How large should a homeless shelter kitchen be for serving three squares a day to sixty people? The residents in the building trade duties in the kitchen, so you'd have however many "cooks" in the kitchen serving the rest of the residents, then eating afterward. I'm not talking about five-star meals, but they don't serve prison slop, either. Aside from taking allergies into account, they also don't customize orders. The staff decides what the meal will be, and residents either eat it or don't. There's always food left over, but as many as fifty people would be eating at one time. @Homer Potvin, any ideas? Anyone else?
Not large at all. One range and a commercial oven can handle a homeless shelter. Hell, I've seen joints that can serve a 100 people a la carte from a space not much larger than a big home kitchen. Everything is cooked in bulk (soups, sheet pan casseroles, pastas, etc) and easily prepped. Kitchens only get large when they have a variety of foods to prepare in an unpredictable order. A shelter doesn't need stations (fry, sautee, grill, bake, garde manger) or have to operate on the fly. If anything, you'd need more space for the preparation and refrigeration, so they'd probably have a few prep tables and maybe a reach-in cooler or chest freezer, but I doubt they'd need a full blown walk-in or anything. Sinks too. I'd imagine they'd need something approximating a commercial dish washer to deal with the plates and silverware, which would be much cheaper than using disposables in the long run. And then depending on the laws and safe serve considerations they might or might not need a few other things. Not sure how shelters are classified legally, but they tend to be run by churches on shoestring budgets, and kitchen equipment costs a SHITLOAD of money and has suicidal depreciation rates (think having to buy a new Ferrari every 10 years or so), so I doubt they'd be held to the same standards as commercial operations. They might not serve prison slop, but it would probably be close to it. Think public school cafeteria. They serve soup for a reason: it's cheap, easy to prep in limited space, doesn't easily spoil, doesn't require much equipment, and can incorporate anything laying around. Just about everything served in your kitchen would come from soup pots or sheet pans. Potatoes, chicken thighs, root vegetables, pastas. Unlikely you'd see salads or cold prep of any kind, unless it was a potato or macaroni salad spiked with an oil-drum of mayo (which is nearly indestructible), but I could be wrong about that. Chop everything up, throw it in a pan, heat at a single temperature, serve and repeat. Bing bang boom. Note the five sheet pans waiting for some oven time on the left pick. Steam tables in the middle pic. Soups and chafers on the right. These actually look a bit more elaborate than I would have imagined, but there are probably all kinds of shelter kitchens. A lot of the equipment is probably donated or picked up after a creditor auctions off the contents of a failed restaurant. I've never worked in one before, so there might be more to it. ETA: Shit, now you've got me designing one in my head. I'm worried about where to put the plates and how many steps it will take to deliver them. How much refrigeration will we need and what's the smallest amount of prep we can get away with to balance quality with operation efficiency. You should see my new kitchen: $300k worth of shiny new equipment and a thirty tap nitrous evap beer tap system the size of a garage! I mean, it's not mine--I didn't pay for it or anything--but I have to make it work and juggle cranky chefs and clueless servers, so the owner is more than happy to step in and run it if he wants to. I got a bit of a chub the first time I saw it. Like the Starship Enterprise when it rolled out of space dock for the first time. Or the Titanic. Only been open a month, so the jury's still out.
Thanks for the input, Homer. This one for my story is a private business, designed as a nicer place than the shelters usually run by the Salvation Army or local churches. The homeless here don't like the shelters, and I don't blame them. One guy lost his house, went to the shelter, had most of his few things stolen, and they refused to let him take his prescriptions on time. He said he saw a server sneeze directly in the soup pot and carry on like nothing had happened. That leads into... Padre would refuse to serve food he wouldn't want to eat, and he ate prison slop for ten years. He runs Jude's House on the concept that if you treat people like they're worthwhile, they're more likely to reach their potential. That includes teaching them self-sufficiency skills like cooking. While they aren't going to eat like kings, they will eat well. Thank you. The space I've described in my story is about 3,700 square feet, empty. I figure three ovens/ranges, two fry stations, two fridges, a freezer, two dish-washing stations, prep tables, a pantry, garbage, and a serving line of what I think are called warmers (like at Chipotle, where they put bins of meat and beans) would do it.
