Inflation has burst through the rooftop and in the last two years, like all other industries, the restaurant sector is highly concerned about reducing costs as much as possible. To stay in business, restaurants reduce unnecessary spending habits as much as possible. 

Decreasing expenses also means being able to control high food prices, wages and stay competitive in the market. A good commercial kitchen design is important if you want to control all of these important factors. 

That’s why in this article, we are going to learn more about the essentials of a good commercial kitchen design.

Before we dive deeper into learning more about the essentials of a good commercial kitchen design. Let’s first focus on financing your restaurant. To create the ideal commercial kitchen design, you need to have a sufficient budget. 

Most restaurants turn to restaurant financing. Restaurant financing is acquiring the necessary funding to support your business requirements. This might be a loan from your bank, family members, friends, or even an investor. 

Furthermore, here are a few tips for financing a restaurant that you can follow: 

• Determine the amount of finances you need: Opening a restaurant can cost from a couple of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars. It all depends on the area you’re opening the restaurant in, its size, and what type of food you want to serve. Your kitchen design plays a great role in your restaurant financing, so lay everything out before you get the loan. 

• Write your business plan: When you start your restaurant, you’ll need a business plan outlining your objectives. The document helps you strategize how you are heading and helps you repay the loan in the long term. 

These two steps are important in designing your kitchen and will contribute to the money you’ll save in the long term. 

5 Things that make up a good commercial kitchen design

Many factors matter when it comes to creating a good commercial kitchen design. Designing your next kitchen will highly depend on the following: 

1. The space in your kitchen 

This is the number one factor that shows how many people you’ll be able to serve and will eventually contribute to the long-term success of your restaurant. It even impacts the type of food you are offering to your customers. 

Moreover, an important question regarding your kitchen space is whether you are building up your kitchen from the ground or only modifying it? This allows you to set up your budget for your final layout. 

2. The accuracy of your measurements  

From the doorway to the electrical outlets is everything you need to measure to make sure you know which kitchen layout you need. Your measures are very important because they determine the amount of time necessary to create the kitchen design and allow you to set up a budget. 

Every measurement is crucial, even the tiny space between your light switches. To make it easier, you can consider using 3D scanning services. It’ll allow you to take the right measures and decide which kitchen layout you need. 

3. Your kitchen layout 

Determining your kitchen’s professional layout will depend on your restaurant's goals and budget rate. Standard kitchen layouts include: 

Island Layout

If you have the required space, you can use this island layout for food preparation and expediting orders. As we said, make sure you have the required space, or else this layout will turn into a nightmare. 

A good example of the island layout is The Michelin-star restaurant Latour in the Netherlands uses an Island layout and promotes a space-friendly movement flow, allowing each staff member to do their tasks freely. Easy movement increases time efficiency and reduces the chances of accidents happening. 

Galley Layout

The galley layout leaves an empty space in the middle, allowing stations and equipment to line the walls. This is an excellent option for a small kitchen since it doesn’t crowd up the back-house staff. 

Otherwise, we don’t recommend using this layout for large kitchens. 

Zoning Layout

This layout divides the commercial kitchen into a set of zones. All these zones represent different tasks. For example, one account for food preparation, the other for washing the dishes, etc. However, it’s not a recommended layout for small kitchens. 

Large kitchens with large meals are prepared in a zone-style layout kitchen. Large hotels use this layout the most because one cooking area won’t do the job. In this case, meals must be prepared quickly and for many visitors. 

If you’re a small kitchen, you’d just be wasting useless money using a zoning layout. You best avoid it if you are part of this group. 

Assembly Line

Excellent for those restaurants that are putting out the same product repetitively. The assembly line layout will start with preparation, continue cooking, and frying, and end with a finished meal. The food is assembled one after the other.

This layout is ideal for a big kitchen with large quantities of meals going out each day. A good restaurant example we found was the Kowloon Shangri-La restaurant in Hong Kong. It also has a hotel and bar to serve its customers. The restaurant is busy at all times so this layout helps it reduce time consumption. After all, the more customers will wait for an order, the worse things may get. 

This restaurant followed the assembly line layout because it served many meals at three important times of the day: Morning, lunch, and dinner. Let’s not forget that we mentioned large hotels will serve large quantities of meals each day. 

1. Choosing the right kitchen design software 

A kitchen design software helps you create a functional kitchen. Both paid and free kitchen design software guides you throughout your process. Kitchen design software offers you easy-to-use functionalities, the ability to design in a live 3D mode which gives you a preview of how your kitchen design will look like, offers you ready-made kitchen design templates, and more. 

Some good choices we picked out that you can consider are: 

• Foyr Neo 

• Homestyler

• Ikea 3D Kitchen Planner 

• Online Backsplash Designer 

The ideal kitchen design software will depend on which layout you choose, your budget, and how user-friendly the tool is. There are hundreds of options available on the internet, but narrow your choices and even try out a demo to see if the software fits your kitchen design requirements. 

2. Using the right kitchen equipment 

Kitchen equipment matters a lot when it comes to determining your design budget. The common types of equipment business owners will choose to include: 

• Freezers 

• Refrigerators 

• Fryers 

• Mixers

• Dishwashers

• Beverages

• Ice machines, etc. 

There is an endless list of kitchen equipment you can choose and which items you choose will greatly influence the amount of food you need to prepare and how easily it’s accessible. Avoid choosing equipment you don’t need because it can lead to unnecessary costs and tighten your budget in the long term. 

A Few Tips on How You Can Lower Costs While Setting up Your Commercial Kitchen Design

When setting up your kitchen design, you want to lower costs as much as possible. While the layout you choose will depend on your restaurant’s size, there are some other factors that influence your costs after you set up your kitchen. Here they are: 

• Proper ventilation: You’d be surprised by how much ventilation can clog up. The food quality can drop and even cause other equipment to overheat. How bad is that! 

• Regularly maintaining equipment: If you’ve brought your equipment for many years and have never checked up on it, it’s now time to do so. Irregular maintenance reduces the equipment’s lifespan and makes you buy new equipment earlier than you should, leading to higher costs in the long term. 

• Cross-staff training: Your staff members need to know how to efficiently use the space in your kitchen. Also, let’s not forget that they need to know when to leave conversations. 

• Portion control: Portion management is an important part when giving out meals. If you aren’t measuring what you’re giving out, you might pay more for food inventory than you think. 

The restaurant industry is a competitive one, so it’s important to put these cost-effective methods into practice. You can’t risk high long-term costs by any chance. 

Your Final Choice of Kitchen Design 

Your final choice will matter on what your restaurant wants to serve, its size, and even the amount of staff members you’ll have. We showed you which layouts fit large and small kitchens, so now it’s time for you to put everything into practice and create the best kitchen design possible. 

Additionally, don’t forget about lowering your costs after you set up your kitchen. You want to win in the long term as well. 

Author’s Bio: Tony Ademi is a freelance SEO content and copywriter. For roughly four years, Tony has managed to write more than 500 SEO-optimized articles and most of them have ranked #1 on Google. When writing, Tony’s main focus is to carefully do research and make sure that his content is high-quality.

Cover image by Daniel Nijland on Unsplash