The high utilization rate of NOKIA Arena’s main kitchen poses a challenge for building technology
NOKIA Arena, which opened in December 2021, is a welcome addition to Tampere’s event locations. The World Ice Hockey Championships, organized in the spring of 2022, proved that everything as a whole worked in an exemplary way.
NOKIA Arena’s event restaurant, the 400-seat Eventum, is run by Noho Partners. Restaurant Eventum’s kitchen is also the main kitchen, which is also responsible for serving food on the Nokia Arena bowl and the boxes.
The possibilities of using the premises are flexible and the scale is sufficient for a wide range of needs. The bowl is the heart of NOKIA Arena, a floor where events can be organized for up to 10,000 people, and which, if necessary, can be extended to a dinner service organized with white tablecloths for 2,000 people. There are 70 boxes in total, and their size varies from boxes for 10-15 people to large group boxes for 250 people.
When designing NOKIA Arena’s main kitchen, Noho Partners wanted to define the kitchen ventilation requirements themselves. “The ventilation solutions for the main kitchen were so critical to the operation of the selection of services they need to take care of that they couldn’t think of relying on solutions made by others”, says Operative Food Manager Antti Ahokas. That’s why Noho Partners also owns kitchen ventilation solutions. The main kitchen has grease canopies and hybrid canopies equipped with ETS NORD ozonators, as well as condensation canopies for the washing line. ETS NORD canopy solutions are also used in all other NOKIA Arena kitchens.
Ahokas says that the main kitchen faces such spikes in utilization that there is simply no room for interruptions or the inefficiency of the working conditions in the kitchen. “It is clear that requirements of this scale also set strict limits for building technology, which takes care of the working conditions in the kitchen”, he says. “ETS NORD’s kitchen ventilation solutions are of the best quality on the market and represent a completely new kind of technology. The operational reliability of the canopies has been unparalleled, and not a single drop of condensation water has yet come down”, Ahokas states.
