Like many successful club chefs who have helped to raise their properties’ food-and-beverage profiles, Frank Mirabile, Executive Chef of Monroe Golf Club in Pittsford, N.Y., now finds himself challenged “with a relatively small kitchen [and] demand that has outgrown its layout and design.”

So when Mirabile saw the opportunity to submit a proposal for a “dream suite” of kitchen equipment through the contest sponsored last year by The Montague Company, it wasn’t hard for him to fantasize about all of the ideas he’d like to bring together in a dream-kitchen scenario.

“I designed a suite that follows the classic brigade system of fish, meat, two Entremetiers and Sous Chef/Expediter,” Mirabile says in describing his entry, which took top honors in the Clubs category. “The challenge with a club environment, however, is that you have both casual and fine dining items offered at the same time. Lunch service is another consideration, because it’s typically a one-man line.”

What special features did Mirabile and his partner, Michael Berard of Commercial Kitchen Consulting, LLC, include to try to help meet the needs of each cook, each service and each cuisine in such tight space? “We included drop-in sous vide wells that could provide a compact outlet for our progressive sous vide cooking, which is here to stay and an integral tool in my kitchen,” he says. “Another special piece was the plancha, which I was first exposed to while working for Roger Vergé in France in 1998.  At that time, I remember being amazed that almost all proteins, especially fish, were prepared on the plancha, and that there were no sauté pans. The uniformity of the heat, and the flat surface, made it a very productive piece of equipment.

“I also included a standard griddle top, as we serve a lot of classic sandwiches at lunch that require the toasting of bread,” Mirabile adds. “And the infrared, under-fire broiler would be perfect for the prime steaks and meat that I serve, giving me a quality tool to prepare the quality product that I work so hard to source.

Other features incorporated into the suite included a drop-in spoon well and drop-in 1/9 pan wells.  For special touches, Mirabile added a brass rail belly bar and a special handmade plate at the front of the suite, where his club’s logo could be displayed.

Such a cooking suite “would allow us to open up the kitchen with a Chef’s table and show off a little bit,” Mirabile says. “Because of our size constraints, we would need workhorse equipment that would allow the club to grow its a la carte offerings of both casual and fine dining cuisine, in terms of speed and total covers, well into the future.”

View Mirable’s rendering here.