Fitting Out a Café or QSR: The Kitchen Decides Everything Else
In a food fit-out, three things are usually decided by the building rather than by you — where the extract can go, where the drainage runs, and how much power the unit has. Design that ignores them produces drawings that cannot be built.
AlcorOne Solutions is an execution-first interior contracting firm delivering turnkey residential and commercial fit-outs across South India. It is headquartered in Chennai, with offices in Hyderabad, Visakhapatnam and Rajamahendravaram.
The Survey That Should Happen Before the Lease
A food unit is the only kind of retail space where the building can make your business model impossible, and where you can find that out after signing.
Three questions decide it, and all three are answerable in a single site visit with the right person present:
- Where can the kitchen extract discharge, and is there a route to it? Commercial cooking produces heat, steam and grease-laden air that must be ducted out of the building to an acceptable discharge point — normally at roof level. In a mall the centre may provide a dedicated kitchen exhaust shaft, and units connected to it are the food-capable units. In a standalone building the duct has to run through the structure to the roof, which needs a physical route and the building owner's agreement. No viable extract route means no commercial cooking. Not a difficult problem — a disqualifying one.
- Where is the drainage, and at what level? Kitchens need floor drainage, and wastewater carrying fats and food solids requires grease separation before it enters the building system. A unit with a single sink-height connection and no floor drainage needs a drainage route created, and drainage runs downhill — if the available connection is not low enough, the kitchen floor has to be raised to create fall, which changes every level in the unit.
- What is the sanctioned electrical load, and is there gas? Commercial kitchen equipment is heavy on power, and this is where allocations are most often inadequate. If the unit is provisioned at retail-shop level, the gap between that and a working kitchen is a landlord and utility process measured in weeks.
Everything else in a food fit-out is design. These three are survey.
Extract and the Air Nobody Plans For
Kitchen ventilation is where food fit-outs most often go wrong after opening, and the failure is usually not the hood — it is the air that replaces what the hood removes.
An extract system pulls a large volume of air out of the kitchen. That volume has to be replaced, and if no make-up air is provided deliberately, it will be drawn from wherever it can: under the entrance door, from the dining area, from the mall. Three consequences follow, all of them common complaints in the first month of trading.
- The extract underperforms. A fan cannot move air it cannot replace, so the hood fails to clear steam and the kitchen becomes hot and smoky despite a system sized correctly on paper.
- Doors behave strangely. A negatively pressurised unit has doors that are heavy to open or that whistle.
- Cooking smells reach the dining room, because air is being pulled from front of house through the kitchen.
Make-up air has to be designed as part of the ventilation system, and in a conditioned space it has to be tempered — otherwise the kitchen is fed unconditioned outside air and the cooling load rises accordingly.
Grease is the other half of the problem. Grease-laden extract requires appropriate filtration at the hood, ductwork that can be cleaned, and access points along the route for cleaning. A duct run with no access panels cannot be maintained, and an uncleaned grease duct is a genuine fire risk rather than a hygiene inconvenience. Access provision is a design decision that costs nothing at the time and is effectively impossible to add later.
Drainage, Grease Traps and Falls
Kitchen drainage carries fats, oils and solids, and discharging that directly into a building system causes blockages downstream that become somebody else's problem and then your dispute. Grease separation is standard practice and usually a condition of the landlord's manual.
The planning points that matter:
- The trap has to be accessible for servicing, because it needs emptying regularly. A grease trap installed in an inaccessible position gets serviced late, and a late-serviced trap is an odour problem in a food business.
- Floor drainage needs continuous fall to the outlet. A kitchen floor is washed down, and water that does not run to a drain sits. The same falls discipline that governs a bathroom floor applies here with more traffic and more at stake.
- The floor needs a full waterproofing system, not a surface treatment. It is a continuously wet area, and it is usually above somebody.
- Equipment positions have to be fixed before drainage, because the drainage is laid to suit them. Moving a sink or a dishwasher after the floor is laid means opening the floor.
Finishes: Hygiene Is a Specification, Not a Cleaning Schedule
Back-of-house finishes are chosen for washability and joint integrity rather than appearance, and this is one of the places where a domestic-standard specification quietly fails.
Floors need to be non-slip when wet and greasy, which is a harsher condition than wet alone, and the junction between floor and wall is best coved rather than square so it can be cleaned and does not trap residue. Walls behind cooking and washing need a continuous impervious surface with as few joints as possible. Ceilings need to be washable and sealed, which is why a standard open-grid tile ceiling is usually inappropriate over a kitchen. Worktops and splashbacks in preparation areas are typically stainless steel for a reason: it takes heat, it takes daily cleaning with strong agents, and it does not harbour residue at joints.
The recurring failure is joinery built to residential specification in a commercial kitchen environment. Standard board in a continuously wet, hot, heavily cleaned environment will not last, and the board grade question is considerably more consequential here than in a domestic kitchen used by one family.
