Great Kitchens: At Home with America's Top Chefs - Hardcover

Reinheimer, Ellen C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1561582875 ISBN 13: 9781561582877

Publisher: Taunton Press, 1999

Synopsis

Professional chefs design their home kitchens for efficiency, comfort, and style. What makes a pro's kitchen work so well? A knowledge of cooking and a signature style. This book features hundreds of design ideas offering readers a glimpse inside the home kitchens of some of America's most renowned chefs. It's a visual feast and a wellspring of design inspiration.
-- Features 26 dream kitchens and advice on creating your own.
-- Includes more than 300 photographs, floor plans, lists of equipment, and recipes.

About this title

Review

If envy is an issue with which you struggle daily, you may want to avoid Great Kitchens, a lavishly illustrated walk-through of 26 fabulous kitchens in the homes of some of America's best chefs. This is a Taunton Press publication--the same people who bring us Fine Woodworking, Fine Homebuilding, and Wooden Boat, among others--so rest assured the production values are high enough to raise the stakes for everyone else in the business.

The one thing all of these kitchens have in common is that they didn't start out this way. There are kitchens put into Victorian houses, 1920s farm houses, swim schools (no kidding: Mary Sue Milliken of Border Grill in Los Angeles, and her architect husband, Josh Schweitzer, bought a small swim school and put home and kitchen where locker rooms and showers could once be found), old bars, upscale apartments, ancient stone houses. These are kitchens, then, that have been thought about by people who work with food, and know what they want at home.

Built-in wood-burning ovens and hearths seem to be a big deal. So, too, are custom wok stoves. Seattle chef Tom Douglas put his enormous prep island on industrial casters. He also put his herbs and spices into cans that attach to bar magnets on what would be wasted wall space. He chose the domestic version of an industrial stove because it is better insulated and doesn't heat up the kitchen. And like several chefs in the book, he swears by his commercial Hobart dishwasher with its 90-second cycle.

Great Kitchens is a multifunction book. You can leave it open on a coffee table as a piece of publishing art. You can use it to launch your daydreams. But most of all, you can use it to learn from the mistakes and successes of others, and gain insight from a lot of very practical information.

Most over-the-top built-in appliance? Terrance Brennan's bread-warming drawer. But in this book, it makes perfect sense. --Schuyler Ingle

From the Back Cover

If the kitchen is your favorite room, if cooking is your favorite pastime, or if eating well is your most unregrettable vice, let Great Kitchens take you to paradise. From the home kitchen of Chez Panisse's Alice Waters to The Inn at Little Washington's Patrick O'Connell, each chef's kitchen is a unique jewel of culinary understanding and design. The 26 chefs in this book share the secrets that make a kitchen a great place to cook, to relax, and to enjoy the best of food and company.

The 300 color photographs in Great Kitchens map out an intimate tour of the home kitchens of America's top restaurant chefs. Inside you'll see a remarkable range of styles, each expressed in the cabinets, fixtures, appliances, counters, storage, and finishes of these mouth-watering kitchens. Look inside, meet the chefs, hear their stories, and learn the secrets of first-rate kitchen design--and be sure to check out the favorite home recipes from each of these 26 world-class chefs in the back of the book.

About this edition

• Publisher: Taunton Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1561582875
• ISBN 13: 9781561582877
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240