This article was also published in the Financial Times.
To demonstrate quite how complex is the infrastructure behind a modern, busy restaurant, Nigel Bowater took me on a steep climb behind the kitchens at Nobu Berkeley in central London. He pushed open the fire exit and ushered me on to a large, flat roof where a sight confronted me which more closely resembled a chemical plant than anything to do with a restaurant.
Across an area 15 metres in length and in some instances three to four metres in height were a series of air handling units, engines, extracts and coolers all quietly humming away. Their lifeline was two large ducts which were attached to the building and ran all the way up to the roof that faces on to Berkeley Street where they extracted their steam into the damp air.
Although Bowater gave credit for the precision of the installation to the contractors, he had designed and mapped out every item on the roof and as a result was hugely instrumental in the restaurant’s day to day running – and whether it could open at all.
Although numerous professionals are involved in the opening of any restaurant over the past decade one particular professional has become even more important than all of these, so important in fact that not only do his responsibilities often account for over 30% of the restaurant’s fit-out costs but they can even decide whether it is feasible to proceed with the chosen site. And, most ironically perhaps, the more successful he is at his job the less the customer will be aware of his input. This professional is known as the M&E, mechanical and electrical, engineer.
It had taken me several months to track down Nigel Bowater, one of the directors of consulting engineers Environmental Engineering Partnership, and as we sat at Nobu’s sushi counter he apologised for being so elusive. “It’s been hectic recently as I have been supervising the opening of four new Giorgio Armani stores around London. In fact although I worked on this restaurant for the best part of a year this is the very first time I have eaten here.”
Bowater began his career working on hospital design but then a professional introduction led him to specialise in retail, including what he described as ‘innumerable shops along Bond Street’, and numerous restaurants. But what I wanted to know was what the initials M and E encompassed.
“Effectively,” Bowater replied, “it is the machinery that makes the building work. It encompasses the air conditioning, the drainage, the lighting, the electrical power, the fire alarms, the lifts, hoists and the network provision of all the data but not the software. And then there are all the services to the kitchen, essentially how to ensure it has enough power and extract, although happily we don’t get involved in the kitchen design.”
As a result Bowater and his colleagues are often the first of any restaurateur’s team to see a potential site even before the lease has been signed. “Our job is becoming increasingly complex for several reasons. Firstly, because local authority regulations on noise have, quite understandably, become more stringent. But as kitchen equipment becomes more powerful it requires more energy and therefore more cooling which in turn generates more noise. Then, as the overall design quality of restaurants and kitchens today gets more sophisticated so too must the level of services to support them. And, finally, there is the particular challenge of central London of a lack of power from the mains supply.”
Which neatly led into why I wanted to talk to Bowater specifically because I had heard on the restaurant grapevine that no sooner had Nobu signed the lease for this new site than they discovered that a shortfall in the electrical supply to the building meant that they faced the prospect of a £250,000 bill for a vital sub-station. That is until Bowater had come up with an ingenious solution.
He smiled modestly, ordered the beef with teriyaki sauce and a cranberry and apple juice and continued, “A further problem was that we didn’t have access to the basement here and these units are extremely heavy so if we had had to install one on the ground floor we would have lost a lot of trading space. In the end I created a system that uses gas to fire the air conditioning round the building which is powered by five Japanese van engines that are sited and enclosed on the roof. This system generates enough chilled water to service all the air handling systems.”
One of Bowater’s other clients is Alan Yau’sgroup of inexpensive restaurants Busaba Eathai and it was with a London site that Yau and his team were particularly keen on that he reluctantly had to admit defeat and the proposed deal was not completed. “The woks that these restaurants use are extremely powerful and they gobble up lots of gas plus the cooking oil the chefs use gets easily transferred into the duct system and has to be filtered out very, very efficiently. We have to ensure that there is enough power to support a high velocity kitchen extract, say 7-9 metres per second when normally we work on 4-5 metres per second, and at that particular site we just could not manage to fit in all the necessary plant and leave enough space for enough seats. I was very disappointed.”
And while the challenge in the kitchen is how to deal with such large amounts of radiant heat, in the restaurant it is the question of comfort control, of ensuring that the customers feel comfortable. “This is particularly difficult because at the time we are finalising our calculations the restaurant is a building site. Everyone wants air conditioning, of course, but there is a very big difference between how you feel in a shop where customers move around and generate their own heat and in a restaurant where customers, wearing clothes that can differ significantly in weight from each other, can sit for up to two hours or more and, as they do so, their body temperature naturally rises thanks to the food and wine.”
Lunch over, Bowater escorted me out via the main production kitchen close to the restaurant and the preparation kitchen in the basement where half a dozen Japanese chefs were busily filleting fish and dicing beef and chicken for the Peruvian style skewers. Here he pointed out two extra challenges. “The sushi counters demand so much ice to keep the fish as fresh as possible that we had to position an air conditioning unit just above the four ice makers to stop them from over-heating. And over there is a special glycol cooled fridge which stores the tuna at minus 61 degrees centigrade which also needed to be built into the system.”
Later, as I recalled this industrial scene in the heart of plush Mayfair I couldn’t help but smile at the thought that all this extremely expensive equipment, which had had to be hoisted into place by a vast crane, was working away to maintain a restaurant that was best known for the quality of its raw fish, its sushi and sashimi. But then, I realised, that there is far more to restaurants in the 21st century than simply what appears on the plate.
Nobu Berkeley, 15 Berkeley Street, London W1, 020-7290 9222. Open 7 days.