I volunteer in a community kitchen one night a week. It serves dinner 365 nights a year. Typically serves 100-140 people a night. The food is served restaurant style rather than cafeteria style. Every night a church group or temple group brings in a main course and dessert and then a chef employed by the community kitchen makes the rest. I volunteered tonight and dinner was Sloppy Joes, with a side of lasagna, corn niblets, cole slaw and for dessert a cookie and a tangerine. The diners do not get to special order other than if they do not eat meat they can request a vegetarian plate. Two volunteers go table to table with a drink cart (coffee, milk or water). The food is very good (I always eat the dinner afterward with other volunteers once the doors have been closed). The kitchen is not massive. Several ovens, a large steel table in the center of the kitchen, a couple of restaurant sized refrigerators, a pretty large storage area for supplies, an area with a restaurant style dish washing unit. This community kitchen does not depend upon governmental money to exist. It does its own fundraising and is self sufficient money wise. It's not raining money there, but it is self reliant financially. Four days a week during the day there is a produce mobile that brings large quantities of vegetables, lettuce, etc. that is given out to anyone who shows up. There is also a ton of bread donated to the community kitchen which diners can take with them when they are done with dinner. I would describe this community kitchen as very high end by community kitchen standards. My daughter is a freshman in college and is taking a social work course class that requires each student to volunteer 20 hours during the semester and she has been volunteering at a homeless shelter where she serves dinner to the homeless. Residents at the shelter (both families and individuals) must be accepted into the program which creates a 90-day plan for them which provides shelter, three meals a day, and services designed to help them get back on their feet in terms of finding jobs and finding affordable housing when they leave the shelter. My daughter's experience at this shelter is that there is not enough funding to go around. Having enough food sometimes is a challenge. The meals served at this shelter are not as nice as the ones at the community kitchen I described above (my daughter volunteered there with me when she was in high school, so she has a perspective that allows her to compare). Interestingly enough, though, one of the homeless residents at the shelter told my daughter one night during dinner that the food at this shelter is way better than is served at other shelters in the vicinity where the meals tend to be served cold. So there are all different levels of quality out there.
I just love reading informed and authoritative factual answers to technical questions here. That's not a dig at anyone else here on the thread or the forum, and it applies to a lot of other people, but it is just so fucking cool that we've got so many random experts here. Completely sincere and serious, I loved this reply (and any number of others scattered elsewhere throughout the site).
I agree. The answers given by Homer and Mr. Write are both extremely helpful. I love it when someone can provide thorough, expert information based on intense study or long experience. My kitchen is still a chaotic mess, but that's okay. It's all going to get blown up, so it doesn't have to be too detailed. My descriptions thus far have been based on the kitchen in the church I grew up in, because they served 300-400 plates every Wednesday night, but the food was absolute garbage.
Oh, is this the one with the defrocked priest and zombie uprising? Cool! I wouldn't sweat the details too much. Kitchens aren't very interesting as far as narration goes. 3700 feet is ginormous... you could run a hotel banquet hall with half that space. And there's no such thing as a second dish station. That would be a fabulous misuse of space, especially for 60 people, which is nothing. You could clean every plate in the joint with three racks in under two minutes. Even a 5000 seat ballroom uses a single station with a single machine, though to be fair, the machine is about the size of a house with multiple conveyors and an army of Oompa-Loompas manning the sprayers. I think the one as the casino where I worked cost around a million bucks, but that was probably exaggerated. Not sure about the frialators either. There's probably a shelter somewhere that has them, but that kicks things into another tier of permits and building codes. I might be mistaken, but I don't think you can run a fryer without hoods and fire suppression, which adds another $50k (at least) to the operation. Less is probably better in this case. For example, I worked for a stupidly successful landmark Italian joint back home that ran a 90 entree menu for 150 seats with only an executive expediter, three line cooks, and one dude in the back. We had an 8 burner range and a single oven. All in all the kitchen was maybe 800 square feet, and even that might be generous. And that was high end a la carte, not 60 identical dishes. As a general rule, catering and banquets (including shelters) are paint by numbers as far as kitchens go.
