6 tips for cooking in a shared kitchen with roommates

They say the kitchen is the heart of the home, and I believe keeping that heart healthy is essential. But when you live with roommates – whether your best friends or total strangers – navigating a kitchen can be a challenge. It’s one of the most high-traffic rooms in the house, and finding the space and time to accommodate everyone and their cooking needs is no easy feat.

It’s a dynamic that chef, food writer and supper club host Rosie Kellett is more familiar with than most. After years of living in London flat shares, she moved into a warehouse where the tenants practice communal living. All seven housemates contribute 25 pounds (about $32) per week into one pot and share all the groceries, cleaning products and basic toiletries from the weekly shopping. Each housemate is responsible for cooking one meal a week, and mealtimes are usually social occasions.

The format is hardly the norm, especially in the United States, and Kellett says she has certainly found it instructive on the best ways to share a kitchen. I’ve also had quite a bit of experience with shared spaces: I’ve lived with best friends in shabby apartments during college, squeezed into cramped student accommodation when I studied in London, stayed in a big building block with an ever-rotating cast of roommates during a two-month stint in Dublin, crashed in my boyfriend and his brother’s two-bed, one-bath house during the beginning of the pandemic and now am the proud tenant of a quintessential D.C. rowhouse with two lovely roommates who have become good friends.

As time has gone on and food has played a bigger role in my life, my relationship with shared spaces – especially the kitchen – has evolved. One day, you’re the roommate with a few too many dishes in the sink (sorry!) making microwaveable noodles, and the next, you’re the one who’s cooking multicourse meals and hovering like a shadow with a damp rag and vacuum, cleaning up the messes as they happen. I’ve learned from being both the problem and the solver, and I’m still finding ways to become a better, more thoughtful roommate.

I asked Kellett what pieces of advice she’s gleaned from the transition to communal living and pulled from my own experiences sharing various kitchens to come up with some guiding principles that can help bring harmony to all types of living situations.

Communicate and compromise

Perhaps the most important piece of advice is also the most obvious and universal one. Amicably sharing a space requires communication, compromise and consideration – and lots of each. Before you cook your first meal in a shared kitchen or decide which pans should go on which shelves, you should be having conversations with your housemates about your routines, expectations and priorities. How often do you all cook? What does a clean kitchen look like to you?

“I just think communication is imperative and you’re bound to have a little bit of conflict,” Kellett says. She says having a regular forum to bring up any issues that arise helps to defuse tension and nip problems in the bud. For her and her housemates, that means regularly scheduled meetings over food with a predetermined agenda.

“The important thing is getting into the habit of having conversations,” she says. “They always tend to run smoother if it’s not a once-a-year thing.”

Create shared shelves in the pantry and refrigerator

Unless you’re running an underground bakery with your roommates, there is no reason a single household needs five bags of flour and several dozen eggs. And yet! Many of my past apartments operated with each roommate buying their own ingredients and storing them on their own shelves, only splitting basic seasonings and spices. This led to an accumulation of countless duplicate ingredients that never fully got used up.

Kellett says she encourages “anyone living with housemates to at least suggest to each other sharing the things that everyone uses every day,” and that those ingredients might look different for specific groups of people. My roommates and I now have found that sharing condiments, sauces, citrus, butter, baking necessities and bulk ingredients makes the most sense for us .

Not only does it save precious shelf space, but it also cuts down on unnecessary food waste. When I can’t cobble together a meal from the items in my section of the pantry, I can see what others have contributed to the group shelf and often use that as a basis for my meal.

Kellett says that you can contribute a few dollars a week or a month to a communal fund that is used to purchase shared items, but I also often volunteer to replenish ingredients that I know I reach for the most, such as chili oil and lemons.

Pool together kitchen equipment

When I was in grad school, I lived in a shared student flat in London. I arrived a week later than my flatmates, and when I asked what I could contribute, I was surprised to find out that everyone was responsible for buying their own kitchen equipment. Too shy to suggest a different approach, I sheepishly lugged back several pots and pans from Ikea.

In a kitchen that was essentially a tiny corridor with a bit of counter space on either side, this made cramped conditions even worse. For the six months I lived there, I barely cooked, hoping to avoid the overflowing cupboards and perpetual mess of cookware.

Luckily, you can avoid this fate by pooling what you and your roommates already have and deciding from there what gaps need to be filled in. If you need to buy something new, you can always split the cost and keep track of new purchases in a spreadsheet so that you can settle up when housemates move out and take items with them.

Follow the golden cleanup rules

It should go without saying, but you are responsible for your own messes. Spills, splatters and dirty dishes should be taken care of in a timely manner. For me, this means by the end of the day at the latest, but everyone has different expectations. (See the first tip!)

I believe the major addendum to this rule, though, is that if someone cooks for the group, everyone else should take over for the post-meal cleanup. On top of being a more equitable split of labor, it also incentivizes you and your housemates to cook for one another – a win-win in my book.

Ditch the chore chart

In my college apartments, I loathed the weekly chore swap. I would often lose track of which task I had been assigned – or forget to do it all together. Chore charts are often the default division of labor in shared spaces, but they don’t necessarily make the most sense. Cleaning is a habit, and you’re more likely to remember to do the same task you’ve been doing for weeks or months.

Taking on a set responsibility also encourages a stronger sense of ownership. If a job around the kitchen isn’t getting done, it makes it easier to sit down and discuss why that is and what can be done to remedy the situation.

In Kellett’s warehouse, jobs include doing the weekly shopping for all the housemates, washing towels and taking out the trash and recycling. Kellett takes on the role of “fridge defender,” cleaning out the refrigerator at the end of every week to make sure any languishing ingredients are quickly used up or tossed.

Because her kitchen is also her office, Kellett naturally gravitates toward the task and suggests that choosing a chore that plays to your strengths is helpful. And if someone’s unhappy with their set of responsibilities, it takes only a conversation to find a better solution. “We’re like, look, you don’t like the job you’re doing, so let’s have a chat about it, and we’ll switch it up,” she says.

Make time to sit down for a meal together

In February, my roommates and I (somewhat successfully) went vegan for the month, forcing us to pivot from our typical eating habits and rhythms. We challenged ourselves to each cook a new recipe from one of our many cookbooks each week, digging ourselves out of cooking ruts. The result was successful on multiple fronts: Besides eating more plants, we also found a new way to connect during busy workweeks while splitting the burden of cooking and cleaning.

For newer cooks, this can also present an opportunity to practice and feel more comfortable in the kitchen. “I think cooking for big groups can be really daunting,” Kellett says. “But if you’re given the space to learn how to do it in a really relaxed environment and it’s not judgy or pressured, then you can learn to really enjoy it and love it.”

Whether you’re strangers or best friends, the simple act of breaking bread makes a house feel like a home. And, as Kellett notes, you can cook a good meal on any budget and in any space. “I just think the more that we come together with our friends and with our communities and resource each other rather than the outside world, I think the better life will be,” she says.