I was hoping this was going to talk about the increasingly trendy open kitchen concept in homes, or more specifically answer the question: why have kitchens traditionally been separated from dining areas in the first place?
We didn't have "help" growing up but when there was a dinner party, there was still the idea that you had the dining room and that all the food prep/cleanup happened out of sight in a different room. You certainly didn't have mingling of guests and food prep/delivery.
This wasn't really upper class but it was influenced by British norms, albeit in the US, even if there weren't servants involved.
The cooking is still exclusively done by "the help" in restaurants, but the article indicates that the theatre, so to speak, of food preparation has come to be considered a desirable trait by those occupying the dining room.
So this doesn't quite answer why they settled on keeping it hidden instead of a display of entertainment. There is no reason to think people in that time wouldn't have found the same enjoyment in watching the food get made.
Most likely the answer is that it's just what one notable person happened to decide, by random chance, to do with his kitchen arrangement, and everyone else copied it in hopes that it would make them equally notable. Pretty much all human behaviour can be explained that way.
> it's just what one notable person happened to decide
Oh no. Chances are the real engine of this change is the recent mass-media discovery of food-prep as a heroic and cool activity.
Celebrity chefs used to be obnoxious, "always-be-prepared", by-the-book home-goddess archetypes like Delia Smith; at some point over the last 25 years, they turned into sexy, improvising, creative rockstars. The creativity-impoverished masses, bored to death by day after day looking at computer screens, now get their kicks by eating and cooking.
You are quite right that another notable person came along and, to buck the trend, decided it would be entertaining to watch "the help", and then the rest started to follow thinking that must be what is required to become notable.
But it could have gone the other way. The first notable person could have recognized the entertainment, and the later notable person could have decided it was better to keep hidden. We don't know why the first one decided to go with hidden, and likely it was just a random choice.
History: greeks and romans traditionally had separated kitchens from homes due yo the use of hearths. Another aspect was fire. Kitchens used wattle chimneys which were super flammable, so it was placed as far away from the main home as possible - also kitchens were a lot noisier.
This is a wonderful trend. Cooking goes on, mixed with kids homework or peers socializing, and it pulls everyone together.
Another nice trend is street level shops and restaurants mixed with housing above. This fights the "estate for everyone" mcmansion trend that separates people.
> Another nice trend is street level shops and restaurants mixed with housing above
FYI this is how most non-american towns and cities have been designed for … ever? Go into any European old town center and it’s full of street level shops with residential on the floors above. Judging from popular photos, much of Asia and Africa are like this as well.
Nah detached houses with yards are the worst of both worlds. You get neither the easily accessible town/city experience nor enough land to do anything interesting with.
But I’m probably biased because I grew up in a city and regularly visited grandparents with legit farms. If you’re gonna have land, it should support at least a decent-sized garden … maybe a few fruit trees, nice shed, couple chickens.
You definitely don’t want a yard that’s spitting distance to your neighbors’ house, that’s just silly.
> You definitely don’t want a yard that’s spitting distance to your neighbors’ house, that’s just silly.
I don't care about having land (nor yard - I especially don't want to take care of one), but detached house is the only way to have loud and/or space intensive hobbies (playing music with drums, karaoke, machine shop). Invent magic sound-isolating material and I'd prefer large flats in buildings, for easy access to everything.
Modern buildings can be surprisingly sound proof. I’ve seen apartments where you close the window overlooking a busy street at rush hour and it’s complete silence inside.
And I’ve lived in detached suburban houses where you can hear your neighbors sneeze.
So we are comparing modern sound proofed multi-tenant buildings to non-modern, non-soundproofed suburban houses? Or are you saying that a suburban house cannot be built with sound proofing?
I’m saying it is not a given that apartments are noisy and it’s not a given that houses are quiet. As you say, it depends on soundproofing not on the form of housing.
My take is the opposite. It’s a nightmare of noise, where everyone is forced to be louder than everyone else. Anyone trying to read or do homework is forced to flee to the edges of the house to find an escape.
Don't people wanting to read in peace just do it in their room? There are social activities in the open plan area (cooking together, painting, crafting, etc) and then anyone working or reading is often doing it in their room or the home office.
If the majority wanted quiet, couldn't they easily push the person wanting to listen to music or watch TV into their room? We have five people in our house; if someone wants to watch something solo, they're usually watching it on an iPad in their room or at the other end of the house.
Open plan living plus individual bedrooms and things like den/study/second lounge, etc gives flexibility.
