Most house hunters and home renovators want a so-called "chef's kitchen." High-end appliances (preferably fronted with stainless steel), plenty of counter space (granite counter tops are de rigueur but some "settle" for Carrara marble or even butcher block) and lots and lots of storage.

Professional chefs, however, do most of their cooking in restaurant kitchens. They don't necessarily need all that at home.

Matt and Amy Bell, co-owners of South on Main in Little Rock where Matt Bell is the chef, describe the kitchen of their Argenta home, built in 1911, as "very modest but adequate."

They've been in the house since summer 2007 and the kitchen, with some very modest changes, is not that different from the way it was when they moved in.

"We'd like to do a little remodeling, but honestly, it's been a good kitchen," Matt Bell says.

They added some decorating touches -- in addition to repainting, Bell hung the house's original doors from the ceiling for shelving and storage (kitchen paraphernalia hangs from one; the other overhangs the comfortable couch that dominates the Bells' dining nook) and they bought a Kenmore refrigerator big enough inside to hold commercial-size pans.

"With the doors open, we can get a lot of 'prep' in there," Matt Bell explains.

That couch, the Bells say, is the one place they get to spend time together. "We watch the news in the morning and we spend Sundays in here," he says.

They have a coffee press, a grinder and an espresso maker, a KitchenAid mixer and a microwave oven. But you won't see that in the kitchen -- they hide in the pantry. "It's basically a glorified popcorn cooker," Matt Bell says of the microwave.

The one thing he says he can't do without: a set of cast-iron pans and skillets. The one thing they don't have, but want, is an over-oven hood that vents to the outside. "Most don't truly exhaust," he says. They've coped with their existing range. "We didn't like the glass-top electric stove, but it was new when we moved in," he explains.

"We cook, well, I wouldn't say every night -- Sundays, and the days we both have off from the restaurant," says the chef. "We cook breakfast every morning."

"I cook the way my grandmother did," Amy Bell says, "in batches." Most of the time, they cook whatever is in the fridge or pantry.

"We improvise; whatever we have, from homemade Asian food to Mrs. Paul's Fish Sticks," adds Matt Bell.

Backyard smoker

"If I had a gas range, I'd be happy," says Brian Kearns, who earlier this year took over as executive chef at Arthur's Prime Steakhouse and its companion seafood restaurant, Oceans at Arthur's, in the Village at Rahling Road off Chenal Parkway in west Little Rock.

He did some painting, added fixtures and put a new refrigerator and a new faucet into the modest kitchen in his home in the Point West subdivision, where he's lived for five years.

Nothing stands out in Kearns' kitchen, decorwise. There's a Krups toaster oven that he and his wife, Laura, received as a wedding gift.

And he doesn't have one, but for the right gift for the chef who already has everything, he recommends an immersion circulator, which, he says, "let's you cook in sous vide" (submerging vacuum-sealed pouches in a water bath) "at a very precise temperature."

The kitchen tool he depends on most: a Wusthof Classic 10-inch carving knife, except that he's moved his best knives into the kitchen where he works.

He actually does very little cooking in his kitchen, he says.

"The majority of my cooking is outside. If I'm home, I'm barbecuing."

He has a 22-inch Weber kettle-style grill on his back porch; at the back of his backyard is a monster smoker with a rotisserie attachment in which he variously cooks chicken, pork and fish (he made a pastrami-cured salmon for Easter) and, occasionally, "ducks that I shoot over various seasons."

Baker's delight

Pastry chef Cathy Kincaid, who teaches baking, pastry and cake decorating at Pulaski Technical College Culinary Arts and Hospitality Management Institute, admits her home kitchen is "pretty good. Still nothing like what you'd have in a restaurant."

Her kitchen in the Oaks subdivision in west Little Rock's Chenal Valley has a commercial-grade, four-burner Wolf gas convection stove, stacked electric and microwave ovens, a separate water tap near the gas oven for filling pots and pans (a convenience, she admits, but "I would have never spent the money"), a warming drawer, a trash masher and even an ice maker, all in place when she and her husband moved in six years ago. Nothing extraordinary, though -- it's all stuff you can buy in any high-end appliance store. And there's plenty of room for Kincaid and her 17-year-old dog, Rosie, to rattle around.

But "You don't need all this," she says. "You can make great food out of a 150-square-foot space."

She's added some personal touches to the kitchen -- lots of pastels (she describes the wall paint as "Kermit color"), porcelain containers shaped like birds and cats (plus a decorative porcelain pig in a porcelain car). Flower-petal light fixtures illuminate the island with the apron sink. A recipe rack under the hood and above the oven also "houses" several figures of patron cooking saints.

The appliance Kincaid says she uses most often didn't come with the kitchen: her KitchenAid mixer and its several attachments.

Most of her home cooking, Kincaid says, is in service of a large extended family and she's willing to help out friends in need with, say, a wedding cake.

"It's almost fun when you do it for free, when it's not your job."

As opposed to the kind of baking she does at the culinary school, where she teaches her students how to turn out bread, cake, cookies and classic French pastries, "at home I do a lot of savory cooking. I love spicy; Thai food, I cook a lot of that."

Kincaid, who once had a business creating wedding and specialty cakes, also worked for a while at Blue Cake Co. in Little Rock, where she still occasionally puts in a few hours as a freelance sugar artist "any chance I get."

"I spend as much time on the way the cake looks as I do on how it tastes," she says. "Decorating is a lot harder to teach than baking; it's more of an art."

HomeStyle on 06/14/2014