Melissa Krumbein hosted 63 family members for a Passover lunch last spring.
Let’s just say it left her normal home kitchen — with one standard stove and one regular oven — a bit stretched. And when looking for other places to cook for the crowd, Krumbein found that her lack of a business license and health department certification made other commercial kitchens unavailable.
“So I thought that if no big kitchen exists for temporary use, maybe I should take a Field of Dreams approach,” she said. “Build it and they will come.”
But Krumbein, who’s worked as a litigation paralegal for the past decade, wasn’t quite ready to drop everything and start buying industrial cookware. So she approached home bakers at area farmers markets, asking if they’d be interested in renting a kitchen on a hourly basis. And she talked with caterers and owners of local food carts (carts are required to prepare their food in commercial kitchens certified by the local health department).
The response, she said, was overwhelming. One food cart operator said he’d want to use the kitchen six days a week for several hours a day. A local cupcake bakery wants to use the kitchen during peak periods, since its current location can barely keep up with demand. And a local cooking school expressed interest in holding larger classes.
Now Krumbein’s company, KitchenThyme, is just a month away from opening in a former Indian restaurant at the intersection of Hungary Springs Road and Broad Street.
The location — which she has completely renovated — includes a fully-operational “show” kitchen that could be used for cooking demonstrations as well as a full-size restaurant kitchen in the back.
She thinks folks who spend days baking or cooking for farmers’ markets will appreciate the giant mixers and the four ovens in each kitchen.
“You could probably make 60 or 70 loaves of bread in one go here,” she said.
The kitchens can be rented in increments of four or more hours. Rates start as low as $25 per hour and go as high as $37.50 per hour; the price is determined in part by how many hours a month each person uses the kitchens.
Long-term Krumbein hopes she can turn the old dining room into a space that food carts or caterers could use for event space. She’s in the process of getting an ABC license for the space. That might also allow her to do corporate team-building or other similar events.
Though Krumbein expects most of her customers will be commercial operations like the food carts or smaller groups like bakers who sell at farmers’ markets, she said private citizens may still find ways to use the kitchen.
“We’ve got a big family, and everyone’s birthday is in December,” she said. “I made 11 birthday cakes last month. And all I wanted to do was be able to cook them all at once and freeze them.”
The only bad news: you still have to clean up after yourself.