Industry
Restaurants & Pizzerias
High-turnover ovens sized to your covers, built to hold temperature through a full service.
A pizzeria oven is specified by throughput, not by how impressive it looks. Get that wrong and you live with it every Friday for the life of the oven.
Sizing against your peak hour
Work back from your busiest single hour rather than your daily covers, because that is the only time the oven becomes the bottleneck. A 100 cm dome turns 40 to 50 pizzas an hour with one operator on the peel; a 120 cm turns 70 to 80 but takes twice as long to heat and burns considerably more fuel.
Undersize it and service backs up at eight on a Friday. Oversize it and you are paying to heat mass you never use. Our sizing guide works through the arithmetic, including the question most kitchens get wrong — whether your real constraint is the oven or the person working it.
Holding temperature through a rush
Every cold base launched onto the floor takes heat out of it. In a busy service, launches come faster than the floor recovers and the temperature walks downward — bake times drift from 90 seconds to three minutes and the product changes through the evening.
This is recovery, and it is the main reason commercial builds carry more hearth mass than domestic ones. It is also why a garden oven pressed into restaurant service disappoints in a completely predictable way. The differences are set out here.
Fuel, and what it means for your rota
Wood gives you the smoke and the char that a Neapolitan menu is built on. Gas gives you working temperature in 35 minutes rather than 90, holds it without anyone tending a fire, and does not depend on a fire-competent operator being on every shift.
For a restaurant where pizza is the identity and the staff are skilled, wood. For long trading hours with rotating shifts, gas. For genuinely different weekday and weekend patterns, a hybrid — but only if both patterns are real. The full comparison.
Extraction and the working line
The flue decides more installations than anything else. It has to reach above the roofline at the right diameter, with clearances your insurer will want to see, and it usually cannot share an existing kitchen canopy — a canopy is built for cooking fumes, not combustion gases.
You also need room to work: at least 1.5 m clear in front of the mouth, a landing surface within reach, and space to swing a peel without hitting a colleague. An oven you cannot work comfortably slows every service for years.
What we build for restaurants
Most commercial ovens cannot be delivered finished — they are too heavy to crane into a working kitchen, or the route in has a step. So we build in place, fire the oven to working temperature, and hand it over proven rather than untested.
Typical specification: 100 cm dome for most pizzerias, 120 cm where the peak hour genuinely exceeds fifty. Both in high-alumina firebrick with 50 mm ceramic fibre and 100 mm rockwool over the dome.