HoReCa Fit-Out

Every HoReCa fit-out that struggles at opening struggles for the same reason: the dining room was drawn before anyone modelled how many covers the kitchen could actually support, at what turn time, during a Friday dinner service. We start with a covers model — seat count, expected turn time, peak-hour throughput and menu complexity — because that model sizes the kitchen, not the other way round.

A kitchen built for forty covers on a simple grill menu looks nothing like one built for forty covers on a multi-station à la carte concept. Getting the covers model right before a single wall is drawn is the difference between a kitchen that can run a full house and one that buckles on a Saturday.

Size the kitchen from the covers model, not the dining room drawing. The kitchen decides how many covers the room can actually serve.

A commercial kitchen has to satisfy a menu, a health inspector and a stream of daily deliveries at the same time. Cook line, wash-up and cold storage are laid out to keep raw and cooked flows separated, hygienic wall and floor finishes are specified to code, and extraction is sized to the grill, fryer and wok load the menu actually requires — not a generic allowance.

We prepare the documentation pack for the pre-opening health and safety inspection alongside the construction drawings, because a kitchen that looks right and a kitchen that passes inspection are not automatically the same thing, and the gap between them is expensive to close after the fact.

Seating layout, table spacing and lighting are not decoration decisions — they set the number of covers a room can turn per service and how long a guest is comfortable staying. A room built too tight kills the guest experience; a room built too loose leaves covers on the table every night the restaurant is full.

We model the dining room against the covers and turn-time targets set at brief stage, then choose materials that survive daily commercial service — sealed flooring, wipeable upholstery, and lighting that flatters food and faces without overheating a packed room on a summer night.

A single restaurant tolerates individual decisions. A brand with five or fifty locations cannot — a guest who visits three branches expects the same counter, the same lighting and the same menu board in each one. We build one reference unit, lock every material and equipment decision against it in a specification pack, and price every subsequent unit against that same pack.

The discipline that makes a rollout work is refusing site-by-site improvisation: where a unit's shell differs from the reference — a lower ceiling, an awkward column, a smaller frontage — the specification is adapted on paper before construction starts, not solved on site by a foreman making a judgement call.

A rollout succeeds by refusing improvisation. Every deviation from the reference unit is solved on paper, before it becomes a site decision.

In Greece, a food-service unit typically needs a health licence, a fire safety certificate and, for units with music or extended hours, a noise and operating permit — each with its own documentation and inspection sequence. Leaving licensing until construction is finished routinely adds weeks to an opening date that was already fixed with a landlord or franchisor.

We sequence licensing documentation in parallel with construction, using the same drawings and specification that go into the build, so the inspection walk-through and the fit-out reach completion together rather than one waiting on the other.