mike giordano:
OK I’ll start from the beginning.A good friend of mine owns the building I would be moving into.Right now he’s running his own coffee shop.I ran it across to him a year ago 'bout opening a pizza place.He came to me a few months back and lets do it.He has space that is not being used in the coffee shop which would be perfect although the lay-out is’nt the greatest.So with the high volume of the coffee shop on the weekends because he has bands three nights aweek.When you first walk in you run into the coffee shop then just behind that would be the new pizza place.There is a room adjacent to where the pizza place would be that has 200 sq feet,small but the room is square.
WELL, that changes it all. I rented the kitchen of an existing pub (bar) in St. Louis. It was incredibly smaller than what you’re dealing with, so it CAN be done. Because I had storage and a walk-in cooler (and chest freezer) available to me, my “space” was more than the size of the kitchen.
Okay, on with what you MUST have. You MUST have a 3 compartment sink – though with luck, you can share that with the coffee shop --er, um, use theirs. That’s about 18 sf in itself. Surely this guy has some refrigeration, piggy back off it.
You need oven capacity – meaning you can buy a small conveyor oven, but the pizzas move through it so slowly that you simply cannot produce much food at once. If you’re able to handle deck ovens, get a double-stack. Check about the possibility of a triple-stack – one will be too low and one too high, but it beats not having enough cooking space. Depending on your menu, a 6’ pizza prep table should be plenty. If you do sandwiches, more might be nice. You may not be able to keep all of your toppings on-top at once, but some things (like green olives) can just be kept underneath. I’d recommend a dough sheeter or press rather than doing it by hand. It takes less space to use a dough sheeter or press, IMHO and the flour tossed all over the kitchen in minimized. Your mixer may even be able to be in the “storage” area rather than in the kitchen – even more space savings. A 20 qt (and maybe a 30 qt) mixer can fit UNDER a table (not on a shelf, but under the table sitting on the floor). Use your under-table shelves and of course use overhead shelves.
Make sure you can move two people around in your kitchen. The oven is a one-person job, so put it at one end if you can. Try to minimize traffic in the kitchen (so the two people don’t have to walk past each other except to get to the restroom, etc). Ah, the restroom – another thing you don’t have to deal with (assuming the coffee shop has one). Try to schluff off (I mean delegate) the coffee shop to doing the order taking.
Watch out for those danged stuffed pizzas. I love 'em, but they take a LONG time to cook.
Find a distributor that will deliver less food, more often. 10 years ago, it was “$300 to stop the truck”, meaning you had to have a $300 order to get a delivery. I’m sure it’s gone up. You have plenty of storage space for non-refrigerated stuff, it’s the refrigerated stuff (cheese mostly) that’s going to kill you. Luckily, the refrigerated stuff is the more expensive stuff.
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