Open Kitchen

Why did you create an open kitchen?

When we started talking about starting Dam Chicken we really wanted to focus on high quality food, locally sourced and as much as possible made from scratch. It’s easy to say home-made but it’s harder to do it. So, one of the reasons we created an open kitchen is for you to see us making your food.

Many restaurants hide their kitchen so it's also hard to smell all the wonderful things going on in the kitchen. Our open kitchen allows you to see and smell what’s going on. We hope that it makes for a more interesting experience.

We also wanted the ability to have events where our Chef can cook a multi-course meal just for a group of guests sitting at the counter. Since we were totally remodeling a building, we had the ability to design the space to accommodate all of those things. The building in question isn’t very big so it certainly was a challenge to figure it all out. (Interesting fact – Bill and Jeff designed the entire space.)

The challenge, of course, is that the kitchen can be chaotic when things get busy and that chaos is in full display when its fully open for the customers to watch what’s happening. It requires a lot of planning and organization to get right and it takes a while for our team to get used to the idea of working like that.

Finally choosing to go with an open kitchen and the limited space also made us do a lot of research into what kitchen equipment can be used to shorten the prep and cooking time of our dishes but maintain the high quality of food we want to serve. If you look, you’ll see some pretty cool things. In future blog posts we’ll discuss what some of them are and what they do.

We welcome your questions and your feedback. Please let us know if you have something on your mind and we’ll make sure to get back to you.