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Restaurant and canteen kitchens found in hotels, hospitals, army barracks, and similar establishments are generally (in developed countries) subject to public health laws. They are inspected periodically by public-health officials, and forced to close if they don’t meet hygienic requirements mandated by law. Canteen kitchens (and castle kitchens) were often the places where new technology was used first. For instance, Benjamin Thompson’s “energy saving stove”, an early-19th-century fully-closed iron stove using one fire to heat several pots, was designed for large kitchens; another thirty years passed before they were adapted for domestic use.

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In the Colonial American kitchen, the same distinction as for the medieval European kitchen can be seen. The early settlers in the North often had no separate kitchen; a fireplace in a corner of the cabin served as the kitchen space. Later, the kitchen did become a separate room, but remained within the building.

In southern estates, the kitchen was often relegated to an outhouse, separated from the mansion, for much of the same reasons as in the feudal kitchen in medieval Europe: the kitchen was operated by slaves, and their working place had to be separated from the living area of the masters by the social standards of the time. In addition, the area’s warm climate made operating a kitchen quite unpleasant, especially in the summer.

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Leonardo da Vinci invented an automated system for a rotating spit for spit-roasting: a propeller in the chimney made the spit turn all by itself. This kind of system was widely used in wealthier homes. Beginning in the late Middle Ages, kitchens in Europe lost their home-heating function even more and were increasingly moved from the living area into a separate room. The living room was now heated by tiled stoves, operated from the kitchen, which offered the huge advantage of not filling the room with smoke.

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The first known stoves in Japan date from the Kofun period (3rd to 6th century). These stoves, called kamado, were typically made of clay and mortar; they were fired with wood or charcoal through a hole in the front and had a hole in the top, into which a pot could be hung by its rim. This type of stove remained in use for centuries to come, with only minor modifications. Like in Europe, the wealthier homes had a separate building, which served for cooking. A kind of open fire pit fired with charcoal, called irori, remained in use as the secondary stove in most homes until the Edo period (17th to 19th century). A kamado was used to cook the staple food, for instance rice, while irori served both to cook side dishes and as a heat source.

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Early medieval European longhouses had an open fire under the highest point of the building. The “kitchen area” was between the entrance and the fireplace. In wealthy homes there was typically more than one kitchen. In some homes there were upwards of three kitchens. The kitchens were divided based on the types of food prepared in them. In place of a chimney, these early buildings had a hole in the roof through which some of the smoke could escape. Besides cooking, the fire also served as a source of heat and light to the single-room building.

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