Executive chef at Mayfair luxury five-star hotel uses Williams freezer
No matter the menu, without a reliable refrigerator, your food service falls apart. For a business like the Mandarin Oriental Mayfair London, a five-star hotel with an excellent restaurant and bar, the refrigeration requirements are enormous and so is the range of equipment needed. The hotel’s ambitious kitchen project, which began pre-pandemic and was completed in spring 2024, includes multiple cold rooms, cold rooms, blast chillers, dry meat ageers, freezers, countertops, cabinetry and more from proven and trusted brands. was needed. That brand was Williams Refrigeration.
The work was carried out by Galgorm Group and the consultant for the Mandarin Oriental Mayfair project was Humble Arnold Design.
Dining at Mandarin Oriental, Mayfair includes the main restaurant, Akira Back, which serves mouth-watering and creative cuisine that fuses Japanese and Korean cuisine. The first UK venture by internationally acclaimed and award-winning chef Akira Back, it features a separate sushi kitchen, which is on full display for customers. Meanwhile, Dosa is the hotel’s new signature fine dining experience. A Korean restaurant with an open kitchen and seating for only 14. Additionally, there is a lounge bar, rooftop bar and in-room dining available to hotel guests. From breakfast to dinner, there are about 800 covers in total. The entire operation is equipped with Williams refrigeration equipment.
Jihun Maxime Kim is the Executive Chef of Dosa and Akira Back and is responsible for all culinary operations at Mandarin Oriental, Mayfair. Like many chefs, he was drawn to commercial kitchens through the underrated route of washing. He accepted a job as a waiter at a restaurant in Seoul, but when the kitchen porter didn’t show up one day, Jihoon had no alternative. ” he says. “That’s when I heard a ‘click’ in the kitchen. I’ve loved this kitchen ever since. ”
From there he attended culinary school in San Francisco and later trained with many famous chefs around the world. London is his “11th city” and one of the most competitive restaurants in the world. “It’s almost chaotic.”
For Jihoon, refrigeration equipment for a successful catering business starts with reliability. “I want to sleep at night and get back to work without any problems!” he says. “Refrigeration in a commercial kitchen is the most important element to the safe and successful operation of a restaurant. To ensure food safety, a refrigerator must not only be reliable, but also easy to clean. Energy efficiency is also important to Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group’s global focus on sustainability.
The hotel has multiple cold storage rooms to safely store food and beverages and to separate different types of food. The cold room is water-cooled rather than a traditional air-cooled system, with pipes running between the floors of the building and connected to the hotel’s factory room. “Cold rooms are very important for receiving goods and maintaining freshness and quality. A peek-a-boo panel allows you to see what’s inside and minimizes the frequency of opening the door. ” Williams offers multiple options for cold storage, including bumper rails, internal releases, and foot-operated doors to streamline kitchen operations. The hotel’s cold room has a ramp, making it easy to move the trolley around.
There is also a separate cold room that houses trash cans. “If you have multiple venues, I think it’s important to have a cold room for the trash. It protects it from biological hazards and also prevents odors.”
The open sushi kitchen offers panoramic views, allowing you to showcase the restaurant’s exciting menu and the chefs’ cooking skills. “Having a separate kitchen obviously gives us full control and eliminates the confusion between the Akira Back kitchen and the sushi kitchen, where the product is raw.”
In addition to keeping food safe, the sushi kitchen’s refrigeration equipment creates an impressive experience for diners. Featuring a custom designed chef’s drawer in stylish black thanks to Williams’ custom Chameleon vinyl wrapping service. “I think it gives a great artistic point. It looks neat and professional, and it’s perfect for interior design,” says Jihoon. Williams Chef Drawers allow you to store ingredients separately and maintain temperature closely, as little cold is lost when the drawers are opened. These space-saving individual refrigeration drawers are perfect for small footprints in sushi kitchens. The drawers are stackable and feature variable temperature control for a highly flexible storage solution. And the front-vented cooling system allows it to fit into the tightest spaces. The hotel also features another Williams space-saving design: biscuit-topped jade counters. These are manufactured to fit snugly under a ready-made worktop. Mandarin Oriental Mayfair chose a model with drawers instead of doors.
Dosa’s open kitchen also features a refrigerator wrapped in a black chameleon. The company’s Meat Aging Refrigerator (MAR) is used to age several different products. “We hang the ducks to dry for 21 days. When cooked, the skin becomes very crispy and the meat is very tender. We also have beautiful whole Welsh lambs, which are also aged for 21 days. Korea MAR works in an ideal temperature range of +1 to +6°C and provides humidity of 60 to 90% to perfectly age the meat. Contains Himalayan salt blocks to help manage moisture and improve meat flavor.
The main kitchen features a variety of Williams Jade countertops and cabinetry, including glass doors and drawer models. These options were chosen to increase productivity and make the chef’s life easier. There’s also the Williams WBCF50, the company’s largest reach-in blast chiller freezer, which quickly and efficiently cools or freezes food, preserving food quality while reducing energy consumption. The blast chiller freezer is a big advantage for Jihoon. “We cook a lot of food here, and we need a reliable blast chiller to safely cool the pre-cooked items, like eggplant.”
“Everyone involved is extremely proud of this project,” says Gary McMullan, Contracts Manager at Galgorm Group. “This is a fantastic final product, featuring a wide range of Williams equipment across many levels, and the Galgorm Group of Hotels and Mandarin Oriental, Mayfair teams are very happy with the project. However, Williams and our other suppliers have worked with us throughout and helped us through all the various stages. We have a great relationship with the Williams team and they are very professional. Yes, I absolutely trust it. Having worked with Williams for many years, our respective teams work very well together and bring out the best in each other, and we look forward to working with them again in 2025 on several large-scale projects. I’m looking forward to it.”
Andrew Charles, project consultant at Humble Arnold Associates, said: “Humble Arnold Associates is pleased to once again be collaborating with Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group and working closely with the award-winning Akira Back team during the design phase. It gave us confidence that the equipment is suitable and meets the requirements for the success of luxury hotel and restaurant establishments for many years to come.”
“I’ve worked in many places around the world, and I’ve never had a problem at Williams,” says Jihoon. “They’ve always been reliable. That’s why I recommend Williams.”
Williams Refrigeration offers a wide range of commercial refrigeration equipment, including gastronome cabinets and countertops, specialty bakery equipment, cold rooms, multi-deck and blast chillers.
Find out more about Williams’ extensive product range. www.williams-refrigeration.co.uk.
Learn more about Galgorm Group here. www.galgormgroup.comfor Humble Arnold Associates. www.humblearnold.com.