Fantastic. Thank you again. I'll downsize the kitchen to, say, 500 square feet. That's probably crowded, but nobody's going to be elbowing anybody into hot pans and such. A few things I do need to mention in the story: I've got one guy overseeing his cooks in the kitchen. We've got eggs, sausage, bacon, pancakes, fried doughnuts and doughnut holes, coffee, juice, milk, fresh fruit salad, toast, bagels, hash browns, and grits. They'll serve the residents, then the cooks will serve up their own plates and join the residents. Afterward, the same crew will clean up. How many people would it take to cook all that? Would you have one guy on bacon, another on sausage, etc., or would one guy handle multiple dishes? If they eat breakfast at 0700, how early would they need to get started? They'll be cooking for fifty people, including themselves, with extra food for seconds. Lunch will be a few soups, probably tomato and potato, with grilled cheese sandwiches. Not that Kraft Singles bullshit, either. They'll at least swing for some honest cheddar, even if it was sliced beforehand, frozen or otherwise stored, then pulled out to make the sandwiches. Coffee, water, milk, fruit punch, or soda to drink. Same situation there: kitchen crew plus residents equals fifty, with ten extra plates. How many guys in the kitchen? Lunch is at 1200, so when do they need to get started?
Whoa. That's not a homeless shelter... that's a $25 a plate Sunday brunch in a piano bar. I understand you're going for something a bit more... something, but this is turning into an overpowered hero of a breakfast. Who's paying for all of this? You've got a few grand in food costs already.... do that every day and you'll hit a million a year easy. Never mind your equipment and labor costs. I know you said these were volunteers, but I doubt anyone is putting in a 60 hour community service week unless they're independently wealthy to begin with. Not to mention the daily deliveries you'd need from multiple food distributors, which turns your shelter into a full blown commercial operation. I mean, fresh fried doughnuts? People pay $4 apiece for those in the real world. At least 6 cooks working from 4am to 4pm. Bacon, eggs, and sausage can all be dumped into a pan and baked, but a fresh fruit salad for 50 people takes a solid hour or two to prepare by itself. And you need a shitload of fruit, which is very expensive and requires a lot of room to refrigerate. How are you toasting the bagels? Or griddling the pancakes? If you cook them live you need a bunch more equipment. If they're prepped you need a shitload of time. Do you have an extra walkin to store juice and milk for 50 people three squares a day every day? Add in the industrial coffee urns and you've added another easy $50k-$100k in equipment that will constantly break and need servicing. $500 just for the guy to show up and say hello. Real cheddar costs a fortune. Pre-sliced cheddar costs a fortune and a half. And cheese doesn't get frozen... not that I've seen at any rate. I'm not trying to talk you out of anything here. Just pointing out that what you're proposing is beyond the pale and over the moon unless the Bill Gates Foundation is covering the overhead (and who knows, maybe there are million dollar homeless shelters out there... wouldn't be the craziest operation I've ever seen or anything). If you want to go this route I would skip over all the details because they won't work for you unless you plan on going out of your way to justify the plot-hole, which would be a narrative death-knell. The thing to remember here (which the Internet and Food Network fail to mention in their senseless pandering to self-proclaimed "foodies") is that food is very expensive, laborious, infrastructure intensive, and very, very, very, very, very time-consuming to produce. But if you've already got murdered families, defrocked priest avengers, Halloween blizzards, and a zombie uprising, what's a luxury homeless shelter on top of all that? I don't mean that sarcastically, either. If you're going to go over-the-top, go all the way over-the-top and don't look down at the details... I love stories that can do that without becoming preposterous. ETA: Did I mention liability insurance? A kitchen full of professional chefs with culinary degrees will average one significant hospital visit every month or two. Usually it's a fall, burn, of a lopped off fingertip... I'd hate to see the accident rate for a crew of volunteer amateurs. And if you have frialators you better have a skin-graft deductible built into the policy. It's all fun, games, and Food Network until someone steps into a vat of 350 degree fry oil.
Padre is independently wealthy, through ways and means nobody but Padre knows. He bought the building for the shelter in foreclosure, and pays for the shelter out of his own pocket. Nobody asks how he can afford it, so long as they're fed and warm. Even so, let me approach the question from another angle. Would six guys working two hours be able to serve a truly decent meal for sixty? I'm looking for at least eggs, bacon, and continental breakfast type food. Maybe not fruit salad, but at least some bananas or oranges or raisins or something.
I don't have Homers level of experience but even I can tell you that 60 is nothing - it shouldn't take six guys anything like two hours to do a basic full English and breakfast buffet Hell, in the Army one cook and a couple of helpers prepare food for a company plus unit -that's about 80-100 men, okay so army food isnt quite of the quality you are talking about but still..
