The Grove Glasshouse
TAG Catering Equipment UK Ltd
The Grove is a 5-star luxury hotel, famous for hosting major international events such as the 2016 British Masters golf tournament, 2019 NATO Leaders’ Meeting and England Football team preparation site.
The Glasshouse Restaurant within The Grove, offers a luxury, top end dining experience. To reflect the rest of The Grove’s style, extremely well refined, yet relaxed, a complete refurbishment was planned, including an impressive glass extension to increase the area by 40 covers, seating a further 200+ guests and served by a totally new immersive, theatre cooking concept, with 8 different guest-facing stations.
TAG was appointed to turn the ideas into reality, drawing on our creative, technical and practical experience to totally redesign and install both FOH and BOH catering areas, all to fit with the interior designers vision. The most profitable restaurant at The Grove, all work was to a tight deadline, budget with strict operational procedures.
Other key elements to brief:
- Re-evaluate the ergonomics of existing food and beverage offering to improve overall efficiency, designs had to reduce/prevent queues even for large functions/groups not just normal service;
- Full concept design and manufacture of totally original FOH live food stations and new entrance bar;
- No signage allowed; each cooking station’s purpose to be subliminally recognisable by design;
- Sourcing unique items to emphasise/enhance the theatrical customer experience;
- Consultancy on equipment spec – reduce running costs, improve reliability and efficiency;
- M and E consultancy and design with the appointed contractors, with only 6-month lead-in;
- Coordination between all design elements – waiter stations, BOH, dish-wash, pot-wash and stills area;
- Increase in cold room capacity;
- Work in collaboration with the interior designer;
- Designs and finish must reflect The Grove’s aesthetic culture, exclusivity and quality, without feeling like a traditional “buffet”
Client Satisfaction
Robert Kenworthy, Group Facilities Director at The Grove commented:
“The Glasshouse Restaurant & Bar was a project that involved the total strip out and rebuild of a very successful 15-year-old restaurant at The Grove, Chandlers Cross, Herts. The new restaurant concept was to remain similar with a number of styled theatre cooking stations – but it was to be bought up to date, expanded by approximately 40 covers to seat 200+ guests, and to expand its theatre cooking station experience to be even wider and more varied.
“In selecting a kitchen designer & installation contractor we selected TAG from a number of potential contenders because of their experience of other high quality, creative design & build projects and their willingness to be open to evolving design ideas from the project team. TAG then took on the brief provided by the Project team and set about designing the 8 different guest-facing food stations, a full production kitchen, wash up and still room area, bar pantry and bar. This went through a number of intensive reviews and developments before finally being installed and handed over in May 2019.
“The final design of the guest-facing food stations and the back of house areas are extremely creative, interesting and really well executed. The TAG design team were able to respond really well to continual pushing of boundaries and the installation team integrated extremely well with the main contractor and sub-contractors in order to complete the project. Their support post-handover has also been excellent in accommodating embellishments and additional requests promptly and willingly.”