Chapter 7 — Exercises

Thirty-four problems, graduated from recall through applied judgment. Items marked with a dagger (†) have worked solutions in the Answers to Selected Exercises appendix — try them before you look.

Do the arithmetic by hand or in a spreadsheet, and draw the plans on paper. A floor plan is the only document in this book you cannot revise after it is built.

Every scenario here is a constructed teaching example. Equipment pricing, mechanical scope, and code requirements vary enormously by market and jurisdiction — nothing here is engineering or legal advice, and a real kitchen requires a licensed kitchen designer, a mechanical engineer, an architect, and your local authority having jurisdiction.

A. Recall and definitions (1–8)

1. Define front of house and back of house, and state the rule-of-thumb split for a full-service restaurant. Why is Bellwether at the kitchen-heavy end of that band, and what did it buy?

2. † Distinguish a Type I hood from a Type II hood. Name three appliances that require the first and two that typically need only the second. What happens if you install the wrong one?

3. What is make-up air, why does a kitchen need it, and what are three specific things that go wrong in a building when there is not enough of it?

4. Define station, the line, and the pass. Which of the three is a place, which is a job, and which is both?

5. † What is an equipment schedule? Name the three separate documents it functions as, and give one specific consequence of each.

6. Define occupant load in one sentence. Why is it not the same as your seat count, and name two things it determines.

7. Define value engineering and distinguish it from cutting. State the seven-step cutting order from §7.6 in the right sequence.

8. What is a grease interceptor, how does it differ from a small under-sink grease trap, and who determines the required size?

B. Capacity, density, and turns (9–17)

9. † A dining room measures 44 feet by 26 feet. Compute the area. At 13, 16, and 19 square feet per seat, how many seats does it hold? Which density would you choose for a \$62 average check, and why?

10. Bellwether's FOH is 1,700 square feet holding 68 interior seats. Compute FOH square feet per seat and total building square feet per seat. Then explain, in two sentences, why neither number is the one a designer works to.

11. † A 3,400 sq ft restaurant splits 2,100 FOH / 1,000 BOH / 300 storage. It seats 84. Compute the FOH/BOH percentage split and the total seat-to-square-foot ratio. Compare both to the rules of thumb in §7.1 and say what the numbers suggest about the concept.

12. Reproduce Bellwether's shape-of-the-week table (Figure 7.1) and verify that the five nights average exactly 1.40 turns and 95 covers. Then answer: which single night should the kitchen be designed to, and why is it not the average?

13. † Using the 37% peak-hour planning rule, compute peak-hour entrées for nights of 70, 95, 123, 135, and 160 covers. At which cover count does a hearth with a sustained ceiling of 28 items an hour become the binding constraint, assuming 50% of entrées route through it?

14. Rebuild the hearth capacity calculation in Figure 7.5 from first principles with different inputs: 12 sq ft of usable deck, 0.5 sq ft per item, 16 items on the deck, an 11-minute dwell plus 4 minutes of handling, and a 65% derate. What is the sustained capacity, and how many covers a night does it support at a 50% routing and the 37% rule?

15. † A restaurant seats 90 and forecasts 1.6 turns over six dinner services at a \$38 check. Compute covers per night, revenue per service, weekly revenue, and annual revenue. Then compute the peak-hour entrée load using the 37% rule, and state one question you would ask the chef before believing the forecast.

16. Bellwether's patio contributes \$64,800 of the \$139,240 revenue bridge. Express the patio as a percentage of the bridge and as a percentage of the \$1,550,000 forecast. Then state, in one sentence each, three design obligations that follow from those two percentages.

17. Compute what happens to Bellwether's annual dinner revenue if the dining room is compressed from 15.9 to 12.0 square feet per seat and every added seat sells at the same rate. Then compute the loss if the average check falls by \$4 across 36,140 covers. Which is bigger, and what does that tell you about density decisions?

C. Layout, flow, and the step count (18–23)

18. † Run the step-count audit on a room of your choosing (or Figure 7.3). Compute: parties per night, round trips per party, average round trip in paces, and total feet walked per service. Convert to miles.

19. Using the §7.4 general form, compute the annual dollar value of a layout change that removes eight paces from an average round trip, on a 48-party night, twelve trips per party, six services a week, at a fully loaded \$24 an hour. If the change costs \$6,000, what is the payback in months?

20. † A kitchen's dish return path crosses the hot line. Name four distinct costs of that condition — one safety, one food-safety, one labor, one guest-experience — and state which chapter of this book treats each.

