Tackling the Trends: Pop-Up Restaurants

In this blog post, Dan from our Events team chats about pop-up restaurants and how PKL can help make them a success.

The Trend
Pop-up restaurants have been a huge trend in the UK over the past couple of years, especially in the summer months. They are great for boosting business to existing restaurants or showcasing artistic cooking events. For businesses, they provide a high-profile way to trial new menus, raise money for charity, highlight a current promotion or experiment with new dining concepts. These exclusive short-term restaurant events are often used for business to create a buzz and generate positive PR. For customers, it provides an exciting, exclusive dining experience, the chance to try new things, and often the opportunity to try dining in a new and unusual location.

How Can PKL Help?
Catering Equipment: There are over 10,000 items of commercial catering equipment in our hire fleet, ready to turn your pop-up restaurant kitchen into a high quality, professional standard kitchen.

Mobile Canopies: Since many pop-up restaurants take place in buildings or structures which are not designed to be used as kitchens, our mobile canopies can easily be installed to help turn any space into a fully-functioning, compliant kitchen. Incorporating an automatic fire-suppression system, automatic gas shut off system and full length extraction canopy, our mobile canopies enable you to install professional foodservice equipment just about anywhere!

Temporary Kitchens: If the venue for your pop-up restaurant doesn’t have any space for a kitchen inside, we can supply one of our portable kitchen units, which is a self-contained commercial kitchen unit all set up with catering equipment of your choice.

PKL Expertise
Warehouses, disused tram sheds, marquees, shopping centre roofs, underground tunnels – you name it, we’ve set up a kitchen in it! When it comes to pop-up restaurants, we have a huge amount of experience. Just tell us what you’re hoping to achieve, and we can guide you through the process, from selecting appropriate catering equipment for your menu requirements, to ensuring you have the right extraction in place to meet health and safety requirements.

The Proof is in the Pudding
Here are a couple of my favourite pop-up restaurant projects that we’ve worked on:

The Decorators: This was primarily an art and architecture-based project, which saw a pop-up restaurant created on a scaffolding structure in a derelict area of Ridley Road Market in Dalston, London. Guest chefs created different daily menus using only market produce, and diners shared a communal table high above the market. The meals were prepared on the ground floor kitchen then raised by a mechanical table up to the guests on the first floor. We provided a six burner, double bowl sink with hand wash, two door fridge, and a water heater for the full three weeks of the project.

Frieze Art Fair: We worked with the artists and managers at Frieze London 2012 to help bring art and food preparation together at the world’s most influential contemporary art fair. Several leading London restaurants hosted different dining areas, with each kitchen having its own specific requirements. Equipment we supplied included solid top stoves, hot cupboards, upright fridges and freezers, servery equipment and preparation tables.

How PKL can help with your event

In this post, Dan from our Events team blogs about some of our events experience and why you should consider using PKL for temporary kitchens and catering equipment at your event.

Organising an event can be quite a daunting experience! To make your event a success, there are a huge number of things you’ll need to consider and suppliers you’ll need to deal with.

On top of this, you only get one chance to get it right, so organising any areas you’re unsure about can be risky. The organisation of temporary catering facilities can be one of those areas, and getting this part wrong could be disastrous and leave you in trouble with your caterers, guests and even the authorities if not done properly.

Don’t worry though – as a member of the Events team at PKL, I know the kind of challenges you’ll be up against and I have plenty of experience in offering advice and supplying temporary catering facilities and catering equipment to all sorts of different events.
So, that’s one less thing you need to worry about!

Don’t just take my word for it though. Here’s a list of a few ways in which we can help, showing exactly why you should consider using PKL for temporary kitchens at your event. 

Proven Experience
We have over 20 years’ experience in providing temporary kitchens and catering equipment for events throughout the UK and around the world. In fact, PKL has been doing this since before I was born!

I regularly work to supply catering equipment and facilities to festivals, sporting events, conferences, exhibitions, product launches and pop up restaurants amongst others, for both front and back of house facilities. Recent projects I’ve worked on have included temporary kitchens for a number of locations at Frieze Art Fair, catering equipment for back of house use at the Brit Awards and pop up kitchens for the 'Last Supper Club' event in London. Last summer, PKL also provided 150 separate temporary kitchens for venues, back of house, public and hospitality catering at London 2012.

Equipment and Flexibility
We have the widest range of commercial, bulk and specialist catering equipment available in Europe with over 9,000 items in our hire fleet. This enables us to provide flexible solutions to meet your requirements, so whether you’re planning a standard menu for a large number of people or a bespoke menu for a specialist pop up restaurant, I can help plan a temporary catering facility and provide commercial equipment that is right for you.

For large scale catering, our panless kitchen solution using Gastronorm compatible ovens, refrigeration equipment, hot cupboards and servery equipment is often an ideal solution. We also have specialist facilities which I can advise you on, which enable us to construct temporary kitchens within existing buildings or inside marquees safely and in a compliant way.

