Serving People Serving Coffee Since 2005
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87 www.baristamagazine.com SUZANNE DREXHAGE USED TO GO the store a lot. Suzanne is the owner of Bartavelle Coffee & Wine Bar, a café in Berke- ley, Calif., that pairs its titular offerings with well-considered breakfast and lunch plates featuring sophisticated flavor profiles. While making trips to the store can be necessary for Suzanne to procure the fresh, seasonal ingredients used in her recipes, she found she was going more often than she wanted in order to get basic necessities. "Dairy was tricky," she says. " We just didn't have any place to put it, so we were going shopping for milk at the store pretty much every day." A couple years in to Bartavelle's run (the shop is now 3½ years old), Suzanne realized she needed to upgrade her kitchen space to improve the logistics and work flow of the shop—and to generally make her life more manageable. By acquiring a neighboring space and remodeling her kitchen, Suzanne was able to double Bartavelle's kitchen space. The funny thing about that, though: This new, bigger kitchen is only about 300 square feet. That means the house-made jams, hand-crafted porridges, and other signature menu items that make Bartavelle a local favorite for not only coffee but food, too, are coming from an undeniably small space. "I like doing a lot with a little," Suzanne says. " You have to keep in mind what you can pull off, but you can actually do a lot." That's a mantra that many other quality-demanding cafés are employing to run sophisticated food programs out of their own space-challenged kitchens. Sure, they can't indulge their every whim when it comes to purchasing equipment or ingredients, as they're constantly monitoring what they can actually fit within their kitchens' four walls. By employing strategies to improve efficiency and creatively manage the limited room they have, however, these cafés are able to conquer the challenges their limited space presents, from storage to waste, and more, in order to produce beautiful food. How do they do it, and how can other small shops do similarly great things with their food programs? Here are some of the key lessons these wizards of tiny spaces have learned for achieving culinary excellence in just a few hundred square feet. M a n a g i n g s t o r a g e — p a r t i c u l a r l y t h e c o l d k i n d Bartavelle's limited kitchen is endlessly roomy compared to the space at Fernwood Coffee Company. The Victoria, B.C.–based café has an astoundingly tiny 60 square feet of kitchen space to make the food offered at its connected sister business, the Parsonage Café. While it's enough space for the café to fit its convection oven, panini grill, and other equipment, storage—to no one's sur- prise—has been a supreme challenge. Owner Ben Cram says the best solution to this problem so far has been looking for—and seizing—any opportunity for nearby storage. " We got very re- sourceful in appropriating extra space in our building," he says. "There were old storage rooms that we would find and ask the landlord if we could clean them up and paint them to get extra freezer and fridge space." Owners of shops with smaller kitchens will often tell you that refrigerated space, in particular, is always at a premium. While cupboards and other creative storage spaces can be installed higher on walls or in other places that don't compete with existing equipment, refrigerators must take up fl oor space, and what's more, they're often bulky. Owners agree that grabbing up any nearby space to install refrigeration can entirely change the poten- tial of a café's food program. For example, as Suzanne's experience tells us, you don't have to go to the store as often because you can store a lot more goods. This of course leads to cost savings, as you can get a price break by buying in higher volumes. For those shops without the option of additional storage, there's always the tried-and-true trick that owners of small shops swear by: Always use multipurpose ingredients. If something is taking up room in your fridge, make sure it's being used in several dishes. While the previous installment of this series men- tioned this practice, it becomes particularly vital for small shops where space is a premium. " We have seasonal fruit, for example, and right now we're using it as a topping in our custard cake, and with our ricotta toast," says Suzanne. " We try to make sure that everything we have can be used in at least a couple of places because otherwise it doesn't work." Cultivating a workplace that is inclusive, diverse and equal for all, since 1995. Co-founder and CEO Helen Russell was honored to give the keynote at the Coffeewoman Berkeley in June 2017. equatorcoffees.com