Open shelving in the kitchen went from a niche renovation choice to something almost everyone has tried at least a corner of, and I think it's mostly for the better. The pull used to be purely visual, a way to show off nice plates, but the better reason has caught up with it since: cheap cabinet boxes have gotten worse, and a run of solid shelving is often sturdier and easier to actually use than another flimsy door you have to wrestle with one handed while holding a pan.
A shelf earns its spot in a kitchen that gets used daily, where you want the everyday stuff, the mugs, the oils, the bowls you reach for without thinking, somewhere your hand can land without a hinge in the way. It suits a kitchen with decent natural light and a bit of personality already going on, since everything on the shelf is on display whether you planned that or not. Where it struggles is in a small, steamy kitchen with no range hood and heavy daily cooking, because grease and dust settle on open shelves the way they never do behind a door, and in a kitchen that's already visually busy, patterned tile, a bold backsplash, a lot of color, since a crowded shelf on top of that just reads as clutter rather than character.
If you're starting from nothing, go with a single long shelf over the counter rather than a stacked set of three, and start with wood rather than metal or glass. One shelf is forgiving, it holds the stuff you use most and doesn't demand you fill a whole wall with styling you haven't figured out yet, and wood warms up a kitchen in a way metal brackets alone don't.
The difference between a shelf that holds up and one that sags into a frown after six months of cookbooks and cast iron is almost entirely in the thickness of the board and how it's attached to the wall. A shelf under an inch thick will bow eventually, no matter how nice the finish looks in the store. You want solid wood or a proper plywood core, not a hollow particleboard shelf with a veneer wrap, and brackets that hit a stud or come with real anchors, not the little plastic toggles that make a popping sound when they finally give up. Run a hand along the underside before you buy, a good one feels dense and cool, a bad one feels light and a little hollow, like a drum.
I'd start with a simple oak or ash shelf left natural, nothing stained too dark, so it doesn't fight whatever cabinet color you land on later.
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