There is a big debate among hosteliers as to weather or not they should close their community kitchen in the late hours of the night. There is no right answer. There are some valid and concerning points on both sides, and each hostels should experiment a bit to find out what is right for their business.
Those for Closing the Kitchen have years of experience and understand the risk involved with keeping it open. Their points mostly revolve around the notion that a 24h open kitchen welcomes the drunken chef. The drunken chef is known to cook with he wrong kitchenware, cook other people’s food, make some noise even when entertaining him/herself, and neglects any and all cleaning often with no recollection it was them until presented with the evidence. A drunken chef has been known to forget the cooking process has started, leaving a frozen pizza to become a brick of charcoal that awakens everyone in the building and summons the fire brigade. Here you can see easily how making a few people happy can ruin the nights of many more.
Those advocates for the Open Kitchen, or as some people call them, kitchen anarchists, feel that answering a customer demand can lead to a good review and do not want to burden their guests with rules. They feel as if hostels should have no right to block access to people’s own food and drink and babysitting is part of the night receptionists job.
So obviously this post is biased towards closing the doors, but not completely. Typically, smaller hostels can pull off a 24h kitchen because the staff are so closely involved with the guests and can monitor them without overloading the night work. So this could work for hostels under 40 beds. Medium hostels can pull it off as long as their night staff are attentive and there is adequate CCTV, say up to 80 beds. However, a 24h kitchen will be difficult with more beds than that, and you are best of closing the doors.
The best way to do so is to have adequate posted rules alerting everyone of the kitchen closing hours. The guests will then work their way around it, keeping a snack and bottle of water in their room. Staff should have the ability to open the kitchen for exceptional circumstances such as medical emergencies and group preparations. Having the kitchen closed gives you ample time to do a good cleaning job and more importantly, tells the drunken would be chef to become McDonald’s instead.
So before you decide, ask yourself the following questions and build a policy around the answers. Just remember nothing is set in stone, and the best policies evolve over time.
- Do you often find a dirty kitchen in the AM?
- Are a few guests ruining it for the rest by being loud?
- Are many of y our guests workers, coming in from a late shift such as after restaurants close?
- Do you allow guests to take food into the room?
- Do guests have access to snacks even when not in the kitchen, such as from a vending machine or a vendor close by?
- Is it worth paying two night employees. One to man the desk, security and night audit and the other to constantly clean the kitchen?
- How upset would your guest be really if the kitchen was closed?
