Building RenovationSouthwest OhioCincinnati

Fairfield Creekside Kitchen and Line Renovation

Creekside Middle School feeds the whole building through one kitchen and one serving area, in a number of minutes that does not change. The room had accumulated obstacles: a storage room walling off part of the serving area, an abandoned cooler and freezer holding floor space in the kitchen, serving lines that put staff and students in each other's paths, and a single load-bearing wall between the two rooms with one door in it.

Fairfield City Schools rebuilt the kitchen and the serving area together on a pre-bid Equalis contract, with Prodigy performing the design services and obtaining the permits. The wall between the serving area and the old storage room came down. Three new openings were made in the load-bearing wall between kitchen and serving — one man door and two sized to hold new pass-through refrigerated and heated cabinets. New openings and doorways were cut from serving into the cafeteria, a third checkout kiosk was added, and the openings to dry food storage were infilled with the corridor door reworked for access. Ceilings and lighting were replaced across all three spaces.

In the kitchen, the abandoned cooler and freezer were removed and the floor inside their footprint taken to grade. A new dish machine, ware washing area, dishwasher hood, exhaust fan and booster heater went in; the existing cooking hood and its fire suppression system stayed. One oven was removed, another relocated with the tilt kettle and steamer, and a new oven and hot water dispenser added, alongside hot and cold serving wells, a frost top, sneeze guards, milk coolers and display cases. Two new panels went in over the existing ones, a grease interceptor was set, gas piping reworked, and the washer and dryer relocated with new power, water, waste and a dryer vent.

Serving line and point of sale in the renovated Fairfield Creekside kitchen

Stainless prep tables and pass-through shelving in the Creekside kitchen

Technical Discussion

Designing a serving line around the lunch period

A school kitchen is not judged on how it cooks. It is judged on whether the last student through the line still has time to eat — a throughput problem with both terms fixed: the enrollment does not change and neither does the period. Every decision here is a claim about seconds.

The largest is cutting three new openings in a load-bearing wall. Two are not doorways — they hold pass-through refrigerated and heated cabinets, loaded from the kitchen and served from the line. That single move takes the restocking trip out of the serving area: staff stop carrying pans through a door into the space where students are queued, the collision that quietly sets the pace of a lunch period. The third opening is a man door beside the one already there, so staff moving between the rooms are not sharing one doorway in both directions.

The serving area itself was opened by demolishing the wall to the old storage room and cutting new doorways into the cafeteria. The aim is one-way movement — students enter the line at one end and leave into the cafeteria at another instead of backing out the way they came. The third checkout kiosk is the same argument at the far end: registers are usually the real bottleneck, and another is the cheapest capacity in the room.

Storage moved out of the flow rather than growing. The openings from dry food storage to the serving area and to the cafeteria were infilled and the corridor door reworked, so deliveries and restocking reach the storage room from the corridor rather than across the serving area.

One trade is worth knowing in advance: the new serving line equipment has no floor drains, and condensate and cleaning water are carried out by bucket. That is routine in an existing slab — drains would have meant trenching a floor the project was otherwise leaving alone — but it is a daily labor cost, and it belongs in the operating plan rather than on a punch list.

Our Work