Despite being designed for food prep, kitchens are often places where guests hang out if you’re hosting a party; they can also get terribly messy beforehand, because you’ve been cooking lots of food to entertain this party. If you have guests over a lot, or if you’re planning to renovate or remodel your house, you might consider a dirty kitchen. This isn’t a kitchen that’s literally covered in dirt, but a sort of second kitchen space for food prep, which doesn’t need to look spotless when dinner guests arrive.
The term dirty kitchen is common in the Philippines where these sorts of rooms aren’t unusual. You might also call it an overflow kitchen, a back kitchen, or even a scullery kitchen: They’re very similar to the sculleries in large mansions where the house staff would put together meals and do the washing up away from the main kitchen area. These historic kitchens are making a comeback, and they’re still useful even when you’re your own house staff. In a spacious enough home, a dirty kitchen can be an entirely separate room which is kept away from guests. Cook the messy stuff in the dirty kitchen and leave all the clutter in there while you entertain your guests in the clean one. The mess will stay unnoticed until after the guests leave, when you’ll finally have enough time and quiet to clean it up.
What you need in a dirty kitchen
A dirty kitchen isn’t going to be where you keep your prized kitchenware. Instead, it’s meant for extra supplies which won’t fit neatly in your main kitchen, like your less fancy pots and stirring spoons. If you’re doubling up on kitchen appliances, or you don’t have space for things like coffee makers or rice cookers, those can all go back here. If you’re short on space in your house, some people combine it with the laundry room. Alternately, if you’ve got a deck or a back patio with extra room, you can set up a small outdoor kitchen space. If you try to build an outdoor kitchen as a dirty kitchen, consider keeping it away from where you might take guests outside.
However, if you’ve got the resources, a fully outfitted back kitchen can include its own sink and wall oven, as well as plenty of storage space and room to move around. A professionally designed dirty kitchen is often next to the main kitchen, so think about sight lines and what’s visible to your guests. Really, it should include whatever you feel you need, and you shouldn’t splurge on anything fancy for a back kitchen. That said, you can always try to make it look nice just because it’s still a part of your living space — it’s not for your guests, it’s for you.
