If you’re opening a restaurant in Dallas-Fort Worth, you’ve probably signed the lease already. Maybe the opening date is on Instagram. What most first-time and second-unit operators don’t have yet is a plan for the building, and a restaurant is the one small commercial project where the building fights back. The kitchen sets the rules, half a dozen agencies sign off, and the equipment ships on its own calendar.
The National Restaurant Association counts 7 in 10 restaurants as single-unit operations, which means most of the people doing this are doing it for the first time.
The kitchen is the building. Draw it first.
Here’s the thing about a restaurant: the dining room is furniture and the kitchen is infrastructure. Every expensive decision lives in the back, so the layout has to start at the cook line and work outward.
Start with the hood. Any cooking equipment that produces grease-laden vapors has to sit under an exhaust hood with a fire suppression system, and NFPA notes that in eating and drinking establishments, most fires start in the kitchen and involve cooking equipment. The hood decides where the exhaust duct runs, where it exits the roof, and where make-up air comes back in to replace what the fan pulls out. Move a hood after the ceiling closes and you pay for the ceiling twice.
Then the grease. Every sink, dish machine, and floor drain in the prep area drains through a grease trap or interceptor. Dallas requires one for any commercial or institutional food service operation, and the interceptor is usually a 250 to 5,000 gallon concrete tank buried outside. If the building doesn’t have one, that’s excavation.
Then the loads. A fryer bank, a pizza deck, a six-burner range, a walk-in compressor, a booster heater on the dish machine. Add them up and you learn whether the gas meter and the electrical service can carry your menu. Often they can’t, and a service upgrade runs on the utility’s schedule, not yours.
Then the water. Dallas’s guidelines for new and remodeled food establishments call for hand sinks within 25 unobstructed linear feet of food handling and utensil washing areas, a utility sink at least 14 inches deep, and a three-compartment sink or an NSF-rated commercial dishwasher. A door counts as an obstruction. Hoods with removable filters go over every cooking surface, and domestic ranges, refrigerators, and dishwashers aren’t approved at all.
The health inspector will look at every sink. Draw them before you draw the bar.
Only after the cook line, hood, walk-in, warewashing, and grease path are fixed should anyone touch the front of house. The neon sign waits.
Six agencies sign off, and they don’t take turns
So what does approval actually look like? In DFW it’s a stack of separate reviews that overlap in time. Miss one and the others don’t help you.
Building permit and plan review. Your architect’s set goes to the city’s building department for architectural, structural, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing review. In Dallas, new construction or changes to a food establishment start with Planning & Development at 320 E. Jefferson. Expect comments. Expect a second round.
Health department plan review. The Texas Food Establishment Rules live in 25 TAC Chapter 228, and the state tells you to check with your city or county first, because DSHS only regulates the areas no local health agency permits. That same guidance requires a certified food manager on staff and food handler certification for every food employee within 60 days of hire. In Dallas the local agency is the Consumer Health Division, which requires a food establishment permit for every restaurant and bar, and charges a $121 application fee. Its plan guidelines ask for two identical sets of plans drawn to scale showing the floor, fixtures, equipment layout, room finish schedule, and every floor and hub drain. Collin County permits only unincorporated areas and a short list of small cities; everywhere else in the county, your city does it. Tarrant County Public Health inspects most establishments twice a year, unannounced.
Fire marshal. The hood suppression system gets its own permit and a witnessed test. Fort Worth charges a flat $200 per hood and wants a state-licensed installer to run that test with a fire department inspector present. Dallas Fire-Rescue’s assembly checklist wants the suppression system serviced at least every 6 months and a Class K extinguisher within 30 feet of the hood. The standard behind all of it is NFPA 96, which also expects the extinguishing system to be listed to UL 300, and today that means wet chemical.
Grease. Dallas Water Utilities requires interceptors to be cleaned at least every 90 days, or sooner once a quarter of the tank is grease and solids, and sizes them under the Dallas Plumbing Code. Fort Worth Water’s guidance recommends a minimum of 750 gallons for restaurants, never accepts an exterior trap under 500 gallons, doubles the size if you run a garbage disposal, and wants the trap at least 10 feet from the sinks so the water cools below 120 degrees before it arrives.
TABC, if you pour. Applications go through AIMS, and TABC says a new license can take 30 to 35 days from the date it receives a complete application. Complete means city, county, and state certificates, the public notice, and a 10-business-day turnaround on anything they ask for. File early. Dallas also requires separate men’s and women’s public restrooms if you serve alcohol, which is a framing decision, not a paperwork one.
Accessibility. If the estimated construction cost is $50,000 or more, the project gets registered with TDLR, plan-reviewed by a Registered Accessibility Specialist against the Texas Accessibility Standards before inspection, and inspected after you’re done. Counter heights, restroom clearances, the route from the parking lot. All of it.
None of these agencies waits for the others. Run them in parallel or add months.
The clocks you don’t control: brand, equipment, landlord
Now, about the things a good contractor watches that the permit set doesn’t show.
The franchisor. If you’re opening a franchise unit, the brand sends a prototype drawing set and a standards manual, and someone from the brand walks the finished space before you open. The city doesn’t care about your tile spec, but the brand will measure it. A contractor who builds franchise concepts reads the prototype and the landlord’s work letter side by side before pricing.
Equipment lead times. Hoods, walk-in boxes, custom counters, and espresso machines are built to order, which means weeks of lead time on each. A good schedule tracks every long-lead item against the date the rough-in will be ready for it, because a hood that lands three weeks after the ceiling grid goes in means the grid comes back down.
The landlord. Tenant improvement money, delivery conditions, and the utility capacity the base building actually provides are all in the lease, so a contractor who’s done this asks for the work letter before the first walkthrough.
