Customer Reviews

Great Kitchens: Design Ideas from America's Top Chefs

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I bought this book thinking that it would be just a sort of celebrity tour of the home kitchens of some well-known chefs, a great idea in itself, but more style than substance. Boy was I wrong. There's more meat to this book than in Julia Child's beef bourguignon. My wife and I have been planning to completely overhaul our kitchen for years now, and we've gone through dozens of kitchen books without finding much really useful design information. Well here it is. On our first sitting with Great Kitchens, we identified at least five great kitchen design ideas we will definitely incorporate into our new kitchen. I'm sure there are more, but I just can't seem to get the book out of my wife's hands.

Finally a book with some "meat and potatoes" content that is enhanced with beautiful photography and actual floorplans! Not just a book of pretty pictures that have little to do with actual cooking. These kitchens combine the best of design, performance and above all, personality. The written background is also fascinating and really gets into these chef's heads about their approaches to their own, personal kitchens. When's Book TWO?!!!

Because we're planning to remodel the kitchen, I've looked at many kitchen design books. This is the best one! It has great ideas. It has floor plans. The featured chefs even talk about the mistakes they think they made when they designed their kitchens. These are grand kitchens. Even if you want to do something more modest, you'll appreciate the ideas in this book. We've all cooked in kitchens that are just plain badly designed. These kitchens were planned by people who really cook. If you don't have a kitchen remodel in your future, put this book on your coffee table. Everyone will enjoy looking at it.

I recently purchased this book. Having been interested in Kitchen Design for a number of years, I thought I would maybe find a nice cabinet style for my ideas file. I was wrong. I couldn't put this book down when I opened it. As other reviewers have mentioned, it features floorplans and beautiful pictures. I came away with plenty of new ideas to further develop the plan of my perfect kitchen.

From the grand workhorse kitchens of Perrier, Miller and Folse (my favorites) to the open living kitchens of McCarty and Dale, there are a vast array of kitchen styles and functions covered in this book. There are kitchens that use the Magic Triangle method, and those who use a restaurant-style function (Wet/Dry/Hot/Cold) layout, which I find more practical and was thrilled to see.

I would highly recommend this book to all people planning a kitchen, whatever the size. You are bound to get at least a dozen ideas to make your kitchen more space efficient, organized or just more beautiful!

This is hands-down the best kitchen planning and design book I have seen. I learned so many things from it about picking materials, lighting, fixtures, sinks, layouts, etc. that my remodeled kitchen will be better because of it. I paged through endless books and magazines filled with lovely photos, but that lacked information or substance. This book stands out because it discusses pros and cons, budget tradeoffs made, the good decisions and "if-I-had-it-to-do-over-again" mistakes. These are kitchens put together by demanding professionals who won't tolerate (bad)or lightweight materials that are hard to clean. I learned many lessons about flooring, countertops, backsplashes and so on that were never touched upon by other books. Sure there are appliances to drool over, but there are also chefs who ran out of money during the remodel, or bought factory seconds tile to save money. Real-life issues and lessons.

My husband and I both love to cook and we're looking at remodeling our kitchen. This book has great inspiration on how to think about your kitchen space and how you use it. It's got some great ideas on how to think about your kitchen arrangement and storage options from people who KNOW what can get irritating very quickly. The downside of this book is that these kitchens were obviously done on budgets that most of us would never dream of -- we're not going to be installing professional/commercial grade appliances, and we're not going to have granite countertops or custom-made cabinetry. However, just to read how professional chefs planned out their own kitchens to make their lives easier, and their ideas on storage and display make this book well worth while.

This is a good book about kitchen design. It shows the kitchens of 26 famous and near-famous (or once-famous) chefs. Its three authors adopted a template for their interviews so that, after a few, they all start to sound alike. The formula: (1) the design challenge and how the chef solved it; (2) the space and the appliances; (3) what the chef would have done differently; (4) the chef's culinary background and influences; (5) the chef's restaurant(s). I am trying to design a kitchen and found (1)-(3), particularly (1), to be helpful. I skipped (4) and (5) and my hypothesis is that they are only in the book so the authors could grab some comp meals at some very expensive restaurants. Oddly, there is also a mish-mash collection of each chef's "favorite home recipe." Granola, anyone?