Did you forget the discussion was about kitchens? And many people's homes do not have all individual bedrooms and things like den/study/second lounge. The advantages and disadvantages of open plan suit your preferences. Your preferences are not universal.
Of course not. What about an open plan (usually kitchen, dining and living combined) or closed plan small house prevents likeminded individuals from working or relaxing quietly? Can you give the specific example you have in mind?
> why have kitchens traditionally been separated from dining areas in the first place?
Smell. To keep the smells of cooking from overwhelming the rest of the house. In the process of building a new house and it will be a separate kitchen. Well, technically, a wet kitchen that is closed off and a small dry kitchen connected to the dining area for dealing with things that aren't strong smelling. This setup is pretty standard in here in Asia.
Having lived in multiple apartments and now back into a house I am amazed that US apartments (at least the ones where I lived) did not have a range hood that blew stuff to the outside. All they did was recirculate air through a grease filter. In other words, useless.
Now back in a house with a connection to the outside. Actually does something.
Although I try to cook outside, because cooking inside means I have to pay for more AC.
Many good reasons below - but another one is that framing large rooms is (was) expensive until pretty close to modern times with laminated beams, etc. So you'd want to make as many smaller rooms as you could already just for cost reasons, and so making everything a separate room followed pretty closely.
Now, for the poorer people (majority?) they'd have similar sized rooms, just fewer - and the kitchen would often double as a dining room (and the living room might double as a formal dining room, if present).
I find I much prefer "openable concept" than open concept - large sliding doors to the kitchen, perhaps, or a drop down under a hutch onto a breakfast bar, so you can close the kitchen off from the rest of the house if you want.
In my parts of the world it was the opposite. Kitchen and living room was traditionally joint. To use kitchen heat in winter to heat up the living area. Usually people would also sleep in the same room during winter.
There were much more region variations on house styles before HVAC conquered everything and Nate it irrelevant.
Modern energy saving building is often reverting to pre-A/C designs - of which one of the tricks is various rooms of various sizes for different times of the day.
I doubt bigger rooms was hard to build. Here in north-east Europe traditional wooden houses were essentially 2 big rooms on either side. With entrance and storage in the middle.
One side was kitchen and living room while the other was „cold“ and usually not used much during the winter.
It depends on the era and the local supply - if you’re building your own house out of your own logs you can likely source quite long trees - in a pine forest.
If you’re going stickbuild at the turn of the century, getting large beams from the sawmill would still be costly. Especially over 20/30 feet.
It probably varies from place to place? Here in north-east europe traditional peasant setup was kitchen and living room together. Kitchen stove was used to heat the house as well. Usually houses would have cold side and warm side. Warm side was warmed up while cooking. People would also sleep in the warm side during the winter.
It only started to change in 20th century with people moving to apartments or building fancier houses en masse.
However by the end of 20th century people were already gravitating back to the usual setup of joint kitchen and living room. Which is the norm in new buildings for the past 20 years or so.
As a non-affluent person who lives in a slightly less “modern” city … I could really use some pictures to quickly understand what an open kitchen looks like in this context.
I understand budgets are not what they used to be, but this article really could have benefited from a nice photograph of what an open kitchen is, instead of the abstract art piece.
My theory is that open kitchens became popular because books like Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential exposed the elites to the fact that cooks were messing with their food. So they devised this open concept as a Panopticon where cooks are constantly watched to prevent licking, peeing in, or putting other fluids in food.
Any good cook can slip anything into the food even if you're staring at him; but it might make the elites feel better.
I feel bad about this whole thing, because half the fun of working a restaurant is being able to talk and joke behind the scenes, which you can't do if you're perpetually "on display".
The rise of open kitchens feels like just another facet of our panoptic tech age. Everything and every job and every person is under surveillance, every task monitored, every move assessed against metrics, every act rateable. there's hardly any realm of work now where you're not being constantly observed and judged, and having to perform for that rating, not even minimum wage work now. Maybe it's not just about transparency, maybe it never was about transparency, or it was about the one way kind of transparency. And also about control.
Well the article is at best incomplete, there's open kitchens in restaurants but an increasingly annoying trend is encountering them in private homes.
The reason for private home open kitchens is simple: greed on part of the real estate developers. Like office open spaces, it's easier and cheaper to develop them, less work, less material, these motherfuckers would sell you a cube of concrete and call it "home" if they could.
