Those open storage tables and shelves that commercial kitchens¹ have are usable there because they have the main dry storage outside of the kitchen space. You k

Those open storage tables and shelves that commercial kitchens¹ have are usable there because they have the main dry storage outside of the kitchen space. You keep some essentials there that are used many times every day, and the rest is moved into the kitchen as part of the prep phase and cleared out at the end of service. In big kitchens this is enough of a task that it's a role on its own: porter. If you were to use those as your main ingredient and tool storage without clearing it every day it would be a mess both in terms of visual clutter and just flour and shit spilling out everywhere. Is that more minimal than putting cabinet doors over it? I don't know actually, maybe. Which indicates to me that "minimal" is a subjective judgement based on certain criteria, and there are multiple valid measures of kitchen minimalism. I grew up in and worked for decades in commercial kitchens and I am often saying this. Commercial kitchens have a different set of constraints than home kitchens, and commercial kitchen design adopted wholesale is not going to be more usable than a well-designed consumer kitchen. It's not more minimal per se either. That open storage demands a closet worth of plastic bins to keep ingredients in, for example. BTW commercial kitchens pretty much all have terra cotta tiles for some reason. Must just be a good combo of cheap, durable, reasonably non-slip (which coated concrete definitely is not). ¹: Not industrial kitchens that's a different thing.