We pour and finish commercial concrete for restaurants, bars, cafes and hotels around Marietta. That covers the flatwork guests walk on before they ever see a menu: the sidewalk out front, the patio, the service walk to the back door, the slab under a new addition. Marietta Square is the historic downtown core, with retail and restaurant frontage packed tight along it, and much of this work happens in front of a business that is still open and still serving. We plan around that.
Most of what we replace failed slowly. A sidewalk lifts at one joint, a patio holds water in the low corner, a service area breaks apart where trucks turn on it. Guests notice, and so do the people carrying trays across it. We look at what moved the concrete first, because a slab poured over the same bad base fails the same way, on the same schedule. Sometimes the answer is rebar and a thicker section. Sometimes it is fixing where the water goes.
Stamped concrete and colored concrete earn their keep on a hospitality property, since a patio can read like brick or stone and still take a pressure washer. We also run broom finish, exposed aggregate, and plain gray where that suits the building better. Our crews work throughout Marietta and out along the commuter corridors that run toward Atlanta. If you own or manage a restaurant here and want a concrete contractor to walk the property with you and tell you what it actually needs, call for a free estimate.
Licensed, Bonded, and Insured ยท A combined 15 years of experience
Restaurant and hospitality concrete is mostly flatwork that has to survive people. A dining patio, the concrete sidewalk out front, the service aisle behind the building, the pad under the dumpster: each surface takes a different kind of abuse, and each one gets built for the abuse it takes. We work as a concrete contractor on both sides of that line, the part guests see and the part only the kitchen crew sees. The finishes differ. What goes underneath them rarely does.
Guest-facing surfaces carry the look of the room they extend. Stamped concrete takes the pattern of brick, slate or cut stone, colored concrete keeps a patio from reading flat gray against a painted facade, and exposed aggregate gives grip underfoot where drinks travel outside. Around Marietta Square, retail and restaurant frontage sit shoulder to shoulder, so a new patio has to meet the existing concrete sidewalk cleanly, at a grade nobody catches a toe on.
Back of house, the priorities invert. A dumpster pad carries point loads from truck wheels and steel casters, so it gets built thicker and reinforced hard through the edges. Service aisles need slope, because grease and wash water have to go somewhere other than the door threshold. Walk-in cooler slabs, curbs along the building, equipment pads: plain concrete work, and the surfaces that decide whether the back of a building stays clean.
Commercial concrete earns or loses its life below the finish. We compact base, set rebar or wire mesh according to what the slab carries, and lay out control joints before the truck arrives rather than guessing afterward. A patio slab and a slab under a nightly delivery route are different animals. Reinforcement, thickness and joint spacing all move with the load, and skipping that thinking shows up on the surface soon enough.
Failures in this kind of work are predictable. Slabs crack at random when joints sit too far apart or get cut too late. Water ponds where the finish grade came out flat instead of pitched. New concrete meets old at a lip that catches a hand truck, or a patch cures a shade off the walk beside it. Most of that traces back to layout and prep, not to the mix.
Almost all of it happens while the business stays open. Commuter corridors running toward Atlanta mean a restaurant's frontage is busy at hours a jobsite normally is not, so we stage pours to hold a walkable route to the door and keep breaking and hauling away from service. Fresh concrete also needs time before traffic returns to it. We build the sequence around that instead of fighting it.
We walk the property and look at what the concrete has to do. Delivery traffic, dumpster paths, grease line access, where servers cross between the kitchen door and the patio. We check drainage, existing slab thickness, and whether the subgrade under a failing pad is soft or just undersized. Photos, measurements, and elevations get taken on that visit. Most surprises on a job come from something nobody looked at before the forms went up.
You get the scope in writing: square footage, slab thickness, reinforcement, finish, joint layout, and what we haul off. Anything that could change once we open the ground gets named up front, so a soft subgrade or a buried line is not a conversation we have for the first time mid-pour. Permit paperwork and any required drawings are handled before we schedule. Restaurant work often means phasing around service hours, and that gets written down too.