It's become almost impossible to buy a new apartment with a proper, enclosed kitchen. And I'm not talking 100s of square meters because at today's prices that's for Bezos and Musks only, a tiny tiny regular apartment with little space to go when stuff starts smelling in the living room (now shared with the kitchen).
Another trend on part of the real estate (agents, developers, all kinda disgusting sleazy hustlers trying to get you buy their crap) is talking you into accepting that smelly cube of concrete instead of proper compartments. "You're not going to cook at home much anyway, are you? Only poor people cook, wealthy guys like you will make at most a tea in the kitchen and eat out or order food".
No, bitches, I cook at home! And it smells! Roasted onion, fried meat, pretty much staple food that needs to be cooked over and over again, smells so strong that you can feel it in the hallway outside the apartment, without an enclosed kitchen. Even with an enclosed one, I still need to open the balcony door and some smell will creep into the other rooms, but it's manageable, with a bit of open windows the smell is gone in 30 minutes instead of lingering for days, so bad that friends smell food in my apartment days after I stopped cooking it.
We cook at home too and I love our open kitchen. I lived in apartments with "proper" enclosed kitchen and I didn't like it. Give me an open kitchen anyday.
True, the foods we cook don't smell as much and we have very good ventilation. Plus my sense of smell is a bit shot (though not defunct), so I don't mind.
People have different esthetic and practical preferences.
> an increasingly annoying trend is encountering them in private homes.
Speak for yourself; I love open kitchens. For me, cooking is an enjoyable and relaxing hobby. If I could throw out the living room and television and replace them with more kitchen space, I would (but I’m concerned about the resale value of the home).
The open kitchen is for entertaining guests and family members, and I like watching how others cook when I visit their homes as well.
What exactly is a closed kitchen? One with doors completely shutting it off from the rest of the home? That seems to be exceptionally rare in the US. So much so I don't think I've ever been into any home that that was the case. There's of course ones with and without walls that partition it off from the rest of the living space, but I can't remember the last time i saw a door on one.
Even when I lived in Germany, while the kitchen was a separate room, it had a big opening that went into a small hallway and right next to it was a dining room.
In none of these scenarios would I think you'd ever magically block off the smell of cooking. I walk by some houses and I can certainly smell what they're cooking, so it's not like even the entirely closed off house is going to prevent that.
I think your issue is actually a ventilation one. You don't dissipate the smell of something by letting it fester in a closed off space. You open a window (like you said) or find an apartment that has a range hood, vented or not.
>> What exactly is a closed kitchen? One with doors completely shutting it off from the rest of the home?
Precisely. My apartment has 55 square meters in all and was pretty expensive as is. My cousin who lives in Paris in a 30 meters (yes, 30 square meters!) apartment was thinking to move to an 80 square meters apartment and was asked €1,000,000 for it (one million, yes, ridiculous but these are the prices). And his 30 meters is close to half a million! So space in major cities is very expensive.
Thus having a closed kitchen effectively gains another room, I have one bedroom and a retractable couch in the living room. Because the kitchen is separated by actual walls, I have sort of a two-bedroom apartment. Two people can sleep in different rooms and it's possible to go into the kitchen or prepare food without bothering them. That becomes especially important when one has kids.
I love how you love your open space kitchens, I dare you do that with kids in a 50 square meters apartment! On the other hand gipsy lifestyle is a thing, extended family of 15 in a tent around the fire, gotta love that.
The intent of the original was for spectacle, inspored by theater, and I would think that other upscale restaurants with similar configurations would choose to do that for the same reason. It has entertainment value. The article contrasted it with diners and sushi restaurants where it serves a different purpose: ensuring sanitary standards.
Open floor plans in offices serve yet other functions: cost savings and employee management.
While it's interesting to note the parallel trend of removing walls in offices and restaurants, I don't know that they actually have that much in common
I’m a big fan of this trend toward more openness in cooking and hope it continues. The article mentions Lazy Bear, which is my favorite restaurant, and one of the reasons I like it so much is that you can indeed see a lot of what’s going on. Their staff goes even further than the article describes by frequently posting the full process behind many of their dishes online and citing the farms they work with by name. I might have been one of those annoying customers, asking which type of charcoal or oak embers they’re using in the konro, but if I owned a restaurant like that I would be excited by customers who took an interest in learning about the craft itself (and perhaps asking too many questions) as opposed to attending on disinterested clients primarily there for a business function.
It is interesting how many people immediately jump to a jaded, negative explanation, missing a rather obvious alternative: what if the guests are just curious?
