Cooking smart with Peach
Feeding the buzz of the place as well as the people in it, a spectacular open kitchen forms the centrepiece of Peach Pub Company's new opening, the Almanack in Kenilworth, Warwickshire.
Customers can marvel at a piece of living theatre as they watch head chef Sam Cowley and his team at work - but the really important feature of this kitchen is something they can't see.
As well as looking good in front of the guests, with all the equipment nicely matched and gleaming, and being easy for staff to work in, the Almanack kitchen is setting a standard in energy efficiency - not something you'd guess as the flames leap from the flambé pan.
Conceived by catering solutions provider Space Catering Equipment, working alongside Peach founder Lee Cash and designer Jo Eames, the galley-style kitchen at the group's 10th venue incorporates a number of features, including:
• a £6,000 induction hob that heats pans on contact, providing 98 per cent efficiency
• a dishwasher that re-uses energy from steam and drainage water to help heat the input water
• super-efficient refrigerators
• re-usable crates for food deliveries to cut down on packaging waste.
And what goes on behind the scenes complements the green initiatives front of house. As well as restored teak and rosewood furniture from the 1960s and a menu of locally sourced dishes that cut down on the carbon footprint, the pub has its own water filter, making the licensees a saving of 6,000 one-litre bottles of water a year, and offers a range of draught wines to save even more glass.
Projects like this cost Peach more up front, of course, but for Lee there are two good reasons for the extra investment - ethical and financial.
"A few years ago our energy costs were one per cent of turnover, now they're three per cent," he says. "That's two per cent straight out of our profits. But it isn't just that. Peach is about trying to do stuff in the right way. We're proud of our food sourcing, our sustainable fish and the rest, and that ethos cascades through the whole business.
"Over the six years we've been going, energy awareness has grown and we've looked hard at what changes we can make in the kitchen."
The induction hob was an expensive and risky experiment. "Chefs are always sceptical about this kind of thing and the idea caused a few furrowed brows," says Cash. "But in the 10 days since the Almanack opened it's become the team's favourite piece of kit. It's powerful, very controllable and a dream to clean."
It also makes it a little cooler in there - especially important when you've got an open kitchen that can heat up the restaurant too.
There are new energy-saving innovations coming along all the time. Peach's next kitchen project, at the Embankment in Bedford, will feature a grill with a sensor that detects when you put something on it and heats up in five seconds. Cash has also been trying to find a heat exchanger for the kitchen extraction system that will pre-heat water, but has yet to see anything affordable.
Gloucester-based Space, which boasts the rather fine green credentials of having worked for the Eden Project in Cornwall, has had an input into each of Peach's pubs and is also doing a lot for Greene King, on both the managed and tenanted sides of the business. Space gets involved in projects from day one, basing its designs on the requirements of the pub's menu as well as maximum efficiency, and stays with it right through to installation.
One new idea from the company is the Green Footprint scheme, which identifies where energy savings can be made on the kitchen plans themselves so operators can see what the options are and prevents quick decisions made on purchase price alone.
"Rising energy costs are killing operators in the pub sector, everyone is complaining and they are all looking at how they can make savings," says managing director Mike Mellor. "We are already seeing pub groups opting for a high capital cost with a view to making long-term savings."
