Restaurant equipment list, with prices in Nepal

Most Nepali kitchens cook on LPG. The workhorse is the single high-pressure gas burner, the bhatti, which takes big pots and woks. Online sellers list bhattis and small electric appliances. Multi-burner ranges, Chinese ranges, tandoors and griddle plates come from commercial kitchen suppliers, who list them without prices.

Plan the line before the walls are finished. A Kathmandu kitchen maker advises fixing the gas pipeline, the exhaust hood and its ducting, the drainage and the floor slope while the building work is still going on, because moving them later is costly.

Most small restaurants start with a chest deep freezer for meat and frozen stock, and a glass-door visi cooler for drinks, dairy and prepared food. Sizes are in litres. Buy for your busiest week, not an average one.

Bigger kitchens add steel chillers. A Kathmandu kitchen maker lists four-door reach-in chillers, two-door under-counter chillers and walk-in cold rooms, all without prices.

Steel work tables, sinks, wall shelves and racks are usually made to fit the room. One Kathmandu maker says it fabricates in both 202 and 304 grade stainless steel, so ask which grade a quote is for (see how to buy, below).

Prep machines depend on the menu. A Kathmandu kitchen maker's checklist names vegetable cutters, dough kneaders, mixers, meat mincers, food processors and slicers; the commercial versions are quoted on request.

Dishes are washed either in a three-compartment sink, one each for washing, rinsing and sanitising, or in a dishwasher. A Kathmandu kitchen maker describes three kinds of commercial dishwasher: under-counter machines for small restaurants and cafés, hood-type machines for mid-sized restaurants, and conveyor machines for hotels and other large kitchens. It sells them on quote; the home-style machines below are what shops list.

Drinking water needs a purifier sized by how many litres an hour it makes. We found no published pest-control rates in Nepal, so ask two or three companies to quote for your floor area.

Start with the gas. In February 2025, an LPG cylinder kept next to a working stove leaked and started a fire at a Kathmandu momo eatery; 11 people were hurt and four had died by the time of the report. A police spokesperson said fire extinguishers in the city's eateries were the exception, not the norm, and that cylinders and stoves were often placed right by the entrance.

We found no national rule that lists the safety equipment a restaurant must have. Biratnagar Metropolitan City ordered all its hotels and restaurants to install fire extinguishers in 2022, after a restaurant fire. In Kathmandu, the metropolitan department that monitors restaurants said in 2025 that it had no law yet to direct where cylinders go or how kitchens are laid out. Ask your municipality what it checks.

Most extinguishers sold online are ABC dry powder, which sellers describe as suitable for all types of fire. CO2 extinguishers are for electrical fires. We found no kitchen (wet chemical) extinguisher listed by a Nepali online seller; a fire blanket smothers a burning pan.

Front-of-house costs depend mostly on the style you choose. Plastic sets are the cheapest way to start; wooden and metal furniture costs more and is worth quoting with a local furniture maker. Buy plates and glasses in sets, with spares, because breakage never stops.

In a coffee café, the espresso machine and the grinder do most of the work, and the grinder matters as much as the machine. Before you buy either, ask who services it and how quickly: a café with a broken machine sells no coffee.

Cold storage and a cake display come next. A Kathmandu kitchen maker's café package pairs the coffee machine with a pastry showcase, a 400-litre visi cooler and a chest freezer.

Nepal had repeated cooking-gas shortages in 2026, and imports of electric stoves jumped: 41,229 infrared stoves came in during the first two months of the fiscal year that began in mid-July, against 13,567 a year earlier. One importer said its own induction and infrared models sold for Rs 2,500 to Rs 2,800, and that electric stove prices had risen 15% to 20% (Kathmandu Post, October 2026).

Infrared stoves work with any pot; induction needs magnetic cookware. Neither replaces a big bhatti: a Bhaktapur sweet-maker told the Kathmandu Post in March 2026 that electric stoves were not large enough for the pots sweets are made in. The commercial sector, hotels and restaurants included, uses about a third of Nepal's LPG, so a shortage hits kitchens hard.

An inverter keeps the lights and fans on in a power cut. A 1,500 VA model, for example, runs on two batteries and is sold for lights, fans and TVs, not cooking. For freezers and electric stoves, look at a generator.

Few Nepali sources publish what a whole kitchen costs, so this is where your own quotes matter most. In 2018, the president of the Restaurant and Bar Association of Nepal put the kitchen equipment alone for a standard 50- to 100-seat restaurant at Rs 50 lakh or more, out of at least Rs 2 crore for the whole restaurant.

Smaller places spend far less. In 2026, a Kathmandu commercial kitchen maker advertised a café kitchen at Rs 10 lakh and a burger kitchen at about Rs 5.16 lakh, each one adjustable to suit. Treat packages like these as a starting point: a longer menu means more burners, more cold storage and more steel.

A hotel or banquet kitchen can add heavier equipment from the same makers, all quoted on request: combi and convection ovens, tilting boiling pans, bain-maries, salamanders, walk-in cold rooms and conveyor dishwashers. One Kathmandu maker suggests the walk-in cold room and the conveyor dishwasher for hotels and other high-volume kitchens.

Used equipment is sold on Nepali classifieds sites such as Hamrobazar, which describes itself as a marketplace for both second-hand and new goods. Steel tables, sinks and racks move easily from one kitchen to the next, as a Kathmandu seller pointed out back in 2014. With fridges, freezers and burners, test before you pay.

On steel grades: a Kathmandu kitchen maker calls 304 grade stainless steel the industry standard for prep tables, sinks and racks, because its higher chromium and nickel content resists rust, while cheaper metals tend to rust at welds and corners. The same maker builds in 202 grade too, so write the grade into the quote.