That would, at the very least, be my case. Some pizzerias do have an "open oven", and seeing the cook preparing the pizza is a nice show of good workmanship. It is not that different from watching a blacksmith on a fair hammering out a horseshoe. We live in an age of industrial production; artisans are becoming rarer.
In a similar vein, some new train sets in Europe actually have a transparent engineer cockpit, so that the passengers can see how the track looks like when underway. Again, this is meant as a satisfaction of natural human curiosity, not some elaborate class scheme to humiliate the engineer, who is a valuable employee.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadUnfortunately, the article is about restaurants.
Not long ago, cooking was often done exclusively by “the help”.
This wasn't really upper class but it was influenced by British norms, albeit in the US, even if there weren't servants involved.
So this doesn't quite answer why they settled on keeping it hidden instead of a display of entertainment. There is no reason to think people in that time wouldn't have found the same enjoyment in watching the food get made.
Most likely the answer is that it's just what one notable person happened to decide, by random chance, to do with his kitchen arrangement, and everyone else copied it in hopes that it would make them equally notable. Pretty much all human behaviour can be explained that way.
And even the ones that do have a theatre of sorts have background preparation and dish-washing that nobody wants to see.
Oh no. Chances are the real engine of this change is the recent mass-media discovery of food-prep as a heroic and cool activity.
Celebrity chefs used to be obnoxious, "always-be-prepared", by-the-book home-goddess archetypes like Delia Smith; at some point over the last 25 years, they turned into sexy, improvising, creative rockstars. The creativity-impoverished masses, bored to death by day after day looking at computer screens, now get their kicks by eating and cooking.
But it could have gone the other way. The first notable person could have recognized the entertainment, and the later notable person could have decided it was better to keep hidden. We don't know why the first one decided to go with hidden, and likely it was just a random choice.
You ever fry fish or saute a dish with a lot of garlic? That's why. Sure, powerful vent hoods, but not everyone has that luxury.
Because my mother would die if guests saw her stack of dirty dishes next to the sink.
Another nice trend is street level shops and restaurants mixed with housing above. This fights the "estate for everyone" mcmansion trend that separates people.
FYI this is how most non-american towns and cities have been designed for … ever? Go into any European old town center and it’s full of street level shops with residential on the floors above. Judging from popular photos, much of Asia and Africa are like this as well.
But I’m probably biased because I grew up in a city and regularly visited grandparents with legit farms. If you’re gonna have land, it should support at least a decent-sized garden … maybe a few fruit trees, nice shed, couple chickens.
You definitely don’t want a yard that’s spitting distance to your neighbors’ house, that’s just silly.
I don't care about having land (nor yard - I especially don't want to take care of one), but detached house is the only way to have loud and/or space intensive hobbies (playing music with drums, karaoke, machine shop). Invent magic sound-isolating material and I'd prefer large flats in buildings, for easy access to everything.
And I’ve lived in detached suburban houses where you can hear your neighbors sneeze.
That seems much easier than the examples I mentioned. I would like you to be right though, and if you are - that it was more common.
> And I’ve lived in detached suburban houses where you can hear your neighbors sneeze.
True, but at least you have some control over soundproofing if you own the entire thing and if that's something you care about.
This is not intended to be like open plan office seating, where nobody can escape. This should be combined with appropriate quiet places too.
Open plan living plus individual bedrooms and things like den/study/second lounge, etc gives flexibility.
Smell. To keep the smells of cooking from overwhelming the rest of the house. In the process of building a new house and it will be a separate kitchen. Well, technically, a wet kitchen that is closed off and a small dry kitchen connected to the dining area for dealing with things that aren't strong smelling. This setup is pretty standard in here in Asia.
Now back in a house with a connection to the outside. Actually does something.
Although I try to cook outside, because cooking inside means I have to pay for more AC.
Now, for the poorer people (majority?) they'd have similar sized rooms, just fewer - and the kitchen would often double as a dining room (and the living room might double as a formal dining room, if present).
I find I much prefer "openable concept" than open concept - large sliding doors to the kitchen, perhaps, or a drop down under a hutch onto a breakfast bar, so you can close the kitchen off from the rest of the house if you want.
Modern energy saving building is often reverting to pre-A/C designs - of which one of the tricks is various rooms of various sizes for different times of the day.
One side was kitchen and living room while the other was „cold“ and usually not used much during the winter.
If you’re going stickbuild at the turn of the century, getting large beams from the sawmill would still be costly. Especially over 20/30 feet.