Strengths - Three things stand out:

1. The design process. These chefs are inventive people with great attention to detail. There is much value in reading about their visions and how they turned them into kitchen designs. This may be the hardest step, and it is helpful to see how creative people take it.
2. Floor plans. Too few kitchen design books provide them. They are helpful both to see the working space layout and to understand how the photos interrelate.
3. What to do differently. Sometimes you can only learn from mistakes and kitchen design mistakes are costly. Unfortunately some of these are very idiosyncratic: "I am a tall man and I should have placed the stove hood higher."

Annoyances

1. Impractical. Most of these kitchens were constructed without a budget. The chefs are affluent people who use their kitchens for classes and television productions, so they are financed by taxpayers in the form of deductions. The appliances are mostly "high-end" and beyond: Montague, Traulsen, Beko, La Cornue. There are wood-burning pizza ovens, specialty woks, custom designed rotisseries. This is nice to look at in a picture, but no help in designing my kitchen.
2. Outdated and overpriced. The book is ten years old now. Many of the restaurants that are described are long-gone. The precious children in the kitchen are pimply teenagers and probably some of the marriages are splits-ville. But, more significantly, in ten years there are lots of new products on the market and you might design a kitchen differently today. The book is too expensive for what value it still retains.
3. Homage to the chefs. Does anyone really care, when they're designing a kitchen, why a chef got interested in cooking, how they met their spouses, the names of their restaurants, and what year they won the "prestigious" James Beard Award? It would have been nice to reduce this repetitive and peripheral information to call-outs and save the space for practical advice.
4. Duplication. The captions for the photos are often verbatim excerpts from the text and add no value.

What's wrong with the book:

In the end, kitchen design is a series of practical decisions about appliances, counters, cabinets, floors, lighting, and fixtures. This book provides no systematic guidance on any of these topics. There are anecdotes and snippets that can be gleaned from the chefs' experiences, but the book cries out for separate chapters on each of these topics in which the authors reflect on what they've learned from interviewing these great chefs and how it can be applied by you and me.

There is a lot that the authors could have learned about, say, choosing appliances. Almost all these chefs chose ultra high-end ranges and refrigerators that are impractical or unaffordable in most kitchens. But these chefs didn't always own such high quality appliances and they could offer good advice about what to look for on a lower budget. This is what I was looking for in a book called "Great Kitchens", not a recipe for granola or a story about how a chef's father taught him to make pastry.

I really like this book alot!
Ken Hom's kitchen fascinated me. The 90 second Hobart sanitizing machine is De Rigueuer but you still have to wash all your dishes before you put them in the Hobart.

Secondly, study his work triangles and read the text. There were sink plumbing restrictions during remodeling and design focus on teaching. Su cuccina, mi cuccina? Maybe not but a great collection of design ideas, just look closely. See waht ideas would work for you and why. Some of these kitchens (John Folse)were designed for TV Production with ample room to move cameras around.

These chefs will tell you some of the mistakes they made and give you the reasons why they designed their kitchens the way they did. A great read and a great drool! Kitchen Kudos to you Miss Ellen Whitaker, et al!

This book has mouth-watering photos of the kitchens of world-class chefs. How they designed their dream kitchens, what tools they find useful, it's all here. The book inspires great envy in this reader.

To be perfectly honest with you, I was a little disappointed in the book. I expected to see kitchens that I could only dream of. Instead I saw utilitarian efforts by America's top chefs. Imagine looking into Mario Andretti's personal garage. Would it look like a dream shop, or more like a GM assembly plant? One kitchen in this book had tall, bare cinderblock walls, that were not even finished, right in the center of the kitchen. How do you prevent dust from accumulating in bare cinderblock, and inadvertently arriving in some of the food? Their were some kitchens that were nicer than that, but nothing that inspired me.
Personally, I am interested in a kitchen that is as beautiful as it is practical. I found, the book, Kitchen's That Work, A Practical Guide to Creating a Great Kitchen, a much more informative, and inspiring book, no matter what your budget.
If you want to throw your pinky in the air, and poo paa your neighbors, then leave Great Kitchens on your coffee table. Their is plenty of names to drop in there. But if you want to create a great-dream kitchen, then get Kitchen's that Work. From soup to nuts, that is the book to have for the practical to the particular.
In all fairness, I am not sorry I bought Great Kitchens, as I am sure I can glean information from it. If you would like to hear about some of the considerations the top chefs like to see in their kitchens, then by all means buy the book. I guess I was expecting something awe inspiring, and that is not what this book is. I gave it four stars, because I never met a man, I couldn't learn something from.