Hi all,
As promised, I wanted to share a post-mortem on my Brooklyn kitchen renovation. It was a painful process that left me cooking on a bunsen burner for double the time I had planned, but it was utterly worth it. Resolving flow issues and joining the cooking and dining areas has made cooking more joyful, improved dinner, and has turned the room into the center of our family life: a place for play, piano, hanging out, cooking, eating, all of it.
I’m going to do this in two parts. In this first installment, I’ll give you before-and-after and focus on what has made the most difference to me: layout and how it can create flow. You don’t have to renovate your kitchen to action a lot of the things that will help you find it.
Next week I’ll talk about design and appliance choices because those are the questions you asked, share some details that thrill me and more photos (for all you photo-hounds).
When I transitioned from cooking every meal in a restaurant to most meals at home, I felt tremendously frustrated and things just didn’t taste as good. Obviously, shopping at the closest grocery store rather than having prime produce required adapting the kind of food I cooked. So too did all the other unglamorous realities of real home cooking (tastes, time, tantrums, dishes!). But I also realized that the layout of restaurant kitchens is designed for a flow that I struggled to recreate in this space. Minor changes in the arrangement of things, along with the layout adjustments made during this renovation, have set me up for the same easy, good cooking at home.
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