21. Draw (in ASCII or on paper) a back-of-house plan for a 750 sq ft kitchen serving a 60-seat restaurant with a gas line, no solid fuel, and a dish pit. Show receiving, storage, prep, the line, the pass, and dish, with one dominant direction of travel and no crossings. Label the working aisle and state its width.

22. The working aisle behind a hot line is proposed at 36 inches to gain 18 inches of dining room (about one and a half seats). Argue both sides using §7.3's reasoning, then state your decision and what you would need to know to be confident in it.

23. A manager inherits a room she did not design. Name five changes she could make in a week, for under \$1,000 total, that would reduce steps — and state how she would prove any of them worked.

D. Equipment, systems, and the budget (24–30)

24. † Bellwether's solid-fuel package totals \$75,000 across mechanical (\$52,000), fire protection (\$6,500), and plumbing (\$16,500), against allowances of \$18,000 and \$8,000. Compute the gap. Add \$4,500 of additional soft cost. What is the total that must be found inside the frozen \$310,000 construction line?

25. Verify Figure 7.8. Add the ten re-cut hard-cost lines and confirm they total \$259,500. Add the three soft-cost lines and confirm \$41,500. Confirm the construction line totals \$310,000 and that \$310,000 ÷ 2,800 = \$110.71. Show every subtotal.

26. † The chef-owner proposes funding the hood from "the \$26,000 of allowances plus the \$9,000 contingency." Explain in one paragraph why that is wrong, using the definition of a construction contingency, and name the four unknowns still standing in front of Bellwether's project that the \$9,000 exists for.

27. Build your own value-engineering schedule. A project must find \$38,000 inside a fixed budget. Its contract sum contains: demolition \$16,000 · general conditions \$40,000 · plumbing \$38,000 · electrical \$45,000 · mechanical \$52,000 · fire protection \$14,000 · framing \$28,000 · restrooms \$21,000 · millwork \$36,000 · finishes \$34,000. Produce a schedule of at least six items totaling exactly \$38,000, in the §7.6 order, and write one sentence per item saying what function is preserved.

28. † The equipment line is frozen at \$185,000 and must absorb \$7,400 of modular stainless. Bellwether defers a \$7,400 under-counter glasswasher and picks up roughly 11 extra minutes of bar labor per shift across seven bar shifts a week at \$19 an hour. Compute the annual labor cost and the payback period on the deferred purchase. Then name two costs the payback calculation does not capture.

29. A used 8 × 10 walk-in with a seven-year-old condensing unit is offered at \$4,000 against \$14,000 new. List the questions you would ask, state whether an equipment lessor is likely to finance it, and compute the cost of one failure: 300 pounds of product at an average \$4.10 a pound, plus an emergency service call at \$900, plus one lost Saturday at Bellwether's Saturday revenue.

30. † A restaurant's connected gas load is 1,180,000 BTU/hr and its meter is sized for a former tenant's 380,000. The utility quotes a service upgrade at no charge but a fourteen-week queue. Construction is otherwise a nineteen-week job and rent commences at the certificate of occupancy. Using Chapter 6's \$7,933 monthly all-in rent, state what the queue costs — and then state what it costs if rent had commenced thirty days after delivery of possession instead.

E. Judgment, writing, and the Business Plan (31–34)

31. † Write the memo. You are the chef-owner. Write a one-page memo to your front-of-house partner explaining the value-engineering decision: what the hood really costs, what came out, what did not come out and why, and what the room will now look like. It must be honest about the finishes they are losing and it may not be defensive.

32. Judgment and ethics. Two situations, one paragraph each.

(a) Your general contractor proposes substituting a hood that is "functionally identical" but is not listed for solid fuel, noting that the inspector "won't be looking at the label." It would save \$6,800. What do you do, and what do you say to him?

(b) Money is short and the architect suggests reducing the accessible restroom's clear floor space by four inches to gain a two-top in the dining room, arguing that the plans examiner has approved similar before. Evaluate the suggestion, the reasoning behind it, and your answer.

33. Business Plan extension. For Bellwether — or for your own concept, if you are working Appendix C — build the one-page capacity statement: seats by zone, square feet per seat, table mix, covers by night and daypart, annual covers, peak-hour design load, the binding constraint, and the revenue the room produces from seats and turns alone. Then write the two-sentence honest caption that belongs underneath it.

34. † Business Plan extension. Write the two paragraphs for the plan that face each other on the budget page. The first states what the hood, make-up air, fire protection, and grease interceptor actually cost and how the \$310,000 line was held. The second states what was given up to hold it, names the contingency weakness in dollars and percentage, and lists the four remaining unknowns. Neither paragraph may be reassuring; both must foot.