It probably varies from place to place? Here in north-east europe traditional peasant setup was kitchen and living room together. Kitchen stove was used to heat the house as well. Usually houses would have cold side and warm side. Warm side was warmed up while cooking. People would also sleep in the warm side during the winter.
It only started to change in 20th century with people moving to apartments or building fancier houses en masse.
However by the end of 20th century people were already gravitating back to the usual setup of joint kitchen and living room. Which is the norm in new buildings for the past 20 years or so.
In Barcelona is a perfect example of this. Amazing food and amazing location
I feel bad about this whole thing, because half the fun of working a restaurant is being able to talk and joke behind the scenes, which you can't do if you're perpetually "on display".
The reason for private home open kitchens is simple: greed on part of the real estate developers. Like office open spaces, it's easier and cheaper to develop them, less work, less material, these motherfuckers would sell you a cube of concrete and call it "home" if they could.
It's become almost impossible to buy a new apartment with a proper, enclosed kitchen. And I'm not talking 100s of square meters because at today's prices that's for Bezos and Musks only, a tiny tiny regular apartment with little space to go when stuff starts smelling in the living room (now shared with the kitchen).
Another trend on part of the real estate (agents, developers, all kinda disgusting sleazy hustlers trying to get you buy their crap) is talking you into accepting that smelly cube of concrete instead of proper compartments. "You're not going to cook at home much anyway, are you? Only poor people cook, wealthy guys like you will make at most a tea in the kitchen and eat out or order food".
No, bitches, I cook at home! And it smells! Roasted onion, fried meat, pretty much staple food that needs to be cooked over and over again, smells so strong that you can feel it in the hallway outside the apartment, without an enclosed kitchen. Even with an enclosed one, I still need to open the balcony door and some smell will creep into the other rooms, but it's manageable, with a bit of open windows the smell is gone in 30 minutes instead of lingering for days, so bad that friends smell food in my apartment days after I stopped cooking it.
True, the foods we cook don't smell as much and we have very good ventilation. Plus my sense of smell is a bit shot (though not defunct), so I don't mind.
People have different esthetic and practical preferences.
Speak for yourself; I love open kitchens. For me, cooking is an enjoyable and relaxing hobby. If I could throw out the living room and television and replace them with more kitchen space, I would (but I’m concerned about the resale value of the home).
The open kitchen is for entertaining guests and family members, and I like watching how others cook when I visit their homes as well.
Even when I lived in Germany, while the kitchen was a separate room, it had a big opening that went into a small hallway and right next to it was a dining room.
In none of these scenarios would I think you'd ever magically block off the smell of cooking. I walk by some houses and I can certainly smell what they're cooking, so it's not like even the entirely closed off house is going to prevent that.
I think your issue is actually a ventilation one. You don't dissipate the smell of something by letting it fester in a closed off space. You open a window (like you said) or find an apartment that has a range hood, vented or not.
Precisely. My apartment has 55 square meters in all and was pretty expensive as is. My cousin who lives in Paris in a 30 meters (yes, 30 square meters!) apartment was thinking to move to an 80 square meters apartment and was asked €1,000,000 for it (one million, yes, ridiculous but these are the prices). And his 30 meters is close to half a million! So space in major cities is very expensive.
Thus having a closed kitchen effectively gains another room, I have one bedroom and a retractable couch in the living room. Because the kitchen is separated by actual walls, I have sort of a two-bedroom apartment. Two people can sleep in different rooms and it's possible to go into the kitchen or prepare food without bothering them. That becomes especially important when one has kids.
I love how you love your open space kitchens, I dare you do that with kids in a 50 square meters apartment! On the other hand gipsy lifestyle is a thing, extended family of 15 in a tent around the fire, gotta love that.
Open floor plans in offices serve yet other functions: cost savings and employee management.
While it's interesting to note the parallel trend of removing walls in offices and restaurants, I don't know that they actually have that much in common
That would, at the very least, be my case. Some pizzerias do have an "open oven", and seeing the cook preparing the pizza is a nice show of good workmanship. It is not that different from watching a blacksmith on a fair hammering out a horseshoe. We live in an age of industrial production; artisans are becoming rarer.
In a similar vein, some new train sets in Europe actually have a transparent engineer cockpit, so that the passengers can see how the track looks like when underway. Again, this is meant as a satisfaction of natural human curiosity, not some elaborate class scheme to humiliate the engineer, who is a valuable employee.