The permit set tells you what to build. The lease, the brand manual, and the equipment schedule tell you when.
From lease signing to opening night, phase by phase
Let’s put it on a calendar. For a second-generation space the phases look like this, and the order matters more than the exact week count.
- Understand and lay out. Walk the space. Confirm what the base building gives you for grease, gas, electrical service, and exhaust. Draw the kitchen first. Price it by trade.
- Drawings and submittals. The permit set goes to the building department and the health authority at the same time, the hood suppression drawings go to the fire marshal, and TABC and TDLR start now too.
- Plan review comments. Every reviewer sends comments. Answer them the same week. This phase is where restaurant timelines go to die, because the health reviewer wants a hub drain moved and nobody answers for a month.
- Demolition and rough-in. Sanitary lines to the interceptor, gas, electrical, exhaust duct, make-up air, the walk-in slab. A rough inspection at the end of each trade.
- Equipment set and finishes. Hood goes up, equipment lands, then wall panels, tile, ceilings, millwork, lighting, signage.
- Finals. Building, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and fire finals. Health department pre-opening inspection. Brand walk if you’re a franchise. Then the certificate of occupancy; Dallas Fire-Rescue’s checklist requires a valid CO from Building Inspection before you operate.
- Soft opening. Staff training on the equipment, then guests.
How long is each phase? The two builds at the end of this article give real construction numbers. The paperwork is the variable, and the best thing you can do for your opening date is answer plan review comments the day they arrive.
First-generation shell or second-generation space?
Let’s talk about the shell, because this choice sets the budget before you’ve picked a tile.
A first-generation space has never been a restaurant. Concrete floor, no grease interceptor, no hood shaft through the roof, a gas stub that may or may not exist, and electrical service sized for a nail salon. You get a clean canvas and a long list. The interceptor alone means cutting the slab or trenching the parking lot. The exhaust shaft means a roof penetration and a landlord conversation.
A second-generation space was a restaurant last year. The interceptor is in the ground, the hood shaft goes through the roof, the gas is metered, and the three-compartment sink drains somewhere. That’s why second-generation usually opens faster and costs less. The catch is condition. A 15-year-old interceptor may be cracked. The hood may be undersized for your cook line. The wall panels behind the old fryers may have failed, and Dallas’s guidelines point out that FRP isn’t recommended behind heat-radiating equipment in the first place. A contractor who does tenant improvements for food service should scope the existing systems before you commit.
The trade in one line: first-generation costs more and takes longer, and you get exactly your kitchen. Second-generation is faster, if the bones pass.
Staying open while the crew is in the building
If you’re renovating a restaurant that’s already serving, every closed day is revenue gone. Staying open is possible on most jobs, but only with a plan built for it.
The plan looks like this. The work gets split into phases that each leave the kitchen able to produce the menu. Loud, dusty, and smelly tasks (demolition, concrete cutting, spray finishes) move to closed hours. The construction zone is walled off behind a dust barrier, and the crew has its own path in and out. Health code still applies every day you’re open, so the temporary layout has to keep hand sinks reachable and food protected, and an unannounced inspection doesn’t pause for construction.
It’s slower per day than an empty space and far cheaper than closing. The next section is what that looked like on a real job.
What we learned on Pizza Twist
I’m Mahmoud Abu Saad, COO of MASACO Construction. My wife Sara Bannat and I run the company from Plano, and we build restaurants, cafes, and franchise food concepts across Dallas-Fort Worth. One finished project covers most of what this article describes.
Pizza Twist, Irving. A 2,000 square foot franchise restaurant. The scope: franchise-compliant construction to the brand’s standards, full kitchen installation and utility connections, interior finishes, flooring, and branding, with every inspection managed by us. Construction ran 6 to 8 weeks.
The part that matters here: the restaurant stayed open the whole time, with no shutdown period. We wrote a phased work plan around service hours, adjusted the daily schedule to the kitchen’s rhythm, and kept the jobsite controlled with staff and guests in the building every day. The client kept generating revenue through the entire build, and the project closed with a passed final inspection and a franchise-compliant space ready for service on day one.
A note on cafes, since this article covers them too. Our other food-service job, Sayfani Coffee House in Allen, was framing only: another firm was the general contractor, so we won’t claim the rest of that build. The lesson cafes teach holds anyway. Espresso machines, ice makers, and pastry cases want dedicated circuits, filtered water, and drains in places a normal counter doesn’t have them, so settle the equipment plan before anyone frames a wall.
How we’d run your restaurant build
Our process has six steps, and on a restaurant they map cleanly onto everything above.
Understand. We walk the space with you, confirm what the base building provides for grease, gas, electrical, and exhaust, and read the franchise prototype and the work letter side by side. Your opening date goes on the calendar first.
Visualize. You see 3D renderings of the counter and the dining room before we price.
Plan. A fixed-scope proposal organized by trade, with allowances for anything you haven’t selected yet, reconciled against the brand standards and the lease.
Execute. One project manager. A written photo update every week. We submit to the building department and the health authority together, chase plan review comments the day they land, and track hood, walk-in, and equipment lead times against the rough-in dates.
Deliver. A close-out package: as-builts, permits, inspection records, the certificate of occupancy, and warranties. We don’t consider a restaurant finished until the CO is in your hand.
Support. We’re still here after opening night, for warranty items and for the next location.
MASACO Construction is a woman- and minority-owned general contractor and a Goldman Sachs Preferred Vendor, headquartered at 7950 Legacy Dr in Plano. Our restaurant and food service construction page carries the full scope list.
Open on the date you announced. That’s the whole job.
If you’ve signed a lease, or you’re about to, book a consultation and bring the lease, the equipment list, and the franchise package if you have one. We’ll tell you what the building needs before you spend a dollar on drawings.
