We pour and replace concrete for restaurants, bars, hotels and event spaces around Sandy Springs, Georgia. Most of what we do is replacement. The buildings along the Roswell Road corridor and around City Springs have been in service a long time, and the flatwork under them wears out on a schedule of its own: a patio slab that has settled toward the building, a service walk cracked apart by delivery traffic, a dumpster pad that has given up under the weight it carries. We handle the demolition, the base, the rebar or mesh, the pour and the finish. If the concrete sidewalk out front is failing at the same time, we do that work in the same trip.
Kitchens and dining rooms cannot close for long, so the schedule drives the job as much as the concrete does. We stage work around service hours, keep an exit and a path clear while a section is out, and pour in pieces when a single large pour would shut a business down. A restaurant contractor who ignores that costs you more in lost covers than the slab is worth. On the guest-facing side, stamped concrete and colored finishes hold up to chairs, carts and weather better than pavers that shift. Call for a free estimate and we will walk the property with you.
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Commercial concrete for a restaurant or hotel is nearly all the ground a guest crosses before the door: the entry landing, the concrete sidewalk along the frontage, the patio slab, the ramp that has to hold an accessible slope. Behind the building it is the dumpster pad, the loading apron, the pad under a walk-in condenser. Some of it is meant to be looked at. Stamped concrete and colored concrete turn up on courtyards and dining terraces, where the finish is part of the room. The rest is flatwork that simply has to hold up.
Build changes with the load above it. A dining patio carrying tables and foot traffic is a different slab than a service drive taking a loaded box truck twice a day, and the difference lives in thickness, subgrade compaction, and whether the slab gets rebar or wire mesh. Frontage work in the public right of way is permitted through the City of Sandy Springs, so sidewalk installation at a Roswell Road storefront follows their detail rather than our preference. Interior slab replacement has its own demands: saw lines, dust control, and a floor flat enough to accept tile.
Failures repeat themselves. A thin pad cracks under a dumpster truck's outriggers, then the crack opens and the pad rocks. Grease soaks into unsealed concrete by a back door and stays there. Slabs pitched the wrong way pond water at the threshold, which walks into the kitchen on everyone's shoes. Sidewalk panels settle and lift a trip edge right where guests queue. Stamped work cracks straight through the pattern when the joints were placed for looks instead of movement, and no sealer fixes that afterward.
Getting it right is mostly work nobody sees once the barricades come down: proof-rolled subgrade, steel set at the correct height instead of hooked up mid-pour, joints cut on time and where the slab wants to move, drainage figured out on paper before a truck shows up. Much of the hospitality stock around Perimeter Center and City Springs sits on concrete poured decades ago, so a concrete contractor here spends more time removing and replacing than pouring new. That means demolition, hauling, and rebuilding a base that was never right underneath.
Most restaurant and hospitality concrete in metro Atlanta sits on ground somebody else built out decades ago. Suburban development here started in the 1950s, ran through an early-1960s housing boom after the highways went in, and kept filling in through the 1980s. The commercial pads that came up alongside that housing are old now. We do far more replacement than new pours, which shapes almost every job: cutting out tired flatwork, matching what stays, and building the new slab to carry loads the original never anticipated.
Perimeter Center, the Roswell Road corridor and City Springs put a lot of kitchens, patios and loading areas in a small area, and we work all of it, including the Dunwoody side of Perimeter Center. Hospitality flatwork lives a harder life than anything residential. Grease, hot water, dollies, delivery trucks and steady foot traffic cross the same twenty feet of concrete every day. Concrete built for a driveway will not hold up to that. We build for the traffic a property actually sees.
Failures start at the edges. Dumpster pads crack under the truck, thresholds settle away from the door, and a service apron poured without rebar or wire mesh breaks up under delivery weight. Drainage is usually the quiet culprit behind the rest of it. When we replace flatwork, we reset the falls, tie the steel and pour a slab that carries water away from the building. Stamped, colored and exposed aggregate finishes belong on patios, and they hold up when the base and the joints under them are done right.
We walk the site with you and look at what the existing slab is doing. Cracking patterns, settlement at the door threshold, standing water near the grease enclosure, how delivery trucks approach. We check the depth of the old concrete at a broken edge and note where downspouts and drains discharge. Most of what we find in Sandy Springs is worn-out flatwork on homes and buildings from the 1950s through the 1980s, not bare ground.