Front of House, Planned Backwards
Once the kitchen position is fixed by the extract and drainage, the customer-facing layout resolves around a few decisions that are worth making deliberately rather than aesthetically.
The queue. In a quick service format the queue is the layout. Where it forms, how far it extends at peak, whether it blocks the entrance or the collection point, and whether ordering and collection are separated well enough that waiting customers do not obstruct arriving ones. A layout that works at half capacity and jams at full capacity is the most common front-of-house design failure.
The counter as a services hub. The counter carries point-of-sale, card terminals, display refrigeration, often coffee equipment, and increasingly screens for delivery orders. All of it needs power and data in positions decided before the counter is built, and access for service afterwards.
Delivery. A meaningful delivery volume needs its own collection point, rider access that does not cross the customer queue, and space to stage orders. Retrofitting this into a layout designed only for dine-in is one of the most common reasons food units are reconfigured within the first year.
Seating density against the extract reality. Seats are revenue, so the pressure is always to add them — but seating in the airflow path between the entrance and an under-provisioned kitchen is where customers sit in a draught or in cooking smells.
Approvals: Longer Than Retail
Food units carry an approval layer beyond the landlord's fit-out process, typically including food business registration or licensing, health and hygiene requirements covering the physical fit-out, fire safety scrutiny particularly around the kitchen and extract, and a gas installation certification where gas is used.
Two of these interact with construction rather than following it. Hygiene requirements constrain the finishes specification, and fire requirements constrain the extract design and the kitchen enclosure. Both are cheaper to design for than to correct, and both can gate the opening date after the fit-out is physically complete — which is the reason a food programme should be built backwards from the inspection dates rather than forwards from handover.
Written by Pradeep Kumar Vasadi
Pradeep Kumar Vasadi is a co-founder and Principal at AlcorOne Solutions. He grew up in Rajamahendravaram and spent years on the factory floors of Chennai’s manufacturing setups — hard, hands-on work that lit his drive to build something of his own. He now leads project delivery, on-site supervision, and vendor coordination, holding AlcorOne’s fit-outs to shop-floor standards of precision across South India.
Sources & references.
Standards, regulatory registries, and manufacturer references that back the material grades, pricing framework, and compliance points in this guide:
Frequently asked questions.
We are opening a café with no cooking — just coffee, sandwiches and a display counter. Do we still need kitchen extract?
The requirement scales with what you actually cook. A pure beverage and cold preparation operation generates far less grease-laden air than a hot kitchen and may be servable with much simpler ventilation. The decisive question is whether anything is fried, grilled or cooked on an open surface, because that is what produces grease. Two cautions: a sandwich press or a small oven still produces heat and steam that must be handled, and menus expand. If there is any prospect of hot food later, establish whether an extract route exists before signing, because acquiring one afterwards is often impossible.
Can a grease trap go outside the unit?
Often yes, and it is frequently the better arrangement — it keeps servicing and any odour out of the food preparation area. It needs the landlord's agreement, a viable drainage route to the position, and confirmation that servicing access is available without crossing customer areas. In a mall this is usually addressed in the fit-out manual, and some centres provide a common grease management arrangement that units connect into. Establish which applies before designing the kitchen drainage, because it changes the layout.
How much power does a small QSR kitchen need?
More than almost anyone expects, and the honest answer is that it has to be calculated from the actual equipment schedule rather than estimated from floor area. Refrigeration, hot holding, cooking equipment, dishwashing, extract fans and air-conditioning each carry real load, and refrigeration and hot holding run continuously rather than intermittently. Build the equipment schedule first, calculate the load from it, and compare against the unit's sanctioned supply before signing the lease. This is the single most common reason a food unit turns out to need a supply upgrade it has no time for.
The landlord says the unit is food-ready. What should we verify ourselves?
Treat it as a claim to check rather than a specification. Verify the extract shaft physically — that it exists, that your unit has a connection point, and what capacity is allocated to you. Verify the drainage connection position and its level relative to your proposed kitchen floor, since fall is what makes it usable. Verify the sanctioned electrical load as a number in writing. Verify whether gas is available if you need it. "Food-ready" is not a standard term, and the four items above are what it is usually taken to mean.
Food fit-outs are decided in the first site visit far more than in the design stage. Units that work were chosen because the extract route, the drainage level and the sanctioned load suited a kitchen. Units that fight their operators for a decade were chosen on frontage and footfall, with the services discovered afterwards.
AlcorOne surveys extract, drainage and load before design begins, so that the constraints are known while the lease is still a decision rather than a commitment.
Checking a unit before you sign the lease?
Extract route, drainage and sanctioned load are survey questions, not design questions — and they decide whether a unit can be a kitchen at all.
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