Great Kitchens: At Home with America's Top Chefs

by Ellen Whitaker

Professional chefs design their home kitchens for efficiency, comfort, and style. What makes a pro's kitchen work so well? A knowledge of cooking and a signature style. This book features hundreds of design ideas offering readers a glimpse inside the home kitchens of some of America's most renowned chefs. It's a visual feast and a wellspring of design inspiration.
-- Features 26 dream kitchens and advice on creating your own.
-- Includes more than 300 photographs, floor plans, lists of equipment, and recipes.
-- More than 50,000 copies sold in cloth since publication.

Genres: Cookbooks, Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1999

Reviews

[Mir · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting biographical factoid here, a potentially useful innovation there -- but overall not a particularly interesting or useful book. Not really "design ideas" so much as photos of kitchens with some accompanying information about the individual chefs and what they like. Maybe rich people who are redoing their own kitchens would find this book helpful, but huge, inspiring spaces with custom-built ovens, movable islands, and other personalized features are way out of my price range, so reading it mostly just made me frustrated with my generic little kitchenette and its flickering florescent lights, lack of counter space, and easily stained cheapo surfaces. I was hoping for more about what food the chefs liked to cook at home, but other than a few recipes in the back there wasn't too much actual food in the book.

[Tiemu · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great little book for who has ever wondered what kind fo kitchen rich professional chefs would have. As they know more about food than us mere mortals their ideas are valuable.

Each kitchen gets 6 pages, each including a floor layout and several photos. They explain why they chose what they chose, which is bound to give you your own ideas. Each chef has their own idea of what is ideal. Each also says the main regret they have about the new kitchen, which helps you avoid their own mistakes.

I gained several new ideas, which are to have a custom gas supply for very high flame wok cooking; a wood fired pizza oven or grill; a tap above the stove top with instant boiling water; and a very large range hood (because many chefs soon regret that theirs is too small).

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprised by how helpful this book was as I looked for ideas for my dream kitchen. Each profile of the 25 chefs and their personal kitchens was filled with a smidge of their bio, but mainly how their kitchen came to be, materials chosen, and what they would change if they could. As a home cook I loved the professional insights and incorporated many of them into my new kitchen. I raised my counter heights, improved my lighting, honed my granite and allowed the beauty of my dishes and tools to be the center of the design.

[Kathleen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was a bit of a disappointment. What I wanted was a book that talked about layout and necessary kitchen components, as thought about by chefs. I was really looking for more of a book on how to make a kitchen the most functional for cooking. This is really a home decor book more than anything. It's all about how the kitchen's "feel" rather than how they function. I guess people who want to see what some famous chefs from the late 1990s' kitchens look like, might be into this book.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the kitchens have really unconventional ideas. For example, I was stunned when one "great chef" had no cupboards above counter height, and stated that he hates cupboards. I realized that I too have always hated the busy look almost every kitchen has because of the endless doors of high cupboards. I hate cupboards, and I never knew it until now!

[Yves · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a highly interesting view into the personal philosophy of Chefs when it comes to their own kitchens. Light, prep space, storage had top billing but absent were some of the extras top residential kitchens demand.

It was a personal book.