In France, there’s a big wall in most restaurants between the dining room and the kitchen. Sometimes this wall is more figurative than literal, but in reality, the kitchen is an entirely different world than the area where the guests enjoy its output. And just as the food served to guests has evolved over time, so has the kitchen in which it’s prepared. The subject herein is not how French chefs or their philosophies have changed over time, nor how ingredients and their availability have evolved, but how the design of restaurant kitchens in France have progressed to modernity.

Before the first restaurant in France was opened in 1765,1 and for many years following until the Reign of Terror eliminated much of French nobility, large-scale meals were the mainstay of château and manor house occupants. Festive meals lasting more than a day and comprising of hundreds of dishes were prepared in primitive kitchens. Kitchens often consisted of barely more than a single large room, often separated from the main building housing the dining room because of fire danger. One or more fireplaces lined the walls. Food preparation was accomplished on rough-hewn tables in the center of the room. Modern kitchens in the mid-eighteenth century began to be built with multiple rooms, each dedicated to its own function, such as baking, cooking, washing, etc.2 These were the days of cooking before refrigeration. Fresh food had to be cooked and consumed shortly after it was killed or picked. If not, it had to be preserved by salting, pickling, drying, smoking, or any other method common to the times.

By the middle of the next century, large kitchens were the province of large hotels and spas. Kitchen work was divided among various parties (groups of cooks organized by responsibility) such as garde-manger, rôtisseur, saucier, or patisserier. The garde-manger, food storage and preliminary preparation, was located separately from the main kitchen in a room that was as cool as the kitchen was hot. This is the period of timbres, or ice drums, precursors to modern-day ice chests used for picnics. By the end of the nineteenth century, timbres were being replaced by armoires à glace, elaborately decorated cupboards with insulated walls filled with crushed ice.3 The centerpiece of the main kitchen was a large cast iron, usually coal-fired, stove. Off to the side would be wood-burning rotisseries. Kitchens were hot and often filled with noxious fumes and odors. Most were built below street level and had little or no ventilation. Even the sources of light, often gas lights, added to the heat in the room. These were the times when the average cook died at the age of 45, a victim of bad working conditions, exhausting fourteen-hour days, and excessive amount of alcohol.4

Sanitation was probably no better than in the kitchens of nobility two centuries earlier, and maybe worse due to poor ventilation. And even though the twentieth century brought electricity and mechanical refrigeration to French restaurant kitchens, conditions were pretty much unchanged, if we are to believe Orwell, into much of the first half of the century.5

Although there are still traces of tradition in modern French restaurant kitchens, there is also a world of differences. Modern kitchens are well ventilated and brightly lit. Exhaust fans expel cooking vapors. Surfaces are designed to be cleaned and disinfected. Safety guards are used to protect workers from physical harm.

Modern, large, French-restaurant kitchens are designed based on the principle of la marche en avant (marching forward), a central part of many of the various civil codes and guidelines that new restaurants must meet.6 All foodstuffs move through the kitchen in such a way that clean items never cross paths with unclean items. The following schematic illustrates how food moves through the ideal kitchen.

Whether picked-up at the vendor or delivered, foodstuffs are unloaded in the receiving area of the kitchen. Here it is inventoried against the purchase order or shopping list. Non-perishables are moved to dry storage. Meat is brought to the butchery for butchering and portioning, then placed in cold storage. Similarly, seafood is cleaned and filleted before moving before being placed in cold storage. Fruits and vegetables may receive some processing, but they usually go directly to the refrigerator and are extracted when needed for mise en place. Cheese, eggs, cream, and other dairy products go directly from receiving to refrigeration. During the various steps of preparation involved in creating the final product for distribution, ingredients are removed from storage as necessary and processed as required. Food not sent immediately to the restaurant is stored either in refrigeration below 4 °C (40 °F) or in warmers above 70 °C (158 °F) in the main part of the kitchen, not placed with raw or unprepared food. Trash is removed to a holding area outside the kitchen. Soiled cookware is sent to the dishwasher. Completed dishes are placed on the service counter for the wait staff to transport to the restaurant. The same staff removes soiled dishes from the restaurant and brings them to the dishwashing area. Trash from the dishwashing area goes to the same holding area as kitchen trash. In theory, all food only moves in one direction, la marche en avant, through the kitchen.

The principle of la marche en avant is simple to set up in large kitchens, but more complicated for smaller restaurants which have to separate the circuits of movement in time if they cannot do it in space. Compromises are made because of the restraints of space and configuration. The following plan is the layout of the kitchen at the Château d’Amondans, a Michelin one-star restaurant in Amondans, France, built to the principle of la marche en avant. The kitchen is built in the corner of a 250-year old stone building and is large enough to serve 250 guests in a single seating. (Clicking an arrow will pop-up a view of the portion of the kitchen pointed to by the arrow.)

In the kitchen illustrated above, the desire to leave the existing stone walls intact led to a compromise between the chef and the authorities to use the same door for both bringing food into the kitchen and for transporting waste out of the kitchen. As long as these two functions are not done simultaneously, the principle of la marche en avant is maintained. Because of the layout of the kitchen, it is really quite easy to keep food clean and sanitary — plus very tasty, too!

Earlier cooks would recognize little in the modern French restaurant except for maybe the piano, the large stove in the center of the cooking area. Much of the rest, including the layout is quite different from what was used in the past.

1. Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, Savoring the Past. New York: Scribner, 1983, 77.

2. Anthony Rowley (ed), Les Français à table: atlas historique de la gastronomie française. Paris: Hachette Livre, 1997, 101.

3. Timothy Shaw, The World of Escoffier. New York: The Vendome Press, 1995, 75-82.

4. Ibid., 71. This value may not be as bad as it sounds since the average life expectancy of a person born in Paris in 1900 was 45 years, in Lyon 50 years, and in Marseilles 40 years. See Access to Safe Water.

5. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1933.

6. For example: Les guides and recommandations des GPEM. Published by République Française: Ministère de l’Economie, de Finances et de l’Industrie (Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry).