Designed primarily to bake signature breads to offer gratis to guests, the soon-to-open $350,000 commissary kitchen of Cyrus in Healdsburg, Calif., also promises to pay off in numerous other ways for the Sonoma County fine-dining destination with two Michelin stars.
“To justify the expense, we thought about what else we could do there besides baking,” said executive chef and co-owner Douglas Keane. He envisioned the 832-square-foot space in the back of a bakery-cafe a short stroll from Cyrus staging a lucrative off-site catering business, easing crowding in the 0main kitchen by handling all of the restaurant’s prep work and providing better butchering of costly perishables, thanks to a temperature-controlled cold room within its footprint.
“We’re pretty crowded at Cyrus,” Keane said. “There’s an a.m. crew and p.m. crew always on top of each other. And even if I do a Meals on Wheels event, there’s no place to put food for 100 people.”
The centerpiece of the baking operation is an Adamantic four-deck oven with steam injection, a $40,000 investment, Keane said. “There are four chambers, and you can do four different products with steam in each of them,” he added. Pastry chef Suzanne Popick plans to have fresh artisanal breads come out of the oven every day around 4 p.m. For working with dough, the commissary has 12 feet of wooden butcher block and 10 feet of stainless-steel counter in the bakery area.
Moving all of Cyrus’s prep work to the commissary will ease burdens on the main kitchen. The new digs have a much-needed additional walk-in refrigerator as well and make it easier to stage off-site catering for a new revenue stream. Keane has done a few outside jobs, featuring selections from the Cyrus menu, and they have been lucrative.
“With food, waitstaff, plates and linens, it’s around $300 per person for a three- to five-course menu,” Keane said. “But they used to completely tax the kitchen. The walk-in would be packed, the prep cooks would be overworked—it was horrible.”
Also possible will be private lunches at Cyrus, which previously were not an option because early prep crews tied up the back-of-the-house.
The cold room inside the commissary, which goes as low as 35 degrees Fahrenheit, will house separate work areas for a meat butcher and a fish butcher. Prepping under those conditions will reduce waste and better preserve costly imported seafood and delicate, highly marbled Wagyu beef, Keane said.
“Wagyu, for example, starts to melt at around 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and our kitchen gets up around 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the middle of summer,” Keane said. “We’ll be able to treat this stuff the way it should be treated.”