The Old School Kitchen TV Trend Is Back, But How Will It Fit Into Your Design?

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Elder millennials who grew up on a diet of Lunchables, Dunkaroos, and other foodstuffs of questionable culinary merit might recall another convenience of the 1990s kitchen: the countertop television. The stove-side tube TV was a staple of rich friends' households all over the United States in those analog days before you could just tote your tablet and fire up "Frasier" while you negotiate your mise en place or chop up a mirepoix. And now, that bit of corded nostalgia is back, believe it or not, and the potential addition is a surprisingly tempting consideration, given how dated the notion truly is. But actually arranging the telly around your more necessary kitchen appliances might be a little more complicated than it was at Tiffany's house way back when.

The appeal of having a television in a workspace — which can become somewhat repetitive even for those who truly enjoy cooking — hasn't really changed over the last three-plus decades. Whether you're saturating the ambiance with a cooking show or just running some old multicam comedy for the millionth time, the distraction/company/incidental entertainment can be nice. But we as a society have moved on from wires snaking this way and that, clunky hardware, and aluminum rabbit ears. 

While you could bring a tube TV into your space for the nostalgia factor, today's screens are leaner, cleaner, and possessed by connectivity features that would have seemed like witchcraft last millennium. Ideally, they should also be neutral enough to blend in with a variety of designs. Fortunately, plenty of ad hoc or dedicated options are available.

The easiest way for most folks to introduce what we're just going to call television to the kitchen is by lending a little more permanence to a tablet. This is a better move than ferrying your main device from rooms of what we're also going to call incompatible germs, if you can forgive the implied inelegance. There are tablet mounts for seemingly every configuration, whether you want yours attached to the wall, or hovering at eye level under a cabinet, or perilously adjacent to a cutting board.

Most of the broadly commercially available televisions, proper, that one might want to fix in their kitchen are virtually indistinguishable from your average tablet, so it's kind of a coin toss unless you want other capabilities a junior computer can bring. But you can get a few different small Sylvox kitchen smart TV models for a little to a lot less than any new iPad variety, and some fold up to virtually disappear under shelves, which should come in handy once the next vintage kitchen trend begins to simmer.