Commercial Chef Bases

A fridge that holds the cooking line up

A chef base is a low refrigerated drawer unit rated to take heavy cooking equipment on its top — a chargrill, a griddle, a two-basket fryer. It buys you the one thing a hot line never has: cold storage at the point of cooking, without adding a metre of bench. Proteins come out of the drawer directly onto the grill above them.

The part people get wrong

Not every under-bench fridge can take a cooktop. A chef base is built for it — reinforced top, insulation between the heat and the cabinet, and a condenser sited so it is not breathing the exhaust of whatever is cooking above. Putting a chargrill on a standard under-bench fridge will cook the compressor as well as the steak.

Sizing

This range runs 924 mm to 1,838 mm wide with 162 L to 385 L of drawer space, the middle of it a 263 L unit at 1.5 m. Match the width to the equipment going on top first; drawer count follows.

Temperature

Models here hold between −1 °C and +7 °C depending on specification. Sitting under a live grill is the hardest job a small refrigeration cabinet gets, so the rated ambient matters more here than in any other cabinet we sell.

If you need the prep surface instead

If what you actually want is a chilled rail of pans to build food on rather than a stand for cooking gear, that is a prep bench — see salad and sandwich prep fridges.

What we carry

Turbo Air, FED-X and Polaris. All 14 are in stock, from $2,388 to $8,928 ex-GST.

Prices shown are ex-GST trade rates. Every unit is fully tested before it leaves us — which is why we don't promise same-day on everything. Sydney metro is next day; we deliver Australia-wide.