Common Kitchen Design Mistakes That Cost Restaurants Thousands

Your kitchen is the engine of your restaurant. When it works, everything flows: food comes out fast, chefs move efficiently, and service runs smoothly. When it doesn't, you feel it on every plate, every ticket, every stressful Friday night.

Here are the kitchen design mistakes we see most often, and how to avoid them.

1. Not Enough Extraction

This is the number one mistake. Underspecified extraction systems lead to a kitchen that's too hot, too smoky, and eventually a visit from environmental health. Commercial kitchens produce enormous amounts of heat, steam, and grease-laden air.

Your extraction needs to match your cooking equipment, not the size of the room. If you're running a charcoal grill, you need significantly more extraction than a salad-focused kitchen. Get this wrong and retrofitting is expensive and disruptive.

2. Poor Workflow Layout

A kitchen should flow in one direction: delivery → storage → prep → cooking → plating → service. When that flow gets interrupted (when the fridges are on the wrong side, or the pass is too far from the stove), every service is slower than it needs to be.

Watch a busy kitchen that works well and you'll see almost no wasted movement. That's not an accident. That's design.

A well-designed kitchen doesn't just look organised; it makes your chefs faster without them realising why.

3. Ignoring Storage

Restaurants need more dry storage, cold storage, and equipment storage than most owners expect. If you don't plan for it, you end up with boxes stacked in corridors, fridges jammed into corners, and ingredients stored in ways that make health inspectors nervous.

Plan your storage around your menu and your delivery schedule. If you get deliveries three times a week, you need less storage than if you get them once.

4. Choosing Style Over Substance

Open kitchens look beautiful, and they're increasingly popular. But they need to be designed differently from closed kitchens. Noise, heat, extraction, sight lines, and cleanliness all become front-of-house concerns.

If you want an open kitchen, plan for it from day one. Don't try to convert a closed kitchen to open later. It rarely works well.

5. Underspecifying Electrics

Commercial kitchen equipment draws serious power. Combi ovens, dishwashers, fryers, refrigeration. It adds up fast. If your electrical supply can't handle the load, you'll trip breakers during service. That's not a minor inconvenience; that's a disaster.

Get an electrical survey done before you finalise your equipment list. Know what the building can deliver and design around it.

6. Forgetting About Maintenance Access

Equipment breaks. It's not a question of if, it's when. If your fryer is wedged into a corner with no access from the sides or back, a simple repair becomes a major operation involving moving half the kitchen.

Leave service gaps. Make sure engineers can access the back of every major piece of equipment. Your future self will thank you.

The best kitchens are designed by people who've worked in them, not just drawn them.