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The next time you’re eating in a restaurant, look around. Can you spot the chef? Chances are they’re sweating by the fire in public. They’re unlikely to be swearing or shouting. Such pleasantries were rare when I was serving a decade ago. Most of the kitchens I worked in were in windowless basements—breeding grounds for bad moods. The horrors ranged from raised voices and smashed plates to, on one occasion, a panna cotta floating through the air. I doubt a chef would throw a pudding into an open kitchen.

“I always knew that if I could open a restaurant, I would open the kitchen,” says Chris Leach, chef-founder of Shoreditch restaurant Manteca, where chefs roll, slice and salmon and fire up the grill in full view of customers. The layout has had a direct impact on the way Leach’s staff interacts: “The relationship between the front and back of house is very healthy,” he says. “It’s the way they work together.”

Leach’s desire to create a friendlier kitchen came from his experiences working in places that were “ruled by fear.” Charles Pearce, executive chef at Piedmont Hotel Nordelaia, also “learned that the hard way.” Lorto, the hotel’s “relaxed fine dining restaurant,” places its large, pink-tiled kitchen in the center of the room. “We have so many guests who say it’s amazing to watch us work,” Pearce says. “Everyone knows what they’re doing, there’s minimal talking—just eye contact. It’s like a dance, like theater.”

Almost 50 percent are women. That has transformed the energy

Open kitchens as we know them have been around since the 1980s, when breakfast bars became fashionable at home and Wolfgang Puck opened Spago in Beverly Hills. Other variations can be traced back to the 1900s, when the first American diners moved from lunch wagons to brick-and-mortar restaurants. They’re a different breed from counter-service restaurants—intimate spaces where all seating faces the kitchen—but can be just as focused on entertaining and showcasing thoughtful design. At Bar Bludorn in Houston, chefs serve their dishes under spotlight-like lights. At La Mercerie in New York, the serene, aqua-blue kitchen is the work of cult design duo Roman and Williams. And at Dear Jackie in Soho, chefs cook behind an extravagant red curtain above Giallo Siena Marble countertops—“a far cry from the sharp-edged, commercial stainless steel kitchens,” says chef Harry Faddy.

For Cynthia Shanmugalingam, founder of Rambutan, the open kitchen in her restaurant is a nod to Sri Lanka, her inspiration. “There are relatively few South Asian restaurants with open kitchens in London,” she says. “If you go to Sri Lanka or southern India, it’s amazing to see people cooking on the street.” Basement kitchens seem to be more of a Western invention. In most other food cultures – whether it’s a sushi counter in Japan or a Mexican taco truck – most of the cooking is visible.

Jean Whitehead, author of Create an interior atmospherefollowed the rise of “environmental psychology” in design projects, spaces built with the human experience in mind. “Design is increasingly about creating not just physical space, but psychological space,” she says, pointing to Maggie’s cancer centers, where informal kitchens are placed at the heart of each building to “put users at ease.” But Whitehead also emphasizes the “deliberate voyeurism” of open kitchens, drawing a comparison to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. “Is there a Big Brother aspect to the design of the open kitchen, a general surveillance that encourages better behavior?” she asks.

The rise of open kitchens is a positive move for the restaurant industry as a whole. Shanmugalingam, Leach, Pearce and Faddy all point to the “challenging recruitment climate” with an estimated 40 per cent of hospitality workers leaving the sector in the UK after lockdown alone. The industry needed a shake-up. “That kind of Anthony Bourdain cliché is no longer what defines chefs in modern restaurants,” says Shanmugalingam. “Rambutan is not built around super chefs – it’s a new generation. They’re more emotionally intelligent; they’re kinder to each other; almost 50 per cent are women. That’s transformed the energy.”

But open kitchens don’t mean the death of egos; performative cooking can provide a sense of fulfillment. “Cooking pasta for an audience and seeing it bring joy to the guests is an endless source of excitement,” says Victor Lugger, co-founder of Big Mamma Group and the design firm Studio Kiki, which owns restaurants with open kitchens across Europe. “Ask any chef who has worked in an open kitchen; they’ll tell you it makes them feel like rock stars.” Adds Manteca’s Leach: “They get to show off—and I mean that in the best sense of the word. It adds a sense of pride to what they do.”

“Of course there are customers who aren’t paying attention,” says Rafael Cagali, chef-owner of Da Terra in Bethnal Green, where the dining room is set up like a kitchen-diner. “They’re either on their phone or they’re with a buddy. But that’s the beauty of our industry: we’re flexible.” Cagali provides extra training to give his staff confidence so they can handle customers without panicking. Still, he admits that a lack of awareness from customers can be “frustrating.”

Perhaps a better question is: Does an open kitchen make us friendlier diners? I recently sat at a restaurant kitchen table and ate something truly disgusting. “What do you think?” asked the creator of the dish. “Delicious,” I replied. After all I’d seen, why should I argue?