Kendall College of Culinary Arts and Hospitality Management
Client
National Louis University
Location
Chicago, Illinois
SCB was engaged by National Louis University to design a new home for Kendall College, one of the nation’s top Culinary Arts and Hospitality Management programs. Located on the seventh floor of the historic Gage Building on Michigan Avenue, originally designed by Holabird & Roche and Louis Sullivan in 1898, the new 19,000-square-foot space takes full advantage of its views of Chicago’s famed Millennium Park and Lake Michigan.
The overall goal for the new facility was to make every space a teaching space, offering students real world experience. As such, the program includes a 60-seat upscale dining restaurant and bar that is used for instruction during the day and is open to the public for student-run dinner service. The dining room is defined by a playful array of globe lights, while a small private dining room features a wall of wine storage.
The facility includes six teaching kitchens in total: a three-kitchen open suite that can hold either three classes of 10 students or one class of 30 students; a pastry kitchen with specialty equipment needed for baking, pastry, or sugar and chocolate work; a flex kitchen for more focused instruction; and an innovation kitchen for testing and experimentation. Surrounding the kitchens is a multi-purpose corridor offering storage for various instruments, utensils, and stock goods, as well as several walk-in freezers and coolers. Large-scale whiteboards extend the length of the corridor allowing the space to be used for class prep and menu planning.
Three flexible classrooms open to a collaborative lounge space with a cake display case. The floor is also home to a 128-seat student-operated cafeteria that is open to all National Louis University students, faculty, and staff, as is a convenient grab and go café on the ground floor.