Old concrete comes out in sections, cut clean at the joints so we are not tearing up work that is still sound. We haul the broken slab off, then grade and compact the base, usually crushed stone, in lifts with a plate compactor or roller. This is where driveways and sidewalks fail. Concrete poured on loose fill settles, cracks, and no amount of thickness on top makes up for a base that was never compacted.
Forms go in to line and grade, staked tight so nothing bows when the truck backs up. Reinforcement depends on load: wire mesh for light foot traffic, rebar on grid for a concrete driveway or anywhere a delivery truck runs. Steel sits on chairs, in the middle of the slab, not on the dirt. We place, screed, and bull float in a continuous pour, keeping cold joints out of the middle of a walking surface.
Finish is set before the pour, not after. Broom texture for sidewalks and driveways, stamped or exposed aggregate on a patio where appearance matters. Control joints get cut early, spaced so the slab cracks where we tell it to. Curing runs several days, and we tell you when the concrete installation can take foot traffic and when it can take vehicles. Then we walk it with you, joints, edges, slopes and all.
Most of what moves a commercial concrete bid is visible before anyone quotes. Walk the site and look at what is already in the ground, how close a truck can park to the pour, and where water goes in a hard rain. Hospitality work adds one more variable: the place usually has to keep serving.
| What changes the price | Which way | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Old slab or footing under the work | Costs more | It has to be broken out, loaded and hauled off before we form anything. |
| Mixer can back within a chute length | Costs less | No buggies, no pumping, no wheeling concrete across finished frontage. |
| Grease line, gas line or unmarked conduit crossing the pour | Costs more | We hand dig around it and sometimes reroute the flatwork to clear it. |
| Slab carrying delivery trucks or dumpster traffic | Costs more | Thicker slab, rebar on chairs instead of wire mesh, deeper compacted base. |
| Site already drains away from the building | Costs less | Less fill, less cutting, fewer changes to reach slope on a sidewalk or patio. |
| Stamped or colored finish instead of broom | Costs more | Extra labor at the finish stage, plus release, sealer and cure time. |
| Permit and inspection through the City of Marietta | Costs more | Plan review, scheduling and hold time between pour stages. |
| Pours restricted to overnight or closed hours | Costs more | Crew scheduling, lighting, and a shorter window to place and finish. |
Between bids, compare slab thickness in inches, reinforcement type and spacing, base depth, joint layout, and who is carrying demolition, haul-off and the permit.
Yes. Most kitchens take deliveries early, and the dining room fills later, so we pour in the window between. We walk the route your suppliers use before we schedule anything, then keep that path clear or bridge it. Where a back door has to stay open, we stage the slab in sections and cure one half while the other carries traffic.
A hard-troweled slab with a sealed surface handles kitchen work best. Grease, hot water and constant cart traffic ruin a soft finish fast. We slope the flatwork toward drains, keep the trowel tight enough that nothing collects in the pores, and skip decorative texture entirely back of house. Stamped and colored concrete belongs out front where guests see it, not behind the line.
Concrete gains most of its strength in the first week, and foot traffic comes before rolling loads or heavy equipment. We tell you the sequence before we pour: when you can walk it, when carts are safe, when the reach-in goes back. Rushing a slab under a hot line is how you get cracks that show up a year later.
We build for what an inspector looks for: no standing water, no gaps where the floor meets the wall, no cracks holding debris. That means real slope to the drains, coved transitions where the wall base ties in, and a sealed surface that cleans down without soaking. Your inspector sets the standard. We pour to it and tell you what we did.
Yes. Trap lids and drain bodies are where kitchen floors fail, because the concrete around them takes shock loads and chemical wash every day. We form tight to the frame, add rebar or wire mesh in the surround, and set the pour flush so nothing catches a mop or a cart wheel. Access stays clear for pumping.
Sometimes, though a patio is usually a bigger interruption than a lunch break allows. Concrete needs uninterrupted time to place, finish and set. Around the Square, where restaurant frontage runs right to the sidewalk, we often work a closed day or a stretch of early mornings instead. Exposed aggregate and stamped patios both take finishing time that cannot be split across a dinner rush.