When we started planning the Kochi branch in 2023, we made one decision that has shaped every subsequent one: we would not copy Venpalavattom. The flagship works. We are proud of it. But it works because it grew. Each addition was a response to a real problem at a real moment. Kochi has the rare and unsettling advantage of being designed all at once, on paper, by people who already know what works — which means we are designing not from need, but from belief. That is a much harder discipline.
This post is about the kitchen. The rest of the building will get its own dispatch. We've been quietly publishing this series since the foundation pour — this is the third entry.
What we changed
We changed three big things from the Venpalavattom kitchen. The first is the pass — the line where finished plates are inspected before going to the floor. In Venpalavattom, the pass runs perpendicular to the hot line, which is the standard layout and which we accepted for nineteen years without examining. In Kochi, the pass runs parallel. The expediter stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the head of the hot line. The conversation is direct. The plate doesn't travel sideways before it travels out. We expect this to be the single largest improvement to the dining experience, and almost no guest will notice it.
The second change is the tandoor's location. In Venpalavattom, the tandoor is at the back of the kitchen, near the storage. We put it there because, in 2005, we thought of the tandoor as a specialty item that needed to be tucked away. It now produces roughly a third of our food. In Kochi, the tandoor is at the front of the hot line, immediately visible from the dining room through a glass viewing panel. We have decided we want guests to see it. This is partly about theatre and partly about pride. The Kowdiar tandoor took fifteen years to become what it is. We should not be hiding it.
The third change is the dish pit. The dish pit. The dish pit in restaurants is, almost universally, an afterthought — a windowless room behind the hot line where one or two people are stationed all night, doing the most physically punishing work in the kitchen, with the worst light and the worst air. The dish pit in Kochi has windows. It has its own ventilation. It is staffed with three people, not two. The math doesn't work — we are spending more money to make a job less brutal — and the math doesn't have to. It is the right thing to do, and we have run two branches for long enough to know that the dish pit's morale is the kitchen's morale.
The hood
The ventilation hood is, technically, a piece of equipment. Spiritually, it is the central nervous system of the kitchen. We ordered ours in May 2025. It arrived in February 2026. That is eight months, and roughly six months longer than any other piece of equipment in the building. The reason is dull and worth understanding.
We commissioned the hood from a small manufacturer in Coimbatore who has built hoods for South Indian restaurants for forty-one years. He builds two at a time. We waited because, after looking at international alternatives — including some impressive Italian work — we concluded that nobody outside India had any real experience with the heat profile of a working tandoor at full service. The Italian hoods are designed for sauté and grill. Our hood needed to handle the dry, dense, infrared-heavy heat of the tandoor for nine continuous hours a day.
The wait was the right call. The hood arrived, was installed in four days, and ran its first commissioning burn at full tandoor output for six hours without flagging. The Italian hood, by reputation, would have done the same — for about three months, after which it would have begun to fatigue. We may, in fact, be wrong about all of this. We will know in five years. We are betting on the manufacturer who has watched five generations of South Indian chefs use his hoods. That is the kind of bet we like.
The tandoor
The tandoor is the same model we use at Venpalavattom and Kowdiar — a custom clay barrel from a maker in Amritsar we have used since 2009. There is no improvement here, no innovation. We have a tandoor that works. The improvement is in the surround — the brickwork, the tile, and the placement.
The tiles are a fireclay tile we found at a heritage restoration project in Fort Kochi. They are slow-fired, slightly irregular, and considerably more expensive than standard kitchen tile. They were chosen because they reflect heat back into the tandoor's working zone more evenly than the smooth steel surround we have used for two decades. The improvement is small. Possibly three percent on cook time. Possibly less. We are not certain.
Three percent, over twenty years, is the difference between a good kitchen and a great one. We are building this branch for twenty years. — Site notebook, March 2026
The line
The hot line is five stations: tandoor, grill, curry, biryani, sauté. We could have done it in four. We chose five because we want the biryani station to have its own ranges, its own prep, and its own slightly-isolated rhythm. Biryani at Imperial Kitchen is its own discipline. It should have its own table.
The cold line is three stations: salads, garde manger, dessert plating. The pastry kitchen is separate — its own room, its own air, its own walk-in. Pastry chefs need cold. Hot kitchens are bad for them. This is, again, an obvious decision we have not implemented in any other branch, and which we are correcting in Kochi.
What we are still wrong about
The honest answer is: probably more than we know. The kitchen is on paper and in steel. It is not yet on its feet. We will not know what we got wrong until the first month of full service, when the team begins to flow through the space and discover its frictions. There will be frictions. There always are. The promise we are making to ourselves — and to the team that will run the kitchen — is that we will fix them quickly. We will not, this time, accept a layout that doesn't work because we have already accepted it. We will move things. We will rebuild. We will, if necessary, tear out the new pass and put it back the old way, because the old way might have been right all along.
Three years of planning is a long time. It is also, in the life of a kitchen, almost nothing. The Venpalavattom kitchen has been running for twenty-one years and we are still adjusting it. The Kochi kitchen will have its own twenty-one years to become itself. The blueprint is the beginning. The cooking is what comes next.
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Meera Nair joined Imperial Kitchen in 2018 and leads operations across all three branches. She is in Kochi most weeks. The next dispatch in this series will be about the dining room — and the very long argument we have been having about chairs.
