Viking Range Corporation
3 December 2009
“Earthly Delights”
Viking Range Corporation began with that product, but they certainly haven’t confined themselves only to kitchen ranges. They have branched out into just about every area imaginable for kitchens, both in doors and out, with only two basic principles to guide them through the many product lines they have developed and made any number of variations upon. They are these: quality and food. No, make that outstanding quality and food, glorious food, wonderful food, food from every land, food to be cooked in every way imaginable, food that delights and engages and that satisfies without satiating, food as fresh and as wonderfully inspiring as a dew-kissed grape cut from a vine at first light.
I’ll tell you, though, this Internet has been one heck of an education for me. Take Viking. It is such an ubiquitous and innovative brand line that I honestly thought it was an Old World company that dated back a century or more, their first offerings having been cast iron, wood burning stoves. Well, sir! As it turns out, Viking was, in a sense, born of necessity. In 1980 Fred Carl, Jr., a fourth generation general contractor, was designing and building his own home and seriously considering using a standard commercial range in their kitchen.
In doing so, though, he soon learned about the Achilles’ heel of commercial ranges. They’re the kind of ranges that look wonderful, but when you take them out of the commercial kitchen they were designed for and put them in a home, you incur a number of unpleasant surprises. In fact, I heard of one person whose house caught on fire from the heat of an un-insulated commercial range! And this is what Mr. Carl encountered-not the fire!-but he did take note of items like: high heat output and extremely hot surface temperatures, no safety features, excessive energy consumption, constantly burning standing pilot instead of automatic ignition, no broiling in the oven, and dimensions which were not designed for typical residential cabinetry. Other than that, though, I think they were just fine!
But the thing with being a person who builds is that you sometimes find yourself thinking, what if I were to. and with him it became more than just something to think about, because as he was thinking about it, he saw both a problem and an opportunity. He wanted something that didn’t exist. But others would want it as well. The result was Viking Range Corporation which was incorporated in 1984. In the beginning, of course, it was the range he had gone in search of, but as time progressed, so did his product lines, and now Viking is active in every appliance line that relates to cooking, up to and including, outdoor cooking.
Viking now bills the complete Viking kitchen as completely perfect, and looking at what they have to offer, it’s hard to argue with them. Viking Professional ranges deliver ultra-premium features like 18,500 BTUs of surface cooking power, precision burner controls with SureSpark ignition, the largest oven capacity available, and flawless convection baking. And that’s just their ranges. They also have refrigerators and freezers, wine cellars, beverage centers, ice machines, dishwashers, trash compactors, and waste disposers, all of them being items that will match with the others, both in appearance and in reliability. Because, after all, if it doesn’t work well, what earthly good is it? But a well-appointed kitchen and the bounty of the good earth. Man, Hieronymus Bosch has got nothing on THAT garden of earthly delights!
Joseph
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