PKL Delivers World’s Largest Temporary Kitchen for Athens 2004 Games, Serving 2 Million Meals

PKL supplied the world’s largest temporary kitchen (at the time) and dining facility for the Athens 2004 Summer Games. It was estimated that over 2 million meals were cooked during the hire and the kitchen structure was almost 4,000m2.

The kitchen, at its peak, cooked up to 80,000 meals per day. This represented the needs of 16,000 athletes and officials from 202 competing countries plus 8,000 local village staff.

The project took over two years to plan and was delivered by a locally based PKL project team, who were responsible for the maintenance of the facility until the last meal was cooked after the Paralympics on 30th September 2004. All hire equipment was returned to the PKL hire fleet in the UK.

The catering equipment (over 2,000 items) was supplied from the standard PKL equipment portfolio and included such high performance items as 24 rack combination ovens, 150lt bratt pans, 250lt boiling pans plus roll in blast chillers and 150 upright mobile hot cupboards.

At the heart of the kitchen were the unique PKL designed Central Island Canopies.This concept allowed the whole kitchen to be open plan – a necessity for the large volume of meals.

There was over 200m of servery space alone – all required to serve 6,000 meals per hour. Behind every hot servery counter were PKL Mobile Canopies – 23 in all. This was home to the display cooking stations, with Greek cuisine taking a major role.

At these stations, as well as chargrills, fryers and ovens, were pizza ovens,woks, chicken rotisseries and souvlaki (kebab) machines.

As well as the athletes’ village, PKL provided 50 other Portable Kitchens and coldrooms to 20 venues across Athens for the TV broadcast crews. Sized from 100 to 1,000 meals per day, whilst smaller than the athletes’ village – all were equally important and required the same level of project management and logistical planning, so necessary with today’s security concerns.