Every project starts with understanding what you’re actually building — not just the space, but the business. We ask about your menu and cooking methods, your projected volume and service style, your staffing model, your budget range, and your target opening timeline. We also want to understand things that don’t show up in a typical kitchen design brief: your ABC license strategy if alcohol is involved, your service model and how it affects your pass and pickup zone, and whether your concept has specific operational demands — like celebration dining volume spikes or late-night service — that a generic kitchen template wouldn’t account for.
This conversation shapes everything that follows. A kitchen designed without understanding your actual business model is a kitchen designed for the wrong business.
Before any design work begins, we evaluate your space — including the parts most owners never think to check. Gas line capacity, electrical panel capacity, existing plumbing infrastructure, and structural conditions all get assessed against what your concept actually requires. As we’ve discussed in other planning guides, infrastructure gaps discovered mid-construction are among the most expensive surprises in a restaurant build-out, and catching them at this stage — ideally before your lease is finalized — gives you real leverage and real options.
This is the stage most people picture when they think about kitchen design — but it’s built on everything from steps one and two, not a generic template. We map your kitchen into functional zones: receiving, storage, prep, cooking line, plating and pass, and warewashing. We evaluate open versus closed kitchen configurations if that’s relevant to your concept, plan for cold storage capacity based on your actual volume model, and design a workflow that supports your specific staffing plan and service style — whether that’s counter service, full table service, or a hybrid model.
At this stage, we’re producing preliminary floor plans that you review and refine with us before anything moves into formal drawings.
Once your layout is set, we develop your commercial kitchen equipment list — but as we’ve covered extensively, this isn’t a generic shopping list. Every item is selected based on your menu and volume, verified for NSF certification, sized to match your ventilation and utility infrastructure, and — where applicable — evaluated against PG&E rebate eligibility so you’re not leaving incentive money unclaimed. We also flag long lead-time items early so your equipment ordering timeline aligns with your construction schedule.
With your layout and equipment specification finalized, we produce the detailed CAD drawings and documentation required for your California county health department plan check submission. This includes your floor plan, equipment schedule, plumbing and ventilation details, and flooring and finish specifications — formatted specifically for the documentation standards your particular county expects, since as we’ve noted, Sacramento, Sonoma, Marin, and Napa counties each have their own review tendencies and expectations.
We also coordinate at this stage with your fire suppression contractor, since your hood and equipment drawings directly inform your fire suppression system design — and, if applicable, we factor in your ABC license requirements so your floor plan supports both your health permit and your alcohol license application simultaneously.
We submit your drawings to your local health department and remain engaged through the review process — responding to correction requests, providing additional documentation reviewers request, and revising drawings as needed. Because we understand the specific tendencies of the counties we work in across NorCal, our goal at this stage is minimizing correction cycles, not just responding to them after they happen.
During construction, we stay involved as a resource for your general contractor and specialty subcontractors — clarifying design intent, coordinating equipment delivery timing with installation readiness, and helping resolve field questions that inevitably arise once walls are open and systems are being installed. This is also the stage where fire suppression, hood installation, and grease interceptor work all need to be coordinated across multiple contractors, and having a design partner who understands how all these systems connect reduces the kind of costly field conflicts that arise when trades work in isolation.
As your project approaches completion, we help you prepare for your health department pre-opening inspection, your fire marshal’s final inspection, and the overall path to your Certificate of Occupancy. Because we’ve built your kitchen around compliance requirements from day one — rather than treating them as a final checklist — this stage is typically about confirmation and fine-tuning rather than discovering last-minute problems.
Underneath each of these steps, what we’re actually managing is coordination — between your menu and your equipment, between your equipment and your hood, between your hood and your fire suppression system, between your floor plan and your health permit, and between your permit timeline and your construction schedule. None of these pieces exist in isolation, and the value of hiring an experienced commercial kitchen designer in California isn’t just the drawings themselves — it’s making sure every one of these interconnected systems is designed to work together from the start, rather than discovered to conflict with each other during construction.
