Start With the Space, Not the Design
The most expensive restaurant build-out decisions are made before anyone draws anything, when the lease is signed. A space that has never held a food-service tenant may lack the gas service, electrical capacity, water and sewer sizing, grease waste infrastructure, and roof structure to carry rooftop equipment — and every one of those is a significant cost to add. A second-generation restaurant space, even a dated one, often carries most of that infrastructure already.
Before committing to a space, the questions worth answering are concrete: what is the incoming gas line sized for, and what does the utility require to upsize it? What's the available electrical service, and does the panel have capacity for the equipment schedule you have in mind? Is there an existing grease interceptor, and is it sized for your projected seat count? Is there a route for hood exhaust and make-up air to the roof, and will the landlord and the building structure permit it? Can the ventilation discharge be located where code requires relative to other openings and neighboring tenants?
It's worth getting a contractor into the space during the lease negotiation rather than after. An hour of walkthrough at that stage can change what you negotiate for in tenant improvement allowance, or tell you that the rent difference between two spaces is much smaller than the build-out difference. Our guide on scoping work against a tenant improvement allowance covers how to structure that side of the conversation with a landlord.
Health Department Plan Review Comes First
In Michigan, food service establishments go through a plan review process with the county health department before construction — Oakland, Wayne, Macomb, Washtenaw, and Livingston each administer their own, and requirements and review timelines differ between them. This is a separate track from the municipal building permit, it happens earlier than most first-time operators expect, and building work that proceeds ahead of it is work that may have to be redone.
Plan review looks at the things that determine whether a kitchen can be operated safely and cleaned properly: finish schedules for floors, walls, and ceilings in food prep areas; hand sink quantity and placement relative to work stations; three-compartment warewashing and the separate mop sink; food storage arrangement and clearances; refrigeration and hot-holding capacity against the menu; and restroom fixture counts. A menu is part of the submission, because the menu determines the equipment, and the equipment determines nearly everything else.
The practical consequence is sequencing. The menu drives the equipment schedule, the equipment schedule drives the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing design, and that design is what gets submitted for both health department plan review and the building permit. An operator who is still deciding on the menu is an operator who cannot yet submit for review — and that decision, not construction, is where most opening dates actually slip.
Hoods, Make-Up Air, and Grease
The commercial kitchen ventilation system is usually the single largest line item after the equipment itself, and it's the part most likely to surprise an operator working from a general contractor's early budget. A Type I hood over cooking equipment that produces grease-laden vapor requires fire suppression, a dedicated exhaust fan, and welded grease duct routed to the roof with specific clearances and access for cleaning. A Type II hood over equipment producing heat and moisture but not grease is a simpler and much cheaper assembly. Which one you need is determined by the equipment underneath it.
Make-up air is the piece operators most often don't budget for. An exhaust system pulling that much air out of the building has to have conditioned air introduced to replace it, or the space goes negative — doors become hard to open, the hood stops capturing properly, and in winter the dining room is uncomfortable and expensive to heat. Make-up air units are a substantial equipment and rooftop-structural cost in their own right.
Grease waste is the third piece. Most jurisdictions require a grease interceptor sized to the fixture load, and where it goes matters: an interior unit needs floor space, drainage slope, and access for pumping, while an exterior in-ground unit needs excavation and a route to the sewer main. On a second-generation space the existing interceptor may be undersized for a busier concept than the previous tenant ran, which is a discovery best made during lease diligence rather than during plan review.
The Long-Lead Items That Set Your Opening Date
Restaurant schedules are governed by lead times more than by labor. Custom stainless fabrication, walk-in coolers and freezers, hood systems, make-up air units, and electrical switchgear all carry procurement windows measured in weeks to months, and they cannot be compressed by adding crew. The correct move is to lock the equipment schedule and place those orders as early as the design allows, because the build will otherwise reach a point where it simply waits.
The other schedule variable is inspection sequencing. Rough-in inspections for plumbing, electrical, and mechanical have to pass before anything gets covered, and each is a scheduled appointment with a municipality that has its own backlog. A failed inspection isn't just the correction — it's the correction plus the wait for the next available slot. Building realistic inspection windows into the schedule from the start produces a date you can actually plan a hiring and marketing calendar around.
Final occupancy typically requires the building department's certificate of occupancy, the health department's approval to operate, and sign-off on the fire suppression system, and these are separate approvals from separate agencies on separate calendars. Operators frequently plan the opening around construction completion and are caught by the approval tail. We schedule backward from those approvals rather than forward from substantial completion.
How We Run These Projects
We coordinate with the property manager, your architect and kitchen consultant, and the municipal and county inspectors as a single point of accountability, so the operator isn't the one chasing three agencies and four trades. On tenant improvement work we scope against the landlord's allowance and flag any overage upfront, before work starts, rather than delivering it as a change order later.
For a build-out in an occupied building — a restaurant going into a multi-tenant retail center or the ground floor of an office building — we schedule demolition, deliveries, and noisy work around neighboring tenants and coordinate with property management on access, elevator use, and after-hours work. Our guide on minimizing disruption in occupied commercial buildings covers how that gets structured.
We're bonded and insured to $5M and can provide certificates of insurance directly to your landlord or general contractor. For medical, dental, and other specialized spaces with their own licensing and inspection layers, our guide on medical and dental office build-out requirements covers what changes relative to a standard commercial fit-out.
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