What we build · Ghost & Commissary Kitchens
All Kitchen, No Dining Room
Production without a dining room. The kitchen cost stays, the front-of-house cost disappears, and a set of shared-infrastructure problems appears instead.
Before you sign. We will tell you what the landlord has actually delivered and what it will cost to make it a restaurant.
Pre-lease
We will walk the space before you sign it
Rent clock
Every week of delay is a week of paying for a closed room
Grease
Routing checked before design, not discovered at permit
Licensed
General contractor, licensed in the state of Florida
Shared infrastructure, individual liability
Multiple operators sharing exhaust, grease interceptor and utilities is efficient and it makes responsibility ambiguous. When the interceptor is not being maintained or the exhaust is undersized for the combined load, everybody has a problem and nobody owns it. Those boundaries need to be explicit in the agreement, not assumed.
The commercial structure creates a second ambiguity. Operators are frequently on short flexible terms, which is the appeal, and that means the party benefiting from shared infrastructure maintenance may have left before the consequences of neglecting it appear. Whoever owns the building carries that, and it should be priced accordingly.
What to establish
- Exhaust capacity for the combined load, not for one tenant.
- Grease interceptor sizing for everyone using it.
- Sub-metering, so utility cost follows actual use.
- Who maintains the shared infrastructure, in writing.
- Delivery and driver access, which is the operational bottleneck.
Why driver access decides the model
The throughput of a ghost kitchen is limited by how fast completed orders leave, and that means drivers arriving, parking, collecting and departing without obstructing each other. On a constrained site that becomes the bottleneck long before kitchen capacity does.
Designing it deliberately — dedicated parking, a clear pickup point, separation from delivery vehicles bringing supplies in — costs very little at layout and cannot be fixed once the building is occupied.
How we handle it
- 01Size shared systems for the actual combined load.
- 02Sub-meter individual units where the model requires it.
- 03Build clear separation between units for cleaning and pests.
- 04Design driver access and pickup properly, not as leftover space.
- 05Document what is shared and what is not.
Design the driver pickup area deliberately. It is the operational bottleneck of the entire model, and treating it as leftover space produces congestion that costs every tenant in the building throughput every evening.
Said plainly
Where we stop
If shared infrastructure is sized for fewer operators than the model assumes, adding units later means upgrading the shared system. That cost should be identified now rather than discovered at unit six.
FAQ
Common questions
- How is the exhaust sized?
- For the combined load of all units, not for one. Undersizing here affects everybody.
- Who maintains the interceptor?
- It must be explicit in the agreement. Shared responsibility with no owner is how it fails.
- Should units be sub-metered?
- Usually. It makes utility cost follow actual use.
- What is the real bottleneck?
- Driver pickup. Design it deliberately; it decides throughput for everyone.
The hard parts
The Hood & Make-Up Air
The single largest mechanical item in a restaurant, and the one most often priced as though it were a piece of stainless steel.
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Grease & Drainage
Every commercial kitchen needs grease waste to reach an interceptor of adequate size, in a location that can actually be pumped out.
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Health Department Review
Food service premises are reviewed by the health authority as well as by building. Two reviews, two timelines, and they do not run in step.
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The Landlord's Delivered Condition
The lease describes what the landlord delivers. That description is where most restaurant budget surprises originate, and it is negotiable only before signing.
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The Rent Clock
From rent commencement until opening, a restaurant pays for a space that produces nothing. That is the real cost of every week of delay.
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More what we build
Full-Service Restaurant
A full kitchen with a dining room. The most demanding food service buildout, and the one where the space either supports it or does not.
Read more →
Quick Service & Fast Casual
Usually a brand prototype rolled out across sites, where the value is repeatability and the risk is the specific tenancy.
Read more →
Bars & Nightlife
A venue where the number of people is the point. Occupant load drives exiting, restrooms and almost everything about the plan.
Read more →
Next step
Find out what is actually wrong with it.
An inspection, photographs of what we found, and a written scope. If the honest answer is that it can wait another season, that is the answer you will get.