How to plan a commercial kitchen

A commercial kitchen is a production line. The goal of a good plan is simple: let food move in one direction, from delivery to plate, without staff crossing paths or doubling back. Get that right and a smaller kitchen out-performs a larger one that was laid out by guesswork.

Start with the menu and the covers

Everything downstream is driven by two numbers: what you are cooking, and how many covers you serve at peak. A 200-cover banquet kitchen and a 200-cover à la carte kitchen need very different equipment, even at the same headcount. List your menu, identify the peak service, and size from there — not from the floor space you happen to have.

The work zones

We plan every kitchen around a handful of clearly separated zones, each with its own equipment and bench space:

• Delivery & storage — goods-in, dry stores and refrigeration, kept close to the back door and away from the hot line.
• Preparation — washing, cutting and portioning on dedicated prep benches and machines, with raw and ready-to-eat kept apart.
• Cooking — the hot line: ranges, ovens, fryers and grills under a single extraction canopy.
• Servery & pass — where plated food is held and handed over, on a hot and cold servery line.
• Ware-washing — a separate dish and pot-wash area, sited so dirty returns never cross clean food.

Workflow: keep it one-way

Arrange those zones so the flow runs delivery → storage → prep → cook → serve, with ware-washing looping back separately. The two flows that must never cross are raw and cooked food, and clean and dirty crockery. If your plan forces either to cross, redraw it.

Services: the part that gets forgotten

Equipment is easy to move on a drawing; services are not. Lock these down early:

• Ventilation — the canopy and make-up air must be sized to the cooking line’s kilowatts, or the kitchen runs hot and fails inspection.
• Power — three-phase for ranges, ovens and dishwashers; confirm the incoming supply before specifying.
• Water & drainage — floor gullies under sinks and dishwashers, with the right falls, plus a grease trap.
• Gas — where used, with interlocks to the ventilation.

Sizing the equipment

Once zones and services are set, size each piece to peak throughput, not average. A fryer that just copes on a normal night will fail on your busiest one. Build in head-room, and choose 304-grade stainless on anything that gets washed down daily — it is the difference between a kitchen that lasts three years and one that lasts fifteen.

Common mistakes

• Designing around the room instead of the menu.
• Under-sizing extraction — the single most common reason a new kitchen fails commissioning.
• Putting the dishwasher where dirty returns cross the pass.
• Forgetting drainage falls until the floor is poured.

If you would like this done properly, we plan, fabricate and commission the whole kitchen as one team — see the full equipment range or send us your brief.