The hotel Gasthaus Steinberg is in Windautal, a splendid location in Austria surrounded by the Alps of Kitzbühel. Against the backdrop of a landscape of woods and meadows alone, the hotel has represented a haven of peace and tranquillity for over 80 years, a place for recovering from the stress of daily living. The owner, Michael Grafl is also chef and president of KochArt, the association of Austrian restauranteurs known for their cuisine based on locally sourced, organic ingredients.
The hotel restaurant has as many as 200 covers (outdoors and indoors) and offers a mix of home cooking specialities and innovative dishes.

The brief

• Grafl needed to remodel his kitchen and renovate it. “In recent years I’ve worked in an old and somewhat inconvenient kitchen”, he said. For this reason, I was looking for quality equipment which could last for many years”.
• The new equipment had to be gas powered as the electrical energy produced independently by the building with solar panels was not sufficient for meeting its demands.
• Another equally important aspect was the aesthetics of the kitchen, in which Michael Grafl hosts courses, events and seminars.

The solution

• The new kitchen was installed at the same time as more extensive restructuring works were carried out on the entire building.
• The now dated structure and the limited space in the kitchen forced the choice of a line which would adapt perfectly to the numerous structural restraints imposed.
• The choice therefore fell on compact equipment and a corner of the island was bevelled to allow adequate passage through the kitchen.
• For the kitchen island, alongside the partner Gastro West Großküchen, Grafl chose the Ambach System 700 and System 850 lines with hygienic single piece top and highly crafted design and details. For bulk cooking appliances such as the tilting bratt pan, the Chef 850 line was chosen as a guarantee of high performance and productivity.