Restaurant & Café Build-Outs

On the published card: Cafe or coffee refresh, second-generation food space $45 to $90/SF. Cafe or bakery in a vanilla shell, no Type I hood $140 to $200/SF. Cafe or bakery from a cold shell, no Type I hood $220 to $300/SF. Full-service restaurant, second-generation remodel $100 to $160/SF. Full-service restaurant build-out from shell $265 to $380/SF. A Type I hood ($45,000 to $75,000) and an exterior grease interceptor ($20,000 to $45,000) are priced on top where the menu needs them. Applied to typical floors, a front-of-house refresh, a coffee shop and a full restaurant land in the three bands below.

A restaurant build-out is the interior construction that turns leased space into an operating restaurant: kitchen infrastructure, dining and front-of-house finishes, restrooms, and the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing work behind all of it. It is the most infrastructure-heavy of the commercial build-out types, because the exhaust hood and makeup-air, grease interceptor, gas service, floor drains, and health department requirements all carry scope an office project never touches. Whether that infrastructure is already in the space is the single largest factor in what the project costs.

A front-of-house-only refresh (paint, flooring, booth re-upholstery, lighting, fixture swaps) prices on the cafe refresh range, $45 to $90/SF, and is scoped and priced per project after a site walk. We sequence around your service hours (typically overnight or one-day-closed weeks) so revenue impact stays minimal.

Type I commercial hoods require code-compliant duct routing to roof, makeup-air units, fire-suppression integration, and city + health-department inspections. A full Type I hood system (hood, fire suppression, grease duct, fan, curb and makeup air) is $45,000 to $75,000 on the published card. It's the single biggest line item on most restaurant build-outs. We work with hood-specialist subcontractors who know the DFW city inspectors.

Many DFW cities require an exterior grease interceptor for a kitchen that produces grease, sized to its fixtures, and each city's pretreatment rules decide the details, so we confirm them with the city before design. On the published card an exterior interceptor, with the sawcut, trench and paving patch, is $20,000 to $45,000. Floor sinks and their drains are scoped with the kitchen plumbing. All of it is locked into the scope before mobilization so nothing surprises the health inspection.

FOH refresh: 1 to 3 weeks. Café / coffee shop: 6 to 10 weeks. Full restaurant with Type I hood: 12 to 20 weeks. Health-department + city sign-off typically adds 1 to 2 weeks at the end. We give you a real schedule with health-department milestones built in.

FOH refreshes and minor kitchen updates, yes. We can sequence work overnight or during one-day-closed weeks. Full kitchen renovations require closure for the kitchen scope itself (typically 4 to 8 weeks), but we can pre-stage materials and prep work so the closure window is as tight as possible.