, a tilt skillet and a steam kettle.

“The combi ovens are invaluable to us,” he notes. “And we can’t live without the indoor smoker because we do a lot of barbecue. That’s a huge one for us. … We also installed a custom cooling well that cools our stocks and soups. It has its own dedicated ice machine that dumps directly into the unit.” This streamlined setup significantly enhances Farmington’s e ciency.

Farmington also added a dry-aging cabinet, allowing for the implementation of a “wildly popular” dry-aging program. “And our pasta extruder created a new featured section on one of our menus in our more upscale restaurant,” Matarazzo adds.

Among the most notable changes is the expansion of Farmington’s pastry program, with a shop that doubled in size since the renovation.

“We did have a dedicated shop [pre-renovation],” says Matarazzo, “but it was not independently temperaturecontrolled, so we were limited on our menus. … Adding that space and hiring [Executive Pastry Chef Mellisa Root] and her team has had a huge impact. It was an amenity-driven decision to make sure we have the highest-quality pastries in the country.”

Small in scale but big in impact is a 180-square-foot space dedicated to members with severe allergies. Matarazzo says he expects other family-friendly clubs to follow suit, given today’s allergen prevalence.

Down the line, Matarazzo also expects to see an increase in 100% electric kitchens.

“There are already counties and major cities around the country that have mandated all commercial kitchens switch to electric,” he says. “I think that’s something chefs are going to want to think about.”

Overall, Matarazzo says the newly designed back of house has been a “complete game-changer” for the operation in terms of functionality, flexibility and future growth.

“That’s the best part—there’s space for us to add new toys,” he says.

Factoring Future Needs

Richard Brumm, WCEC, CEC, CCA, AAC, Executive Chef of Bonita Bay Club in Bonita Springs, Fla., shares a similar perspective with Matarazzo when it comes to kitchen design. Brumm emphasizes the importance of anticipating the future requirements of the facility. By prioritizing forward-thinking design, he ensures that the kitchen remains adaptable and equipped to meet the evolving needs and expectations of the club.

“For example,” he says, “the first renovation we did when I came on board was a new member bar: 60-80 covers, small plates, appetizers, basically a predinner space. And that’s what we built.”

But from the first night it was open, he says, members wanted to use it as a regular, more traditional dining venue. Today, the kitchen does 180-220 covers per night in-season.

“I’ve renovated that specific kitchen six times since it was built to try to get it to the point where it can produce at the level the members want,” says Brumm. “As we’ve built kitchens after that, we’ve gotten better and better at designing them for what we need.”

Bonita Bay Club’s next project is a full rebuild of its second clubhouse, slated to start this summer.

“The [Naples Club] used to be in the middle of nowhere,” says Brumm. “Over the past 12 years, the sprawl of Naples has brought the city around the club. As that area expands and grows, the dynamics of our membership will also change. We need a facility with the infrastructure to eventually do dinner, breakfast and more extensive banquet operations.”

The new kitchen will feature a dedicated banquet facility and a garde manger space. But pastry will be done out of Bonita Bay’s central hub, along with pasta production and some other from-scratch operations—a system Brumm finds most e cient.

Construction is expected to take a year, he says. And while some of the current equipment is still functional, the question becomes whether the cost of proper, temperature-controlled storage outweighs purchasing new equipment.

“What we’re finding, especially with some of the older pieces, is that it’s more fiscally sound to let it go,” says Brumm. “So we’re looking at donating some items to our local culinary schools and local nonprofits, trying to do some good for the community.”

When it comes to these types of considerations, Brumm adds, chefs should beware of value engineering during the initial design process—a lesson he learned the hard way.

“It’s important to decide whether the cost-savings on the front side is really beneficial in the long run,” he says. “When you’re building a new kitchen, you must think 10, 20, 30 years down the line. Is it going to stand the test of time?” C+RC

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