The purpose of this study is to suggest the improvement strategies for exhaust performance in composite kitchen hoods. The Exhaust only hood, the 2-way compensating hood and the 3-way compensating hood were selected, and the laboratory experiments were performed to compare the local exhaust efficiency and the indoor temperature distributions according to the variations of the hood type and supply/exhaust air velocity. The results of this study can be summarized as follows. The compensating hood has better performance than exhaust only hood in the aspect of local exhaust efficiency and temperature distribution. The 3-way compensating hood shows the best performance when the supply air velocity is about 2.7 m/s, and the 2-way compensating hood at the supply air velocity of 3.5 w/s. In the same exhaust rate condition, if the exhaust area of the hood is increased and therefore the exhaust velocity is lowered, the supply air velocity is also lowered to get the optimum performance. The optimum exhaust velocity range of the commercial kitchen hood which derived from this study is 0.48 ∼ 0.55 m/s.