I have a half-baked theory: the smaller the kitchen, the more likely it’s actually used by someone who knows what they’re doing. The bigger and fancier the kitchen, the higher the odds it’s mainly a very expensive place to store bottled water and takeout menus.
In other words, kitchen size and actual cooking seem to have an inverse relationship. The fancier the counters, the less action they see.
This probably has everything to do with money. Once you can afford the 1,000-square-foot “great room” kitchen with hidden appliances and marble that slides over the sink like a magic trick, you’ve also reached the income bracket at which Uber Eats has your order history memorized.
Meanwhile, the folks making do with galley kitchens the size of a generous closet are out here developing Jedi-level skills just to survive dinner.
Use a pan? Wash it, dry it, put it away before your sauce even finishes bubbling. Chop vegetables? Wipe the board the second you’re done. Mix something in a bowl? Clean it before the next thing needs that same bowl. Use a potato masher, clean it, store it. String up a beef roast, put away the spool once done. Very few tools should stay out during the process: a knife, a spoon, a spatula. Otherwise, cleaning and putting away is part of the process.
No fair creating a Tower of Babel of stacked sundry in the dry rack. That’s cheating. Plus it makes no sense to keep putting wet dishes atop drying ones. You are clearly engaged in elaborate work avoidance. Dry with a towel and keep the rack free of stuff, too.
If you stay on top of it, the kitchen looks almost untouched by the time the food hits the table—except for the delicious smell and maybe a happy little treat in the oven.
Fail at this and you end up with a mountain of dirty dishes, half-chopped onions rolling around like they’re trying to escape, messy liquids everywhere, and a profound sense of chaos and regret.
It’s embarrassing, especially considering that guests like to hang out in the kitchen because that’s where the action is. It’s also where all your cooking sins are revealed.
A tiny kitchen won’t let you get away with that nonsense. There’s simply no room for slop. It’s like cooking with a friendly but very strict drill sergeant.
Big kitchens, bless their cavernous hearts, enable bad behavior. All that glorious counter space turns into a landing strip for every dirty utensil and bowl you own. You can leave a trail of destruction the length of a small airport and still have room for two open cookbooks and the mail. It’s basically a mess multiplier.
Be careful, too, of the glorified recipe book, which is often a huge source of the problem. The text does not make the food. You do. Adhering too closely is like the singer with his head in a musical manuscript. The song never really takes off. Or a paint-by-numbers kit: It’s not really painting. Same with food: If the only goal is to adhere to the instructions, it never really becomes what it could be.
The book turns out to be a huge distraction from the job itself. A cook who reads the book like a Bible will neglect the duty to clean and cook at the same time. Maybe not always true, but this is what I’ve observed.
If you want to observe the ideal, stand around a street vendor and watch him work. He keeps an immaculate workspace while preparing those lamb gyros and Italian sausage rolls. He is managing eight things at once while keeping chaos at bay, with smooth motions that make cooking and cleaning a single ritual. It’s beautiful. If he does not, the health department would gladly shut him down in one day.
These people are real cooks, I tell you, blessed and virtuosic.
My best friend growing up was Victor Rede. He grew up to be one of the more famous chefs in the United States. I met up with him again as his career was on the move. We were in his mother’s homestead where he was cooking.
It was a small kitchen, but he made an astonishing bouquet of flowers out of vegetables. I still have no idea how he did that. Then he said he was preparing a pig for roasting. How in the world is this possible? He opened the refrigerator, and there was an entire pig basking in a marinade inside a lawn and leaf bag.
He had clearly taken over the kitchen upon his visit home. His proud mother looked on as he performed his magic. She was herself a marvelous cook. She made a pile of tortillas every night for dinner, and I used to hang around in the afternoons late enough to watch her and eat the first ones off the pan. She had mastered the art, and Victor was clearly inspired by her.
He later taught me all the basics of gourmet cooking, including the four basic sauces that I use often with no recipe on hand. Watching him in the kitchen was symphonic, his hands and arms flying and moving, knives flying from hand to hand, while always near the sink so he could wash what he used and put it away. His kitchen was always working and always immaculate.
Perhaps the mess problem, invariably due to incompetence, is what has given rise to this strange fixation on massive and supposed beautiful kitchens that make all appliances disappear completely. I once saw a beautifully designed “chef’s kitchen” in a magazine in which the cabinets looked like elegant wood paneling with no visible handles, the oven hidden behind a folding screen, and even the sink disappeared under sliding stone.
It was stunning. It also looked like it had never met a garlic clove, a whole fish in brine, much less a flank steak that needs a pounding.
A designer in the New York Times basically admitted the same thing. “A lot of my clients make me do incredible kitchens that they never use,” the designer said. Some of these owners spend most of the year in vacation homes and enter their kitchens only for late-night snack attacks.
Yeah, that’s one solution to kitchen incompetence. Don’t cook at all. Turn the space into a sanitized art exhibit for public viewing and otherwise never use it. Invite your friends to gawk on your way out to the restaurant.
Meanwhile, in my kitchen—roughly the size of a generous boot room—I’ve somehow pulled off dinner for 60 people without anyone going hungry or having a full meltdown. There was one minor panic involving a pie crust, top and bottom, and limited elbow room, but we don’t talk about that.
It’s not that I’m some virtuoso. It’s that the tiny space forces discipline. You learn to be efficient, creative, and slightly ruthless about putting things away. Five pans are plenty. A good skillet, saucepan, casserole, cookie sheet, and roaster have served humanity for generations. We don’t need a hanging rack of 47 copper beauties to feel legitimate (although they sure looked pretty in the 1980s).
The truth is, prosperity has given us gorgeous kitchens and fewer home-cooked meals. We hid the pots and pans like they were embarrassing relatives. We turned cooking into something optional, something we outsource, and then pine for a sprawling space suitable for Instagram and not much else.
Give me a 7-by-7-foot room with an oven, a fridge, and a sink, my beloved five pans and one large kitchen knife, and I can still put together a decent three-course dinner for friends. Not because I’m fancy. It’s because my grandmother drilled it into me early: Cooking and cleaning are the same dance. Master that rhythm and everything else gets easier and a lot more fun.
