Kitchen and Restaurant Design
The design of your kitchen and layout of your restaurant can be the difference between success and failure, regardless of your restaurant’s food quality. With restaurant development costs ranging anywhere from $200,000 to $3,000,000, you should use extreme care when deciding the best place to spend your development dollars.
National Restaurant Consultants, (NRC) has enjoyed working on over 80 design-build projects. We will:
- Reduce your risk
- Protect your budget
- Oversee the entire project on your behalf
One of the major reasons new restaurants fail is that there are insufficient funds to properly develop and operate the new business. There are literally thousands of opportunities to exceed the budget developing and opening a new restaurant. Too many operators open up behind the curve in terms of having the necessary operating capital on hand due to over spending on the design and equipment. Many kitchen equipment suppliers will do the design for free. But we know, there is no such thing as free. The fees are built into the equipment cost.
How National Restaurant Consultants can help
Start with a business plan and feasibility study
Whether you’re opening a 30-seat café or a 250 seat steakhouse, you should have a plan… a business plan. This plan should include a feasibility study outlining the probabilities for success or failure within your development budget, concept, and location. Without these formal tools, your entire development budget is at risk. This is one of the places you should not shortcut (you should not shortcut any areas in developing a new restaurant). The difference between doing it yourself and spending some development dollars for a professionally prepared business plan and feasibility study will return to you 10-fold. NRC has written scores of professional business plans and feasibility studies for clients which gave them an accurate road-map for their entire development. As part of the business plan, a menu will be developed that will meld with the concept that you have in mind. This is where your kitchen design starts. The menu will drive what equipment is required and the tentative space needs.
Design the kitchen and restaurant
to fit your specific needs
As the site selection is finalized, National Restaurant Consultants will work with your general contractor or Architect to ensure that the kitchen design fits the concept and the menu. We will ensure that the flow of the kitchen fits the logistics of food preparation to reduce back-of-the-house labor. We will provide guidelines for the front-of-the-house layout for the optimal customer experience and labor considerations. We will help determine how and where orders should be entered into the POS system and how those orders should be communicated to kitchen. We will ensure that the flow enhances your guest experience and can be maintained easily.
There are currently over 800,000 different restaurant equipment specifications and just as many restaurant furniture specifications. Some can prudently be obtained pre-owned, some should NEVER be bought used. Writing these specifications, making sure every piece of equipment and furniture fits where it needs to fit, and performs as necessary is a technical skill as well as an art form. The devil is in the details and this is an area you should NEVER allow an equipment dealer to provide “FREE” services – we guarantee that you will be paying for the “free” part for years. Even if you are an experienced Chef, it would be very smart to work with a true expert in the kitchen design field to craft a working kitchen which has no weak spots.
We have seen operators spend over $500,000 too much and open 3 months late because they did not see the value of having a team of EXPERTS on their side throughout the development process. Allowing NRC to partner with you will be the most cost-effective decision you can make in terms of spending your funds wisely and getting open as quickly as possible within budget.