I'm trying to get a feel for the typical day of my main character. Vincent wakes up, starts the generator because the power went out, dumps the old coffee machine in the mess hall because the power bump finally killed it, he gets his boss's daughter settled into her room, calls his boss, and sets up a new coffee machine. Vincent woke up at 3:00 thanks to sirens going by his window. During those next four hours, I need to know when the kitchen crew would wake up and be in the kitchen, because that influences Vincent's routine and how exterior events (the apocalypse growing to the east) will shape the day. I need to show that Vincent cares about his people, as does Padre. To do that I need to show what kind of facility they live in. Jude's House Homeless Shelter is 80,000 square feet spread over four stories including a basement, and needs amenities more like a motel than a shelter. Fifty residents including Vincent, with a kitchen to keep them all well-fed.
For breakfast about an hour before you want to serve ... it doesn't take long to chuck a bunch of bacon and sausages on the grill and start some eggs frying and toast toasting. Couple of big boilers for tea and coffee and jobs a good un.... keeping a load of homeless well fed and looked after requires good wholsome food, not cordon bleu * (Incidentally in the army we reffered to mess hall food as 'Gordon Bleurrrgh' )
Depends on what you mean by decent. If you can chop it up and cook it a hotel pan with no other preparation, you might be able to bang it out in three or four hours. Excluding cleanup of the equipment, of course. Two ain't happening. It'll take at least an hour for service if you're doing seconds, and I've never seen a steam table cleaned and rotated in under an hour. But if Padre is as rich as he seems to be, I suppose he could outsource the cleanup. Sure, if that's all your doing. The OP is rocking fresh shit three squares a day. That's a full blown operation... but whatever.
What I've gathered is it's really difficult for a kitchen to serve fresh food all the time without a full-time kitchen crew and some major money invested in the operation. Perhaps I'll have Wayne (my kitchen leader) and his six working the kitchen full-time. I'm using a future setting, so I might be able to use technology to alleviate some of the food storage issues. There would probably be a different crew cooking each meal, too.
I think the bigger question is why a homeless shelter is rocking fresh shit three times a day. Not only is it not necessary but its also probably not wanted a lot of people who wind up homeless aren't used and don't necessarily want a load of fancy stuff - three squares a day, no messing and a roof over their heads is all they want, and having a full restaurant service pushes credibility unecessarily You can communicate that padre cares about his guys and is looking after them well out of his own pocket without making it the 2nd Ritz Quite often a homeless outfit will have the residents helping with food prep etc not only for cost reasons but because it makes them feel like they belong. A lot of homeless are vets (which is fucking disgrace but that's a different conversation) and the feeling of being part of something, rather than being given charity is important to them Padre giving them lots of shit because he can easily afford it is more likely to breed resentment than loyalty. Padre giving them everything he can afford because they are all in it together is much more likely to form the unit loyalty that Jester will need when the wheels come off
I do appreciate your input. I'm not sure why using technology to alleviate some of the food storage issues would make you want to leave. It was merely an idea (apparently a bad one). I'm open to learning and changing my story for the benefit of realism.
Our school cafeteria serves breakfast and lunch to about 100 kids with two staff - they arrive around 7:30 to serve breakfast at 8:30 because they prep most of the stuff the day before. It's not fantastic food but it's from scratch, with wholesome ingredients. (Breakfast is often bagels (there's a rotating-style toaster the kids can use themselves) and breakfast burritos with some fruit (not fruit salad, just, like, an apple or a banana or an orange or whatever); lunch is often casseroles - not a lot of meat in order to keep costs down, but some. They have salads using pre-mixed greens from big bins dressed up with whatever vegetables they feel like chopping up, and often some chick peas or equivalent. Honestly, unless there are absolutely no other homeless people in the broad area, it seems weird to spend a whole lot of money on something fancy for a few people while other people are still out on the streets. And setting up hierarchies among communities doesn't seem like a good idea - you don't want someone getting dragged out of the "fancy" shelter to make room for someone tougher.
