Small Cafe Design

Creating a small cafe design is a relatively straightforward process when you have all the require information at hand. Assuming you have already selected your location and know the square footage, or know the amount of space you intend to occupy, going through the process of creating your business plan will help to fill in the blanks as to what you will need to begin your small café design process.

Without going into all the details of creating a restaurant business plan in this post, creating a small cafe design will begin with your menu and the recipes to create them. The typical rule of thumb for space allocation is 2-3 parts dining room to 1 part kitchen. If your business plan dictates that 50% or more of your customers will be purchasing take-out, you can reduce this allocation to 1-2 parts dining room to 1 part kitchen. Keep in mind that by offering seating in your small cafe design you will be required to provide 1 if not 2 bathrooms, with at least 1 being handicapped accessible as per your local occupancy codes.

In a small cafe design, it is important when creating your recipes to utilize as many partially or fully prepared food items as possible to minimize required kitchen and storage space. This will allow you to keep fewer items on hand in and un-fabricated state. Items such pre-cut and washed salads, pre-made sauces and soups as well as pre-cooked and sliced proteins allow the operator to offer numerous offerings to their customers while keeping their small cafe design as minimal as possible. The quality of these items must of course be evaluated to ensure they meet your standards. They are of course also going to be more expensive to purchase but by choosing your ingredients wisely, and accounting for those increased costs within your business plan, a properly prepared small restaurant kitchen design can be a sound profit generating operation. Utilizing the experience and expertise of qualified restaurant kitchen design firm will help to ensure your small café kitchen design will operate as efficiently as possible.

Cheers!

We’ve helped develop dozens of business plans with clients over the years, and know how daunting of a task it can be when you are starting from scratch. We always recommend using a software platform to make things easier after you’ve completed your food cost analysis, using our Free Food Cost Calculator.