In the beginning, it’s exhilarating to open a new eatery. However, for a first-time restaurant owner, constructing a new establishment might be daunting. Designing your restaurant around a certain theme is critical to its success.
Your kitchen’s ambiance and seating, as well as its location, must be taken into account. In addition to the fire and building requirements, such as ventilation and air quality. To get you started, here are some fundamentals.
Building a Restaurant: What’s the Process?
Businesses such as restaurants have their own set of laws and regulations unique to their industry. Construction of a restaurant involves extensive knowledge of all applicable building, accessibility, and egress regulations.
Warnings and Tips for Building a Restaurant
To create a restaurant, you will have to put in a lot of time and energy and shed a lot of tears. These significant issues may be avoided with careful forethought and preparedness.
- It may save you money and give you an idea of industry norms if you get many prices and comments from different restaurant contractors or construction businesses.
- If you don’t go by all health, construction, or other regulatory regulations, you won’t get the benefits of your hard work (think: fines, lawsuits, and the like)
- Consider how your restaurant design and construction selections will play out over the year. What if you become a household name and attract a large following? These concerns and considerations are well-known to experienced restaurant building businesses, and they may help you avoid them in the future.
- Create a timeline with the idea that it will not be perfect. Be prepared for the unexpected when it comes to construction, and don’t forget to leave yourself some wiggle room when it comes to the date of your restaurant’s opening.
How Long Does a Restaurant Take To Build?
Building a restaurant that is both code-compliant and true to your concept, as previously said, can take time. As the sort of restaurant changes, so does the timetable. Building a construction timeline for a restaurant requires careful consideration of numerous teams of engineers, contractors, experts, and designers.
According to Projects A to Z, it usually takes four to six months to develop a new restaurant from the ground up. On the other hand, a full-service restaurant can take four months to create on average, while a quick-service restaurant takes approximately a month less.
Now that you’ve considered some of the practicalities of constructing a restaurant, here are seven stages to help you bring your concept to fruition:
Restaurant Concept Design Steps
Building an appealing dining room or an efficient food preparation kitchen is only one part of the design process for a restaurant idea.
It’s a delicate balancing act between achieving your goals and staying within your budget. A restaurant’s design must be both functional and visually appealing and ensure the safety of the food served to the public.
Pre-design
During this part of the design process, much of the research you perform for your restaurant business plan comes into play, says Steve Starr, president, start design, Charlotte, N.C. This is where he adds, “You and the team you hire need to grasp precisely your objectives and your financial model.”
Next, your team should do a brand audit to ensure that the brand is properly defined and the target consumer is recognized; an operational study, an investigation into your rivals’ restaurants, and a market investigation.
As the last step, we’ll usually do a site analysis for our customers before beginning lease talks. Is there enough parking, for example? What are our plans for the HVAC? How much room do we have to install hood ventilation, or will we be forced to build ventilation ducts that extend nine floors into the sky?
Is there enough space for a chiller or other refrigeration device? Why don’t we talk about gas and electric supply lines? The question is, “Is the structure safe?”
Design of a Schematic
At this point, the design team works with you to determine how the restaurant will run, how it will appear, and what the customer experience will be like.
For new restaurants, architectural designs are drawn up, and floor plans and renderings show you the arrangement and appearance of the restaurant.
The Process of Conceptualization
Following approval of the main idea, it’s time to begin defining all of the design’s components, from fittings to finishes. Each member of your design team (architect, engineer, consultant/kitchen designer, and interior designer) will collaborate to sketch the aspects they’re accountable for, record each, and ensure that all elements are consistent.
Drawings for Construction
All data collected throughout the predesign, schematic design, and design-development stages will be utilized to create construction drawings. A general contractor will utilize these to bid on your project.
At the very least, you should get three bids. The identical set of blueprints might provide wildly different quotes from several builders. With just a 20% chance of receiving the work at stake, contractors aren’t going to put in the effort to bid if they don’t think they’ll get the business.