You get a written estimate listing square footage, slab thickness, reinforcement, finish, and how the work is staged around your service hours. Any permitting or right-of-way approval needed for sidewalks along the frontage gets handled before we schedule. We work through the estimate line by line with you so there is no ambiguity about what is included and what stays as it is.
Old concrete comes out in sections, gets loaded, and gets hauled off the same day where access allows. Then the base: we cut to grade, compact the subgrade, and bring in crushed stone compacted in lifts. Soft spots get dug out rather than bridged over. Poor base support is what cracks a slab under a loaded dolly or a dumpster wheel, and no amount of steel fixes it later.
Forms get set to the drainage you need, generally sloping away from the building and toward existing catch basins. Kitchen and dock slabs get rebar on chairs, typically number 4 bar on a grid. Light-duty sidewalks and driveways may use wire mesh instead. Concrete installation happens in one continuous pour per section where possible, with control joints laid out before the truck arrives.
Finish depends on the surface. Broom finish for traction on ramps, walkways and back-of-house areas, exposed aggregate or stamped and colored concrete where the surface faces customers. We cut control joints early, cure the slab, and keep traffic off it while it gains strength. Then we walk it with you: joints, drainage, transitions at driveways and sidewalks, and the edges where new meets old.
Two restaurant slabs of the same size can price very differently, and most of that difference sits below the surface or in how hard the pour is to reach. Here is what moves it.
| What changes the price | Which way | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Old concrete still in the ground | Costs more | Breaking out a cured slab and hauling it off is a full phase of work before any new flatwork starts. |
| A mixer can back up to the forms | Costs less | Wheelbarrowing or pumping concrete across a patio or through a service corridor adds hands and equipment. |
| Soft or muddy subgrade | Costs more | It needs stone brought in and compacted so the slab has something solid to sit on. |
| Rebar instead of wire mesh | Costs more | Dumpster pads and delivery lanes take truck weight, so they get heavier reinforcement and a thicker slab. |
| Grease trap, gas or conduit underneath | Costs more | We hand dig around it and form the pour to keep access open. |
| Water standing after rain | Costs more | Regrading or a drain has to happen first, or the new concrete holds the same puddle. |
| Stamped or colored finish | Costs more | More steps, more labor, longer on site than a broom finish. |
Compare bids on slab thickness, reinforcement, base stone depth, joint spacing, and whether removal and haul-off are included.
Yes. Deliveries, trash pickup and staff arrivals all land at predictable hours, and we build the pour schedule around them rather than asking you to move them. Tell us when the produce truck backs in and when the dumpster gets pulled, and we sequence the work so those lanes stay open. Where that is impossible, we stage the slab in sections so one half is always passable.
Yes. Grease trap lids, floor sinks and trench drains all need the slab formed tight to the frame and pitched toward the opening, which is fussy work that determines whether the floor drains or ponds. We set the frames to finished elevation first, then pour to them. Rebar or wire mesh runs through the surrounding flatwork so the concrete around a heavy traffic lid does not crack loose.
Sometimes, though it depends on the size. A small concrete patio can go in during a slow afternoon, but a slab needs protected curing time after the finish, and foot traffic during that window leaves marks that never come out. More often we pour early in a closed day and let it sit. Stamped or colored concrete adds finishing steps that stretch the window further.
A hard troweled slab with a sealed surface handles most kitchen conditions: hot water, grease, cart wheels and constant mopping. Exposed aggregate belongs outdoors, not under a fryer. For patios and service areas where appearance matters, stamped concrete or a colored finish works, but inside the kitchen we prioritize a dense, cleanable surface with proper slope to drain over anything decorative.
Concrete gains most of its strength over weeks, but light foot traffic is usually fine well before that. The finish, the mix, the slab thickness and the weather all move the number, so we give you a schedule for your specific pour instead of a general one. Heavy equipment and racks go back later than people do. We tell you both dates before we start.
Inspectors look for a floor that is smooth, non absorbent, cleanable and correctly drained, with no gaps where the slab meets drains, walls or equipment bases. We build to that: tight tolerances at every penetration, positive slope to floor sinks, sealed joints and coved transitions where your finish system calls for them. Bring us your kitchen plan and we detail the concrete work to match it.