Innovative Kitchen Design
Clients often approach us with weird and wonderful ideas for new event kitchen concepts. These have resulted in some of my favourite hires, so whether your temporary kitchen needs to be on top of a busy shopping centre or in Victorian tunnels underground, our experienced in-house design team are up for the challenge! Our kitchen designers can work with you to provide a facility that fits your needs and menu, and the requirements of your chosen location.

Preparation, Delivery and Installation
All our equipment goes through rigorous testing and inspection before each hire, as the last thing you want is for your kitchen to become inoperable during your event! Each item of equipment is put through a commissioning process and quality assurance check, and our temporary kitchens undergo a 30 stage pre-delivery inspection.

Our in-house transport team and engineers are vastly experienced in delivering and installing kitchen solutions, not only in the UK, but around the world. Our engineers hold a wealth of health and safety accreditations to ensure your kitchen is installed in a safe and compliant manner.

Technical Support
We understand that often there’s only one chance to get it right at an event, and operations can’t stop for any reason. To make sure your event runs smoothly, all our equipment and kitchens come backed with 24 hour technical support, and we can also offer the services of a 'babysitting engineer' to stay on site at your event if required.

Help in Specifying Other Products
Sometimes, you might require more than just catering facilities, and although we don’t supply them directly, I can help you source water and waste, marquees, furniture, power generators and gas. Our 25 years supplying event kitchens means that PKL has a vast knowledge of the industry so I can also recommend suppliers for many different aspects of your event if you are struggling for ideas on where to go.

Events: The early bird catches the worm!

If there's one thing I've learnt during my time working on the hire of UK event kitchens, it's that there's no such thing as booking too early! For the summer months and festive season especially, it's important to book your kitchen facilities early, as leaving it too late can risk the facilities you need being unavailable. Booking early can also make sure we have enough time to design your kitchen to your exact requirements and offer you the very best options for your needs.

But what type of kitchen is best for you?

This will usually boil down to a choice between Portable Kitchen Units and Marquee Kitchens. Both have their own different advantages, and a big part of my job is advising customers on the best type of kitchen facility to suit their event. Here's a really brief overview of the two key options which would be used as a starting point for designing your ideal temporary event kitchen.

Portable Kitchen Units

• Hygienic, purpose-designed, food-safe unit
• Built-in extraction canopies and fire supression
• Sturdy, high-quality unit
• Can be joined to other units such as dishwash units, coldrooms, etc to form a larger kitchen complex
• Choice of catering equipment inside

Marquee Kitchens

• Over 10,000 items of commercial catering equipment available to hire, ideal for setting up kitchen facilities within marquees
• Specially designed mobile canopies (with full-length extraction canopy and fire supression system) can be used to install catering equipment inside marquees and existing buildings such as exhibition centres and warehouses 
• Very flexible option
• Clear flow through the kitchen due to being able to set up different areas for preparation, production, dishwash etc

For both of these options, I can advise you on the catering equipment you might require, and the best option for your specific event. This is another reason why it's so important to book in plenty of time - the longer we have until the event, the more time we have to plan the ideal kitchen to meet your requirements, and the more likely it is that the exact facilities and equipment you need will be available.

This makes now the ideal time to be thinking about booking catering facilities for your summer events, festivals, pop-up restaurants and even Christmas events! Feel free to get in touch with me for a chat about your upcoming events and I'll be happy to advise you on the perfect PKL facilities for your needs.

Winter Olympics Trade Visit to Sochi

PKL's Commercial Director Peter Schad has set off on a trade visit to Sochi in Russia to promote the company ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics. PKL has a wealth of Olympic experience which includes providing kitchens and catering equipment to the Vancouver Winter Olympics, Athens, Sydney and Beijing Olympics as well as the Youth Olympics, Commonwealth Games, Asian Games and many more similar events. 

The trip also has special significance for PKL, as we are based in Cheltenham, and Sochi is our twin town. Cheltenham Racecourse kindly donated some scarves, and Cheltenham Town FC generously provided a signed football shirt to be taken over (see photo, courtesy of Glos Media). The Mayor of Cheltenham also wrote a letter introducing PKL to the Mayor of Sochi.

The story has been featured in local newspaper The Gloucestershire Echo, and was also mentioned on BBC Radio Gloucestershire.

PKL Joins Clean Up at Glastonbury

Cheltenham based PKL Group has begun the process of removing its temporary portable kitchens from Glastonbury. The UK's leading provider of temporary kitchens and commercial catering equipment for hire supplied the festival with catering facilities for back of house staff and organisers.

Installation of the kitchen units began on the 2nd June, with the final unit completed on the 20th June during the torrential rain. PKL begin removal of the units from Worthy Farm today, as past of the mass clean-up after the festival.

Says Lee Vines, Marketing Director at PKL, “It’s always an extra challenge when the weather isn’t on your side, but we’re used to handling torrential rain, heat, sand and even snow when installing our kitchen units! We supply a number of big events like Glastonbury each year – including backstage VIP catering for the Isle of Wight festival and kitchens at the Commonwealth and Beijing Olympic Games – so have a lot of experience in that area. With the muddy conditions at Glastonbury this year our team will be working hard to rescue our units and bring them back to Cheltenham!”