Jude's House is for men who are serious about getting off the street. Residents are expected to be proactive about self-improvement. They polish their education, find employment, learn a trade, and eventually move into their own apartment or house. It's a strict program, but for their commitment to it, Padre rewards them with real living conditions. They start to live like productive people, so when they make the jump to living on their own again, they can handle it. I'm not sure what you mean by "you don't want someone getting dragged out of the "fancy" shelter to make room for someone tougher." If a Jude's resident doesn't stick with the program, they'll be evicted after several warnings and offers of guidance. Padre is interested in helping people who want help, not in enabling laziness.
Most homeless shelters offer more than just food, though. Many provide access to services that can help them get back on their feet.
To alleviate the cost, many shelters / food kitchens have either volunteer hour requirements or parter with other entities to create culinary training programs that offer a certificate, which helps the people find employment and get back on their feet. The rock star Jon Bon Jovi's foundation does a lot of work on homelessness alleviation projects. He and his wife are especially active in the area of Hunger prevention. Scroll down to "Hunger" and you'll see some ideas you may not have thought of. As a bonus, there may be video or photos of the kitchens to give you some ideas of layouts, too. (Sorry for double post! Totally spaced out on the Add Quotes feature.) http://www.jonbonjovisoulfoundation.org/our-projects-new/
This is kid of off topic, but all the shop talk about kitchens (which I am drinking up like a sponge) makes me wonder what @Homer Potvin would think about a trendy restaurant called Crazy Water in my neck of the woods that has the tiniest kitchen I've ever seen: See that little area to the left of the door with the big range hood? That's where two guys cook everyone's food all night long. I imagine they must have a larger prep area and walk-ins in the back somewhere, but that's where the magic happens when you dine there - it's a really cool atmosphere.
I don't have the commercial kitchen experience, but I know in residential kitchens there's a concept called the work triangle, with the sink, stove, and fridge forming the three points, and it's considered important to keep that triangle fairly small in order to avoid unnecessary travelling. I assume a similar principle would apply to a commercial kitchen? As big as it needs to be to hold everything and give room to work, but otherwise as small as possible?
Yeah, that joint looks official. Menu is sick, too. That's the official Italian fingerling octopus, which if fucking divine if you've never had it. Three hour boil... the thing goes from the size of a tire to smaller than a softball. Tough to tell by looking at it, but it looks like a fairly small joint (60 seats?), and because they seem to emphasize reservations, they can probably stagger seating as necessary to make the place play smaller than it is when necessary. That's huge... and hard to pull off unless you're in an urban area. Where I live, forget about it. The idea of waiting for a table is about as comprehensible as Sanskrit to our clientele. Just about everything on the Crazy Water menu looks to be grill/broil with limited sautee. I can't tell from the picture, but that hood looks way too small to accommodate much more than a grill and maybe a small range, though looking more closely at the menu, I suspect the majority of their sauces are prepped in steam tables instead of built in the pan. That's huge too. There's two kinds of joints: those that roll heavy on sautee and those that don't. That might be a little garde manger (cold prep) on the far right, but I'd push all of that to the back if I could. The gag with open kitchens is to present to the guests the cool steps and hide the bullshit in the back. I don't see anything fried on the menu, so maybe no frialators? They'll have commercial microwaves hidden in the back to cheat when they need to. Plates look small and fabulously overpriced, which is awesome in my book. Definitely a bistro influence there. Lunch shuts off at 1:30 before reopening for dinner at 5, which tells me they're drowning in prep... you don't shut your doors in an urban area unless it's absolutely necessary. Given the open concept, I'm guessing they have a lot of fire and forget dishes. Food costs would probably make your eyes believe, but if you can pull of $28-$36 a plate you can still make margin. Wine list looks decent for what it is, though anyone who drops $65 for a Williamette Pinot Noir needs to have their heads examined. Not much you can do about that. Restaurants make their entire margin on alcohol, so no apologies there. As far as the operations go, it looks like a small menu with lots of redundancies. Proteins are no sweat. Scallops, halibut, duck breast, and veal butt don't require much prep or space. Especially with the size of their portions. Hell, a tub of scallops would probably last a weekend and pay 70 cents on the dollar. It's the sides and accoutrements that kill you, but they seem to have that under control. Kitchens don't need to be big compared to prep, storage, and refrigeration, and I suspect they don't do too many covers. Maybe 100-150 if they turn it twice, but I can't tell that from the pic. Super cool! I'd make the owner give me a walk through for sure, which they almost always do.
