Building Requirements For Your New Bar or Restaurant

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Hello there. We’ve discussed before the options for the location for your restaurant or cafe or bar. Now we need to think about what your engine room and your inputs from that are.

Building Requirements For Your New Bar or Restaurant

We need to have a look at your services and your shell requirements for you to get the ideal unit.
The sizing of your services and type of services will be dependent on,

Your location.
Your types of cooking, and in some respects,
Your beliefs in terms of sustainability issues.

There’s been a movement towards cooking more on electric, rather than gas.

In a bullet point format, your services required will be

A gas installation, ideally around about 16 MC, that’s a 120 kilowatt supply that will be sized to a meter, probably of a view 16 size.
In terms of water, you’re probably looking for a 32 mil diameter incoming water pipe with a supply capacity of about 1.5 litres per second. That gives you a three-bar water pressure suitable for a coffee machine or other general use.
In terms of your electrics, you’re probably looking for something around about a minimum of 160 amp, three-phase, and neutral, although at a coffee shop you might operate down as low as 100 amp.
In terms of drainage, you need to consider your washer, your toilet provision, and your general drainage throughout your store. Therefore, I would suggest you probably need on average about seven drainage points throughout, and these need to be located and spaced evenly to give you the best use for your unit.
Also, maybe you want to consider grease traps. These often come up with building control and you need to actually have consideration for how you’re treating your grease and your offsets.
We also need to consider your ventilation. Ideally, we take this with a dedicated straight and suitable riser straight up to the roof and discharge at roof level. Although in city centre sites sometimes we have to regress at street level, this involves more complex filtration on your kitchen extracts that could involve kits of UV installation, carbon filtration, and other suitable needs.
We also need to consider fire-rated access to your ventilation for cleaning and installation at each floor level, maybe even a roof-level plant platform suitable for your AC condensers and your ventilation plant.
Other matters we need to consider is your means of escape because this will dictate your internal occupancy. Ideally, with at least two metres of escape, you can have far more numbers into your unit than you can with a single ingress and egress point.
Ultimately, your shelf specification needs to allow for acoustics and fire separation from others in other parts of the building.
Your floor and ceiling loading should satisfy local regulations for a restaurant that’s probably five-kilo newtons if you are UK based, all floors, walls, and ceilings should be finished.
To accept your final finishes, you need to consider your refuse collection and allocation, and storage.
You also need to consider how you’re going to make your deliveries from day to day or maybe weekly.
Finally, consider your fire alarm system, whether you’re a standalone system that’s you on your own, or whether you’re integrated with the rest of the building, which would ideally be a two-stage system.