Restaurant interior design in Dubai runs ahead of construction: concept and layout, a seating plan with a counted cover number, a one-way kitchen flow, and the drawing package your authority and your landlord review. Design practices here commonly quote 10 to 15 per cent of the fit-out budget, or a rate per square metre. Concept to approved drawings usually takes five to nine weeks.
What a restaurant interior design package contains
The design stage turns a lease and a menu into something buildable. It starts with the service model rather than the mood board. Counter service, table service with a bar, an open kitchen, a delivery-heavy operation: each one produces a different plan from the same empty shell. The menu sets the cooking line, the cooking line sets the kitchen footprint, and what is left over is your dining room. Projects that start from a seating layout and squeeze the kitchen in afterwards get redrawn, usually twice.
A package for a restaurant normally includes the layout plan, a food flow diagram, a furniture and seating plan with the cover count written on it, sections through the bar and any raised floor, a finishes specification, lighting positions, joinery details for the bar, host desk and banquettes, and coordination drawings for mechanical, electrical and plumbing services. The kitchen equipment schedule sits alongside all of it. Your supplier's dimensions, water points, drain positions and electrical loads are what the services drawings get built around, so an unconfirmed equipment list holds up everything downstream.
Material selection in this climate is a separate piece of work from choosing a look. Open-pore timber within reach of a fryer stops looking new inside a season. Grout in a wash-up area gives way long before the tiles do. Terrace joinery takes humidity, salt and direct afternoon sun at the same time, and the finish that survived a showroom sample board does not always survive a summer. A designer who has handed over restaurants writes the specification knowing what the cleaning team will pour on the surface every night.
How the fee itself is structured, percentage of build cost against stage payments against a rate per square metre, we have set out in a separate piece on how interior design fees work in Dubai. The short version for a restaurant: the 10 to 15 per cent band quoted around the market is for a full package with site supervision, and a concept-only scope costs considerably less and leaves you to coordinate the rest. Our own design packages start from AED 10,000 and take three to six weeks, with food and beverage work sitting at the upper end of that range because of the kitchen and services coordination.
Construction money is a different conversation with different numbers, and we have broken that down in the guide to restaurant fit-out cost in Dubai. Treat the design fee and the build budget as two separate lines in your opening plan, because mixing them is how operators end up believing a fit-out quote that quietly excludes drawings and approvals.
How many covers actually fit the unit you signed
Capacity is the first number worth testing, before any aesthetic decision. As a planning figure, casual dining is usually worked out at roughly 1.5 to 2 square metres per cover including circulation, with fine dining needing meaningfully more because of table spacing, service gaps and a bigger pass. That is design practice rather than a local rule, and it exists to stop you building a room where waiters cannot get past a pulled-out chair.
Then subtract. The area on the leasing brochure is not the area you can seat. On a compact unit the back of house can take a third of the floor plate before a single chair is placed, and the remainder gets further reduced by things that look small on a drawing and are not.
- Entrance zone, host desk and a place for people to wait without standing in the service route
- Service stations, point-of-sale positions and the back of the bar
- Main circulation routes and the clear widths needed for escape
- The column grid, which rarely sits where you want a banquette
- Low soffits and air conditioning drops that make some areas unusable for standing guests
- Customer and staff toilets, and the lobbies they need
- Dry store, cold store, staff change and the waste holding area
The cover count then feeds back into the approval drawings, because sanitary provision and escape route capacity are both read against the number of people the venue is designed to hold. Changing the seating plan late therefore reopens questions the design team thought were closed. That is one of the quieter reasons a restaurant drawing set gets resubmitted.
Seating mix matters as much as the total. A room planned entirely on four-tops looks generous and runs badly, because most walk-in groups are two people and you lose a seat on every table. Banquette runs along the perimeter buy covers back and give the room an edge that reads well on camera, which matters when half your marketing is the room itself. Running several layout versions before furniture is ordered is normal on a commercial fit-out, and that iteration is cheaper on paper than in the room. See our completed projects for examples of the finished work.
Why the kitchen flow is drawn before the furniture
Food has to move in one direction through the plan: delivery, dry and cold storage, preparation, cooking, service, wash-up, waste. The clean path and the dirty path must not cross. When a drawing set comes back for revision, this is the most common reason. A plan where dirty plates travel back through the prep area, or where the bin route passes the cold store door, gets picked up quickly by anyone reading the food flow diagram properly.
Sinks are the next thing a reviewer looks for. Hand washing, food preparation and dish washing need their own fittings, and both the number and the position are read against the layout rather than counted in isolation. A hand wash basin that exists on the plan but sits far from the cooking line solves nothing in practice, and any reviewer who checks the layout against the food flow diagram will flag it.
The grease trap goes on the plan early, before furniture, because it is tied to the drainage route and to the access needed to service it. Someone has to open it regularly and get the contents out of the building without walking through the dining room. Moving a trap after the screed is down means breaking floor, re-coordinating falls and resubmitting drawings, and the cost of that one change usually exceeds the whole design fee for the kitchen area.
Extract is the constraint that decides where a kitchen can physically go. The hood over the cooking line needs a duct route running vertically to roof level, with make-up air coming back into the space so the kitchen is not pulling air through the dining room and the front door. That route is a building question, not an interiors question. In a mall or a mixed-use tower the landlord approves it, and if the riser you need does not exist, it does not matter how good the layout is.
We have seen this kill a concept at survey stage. The honest advice in that situation is to change the menu to something that does not need a heavy extract, or to walk away from the unit, and a designer who will not tell you that early is costing you money. It is better to lose a deposit on a lease than to discover the problem after you have paid for drawings and a kitchen package.
What the approval package needs to show
The submission set is more than a pretty plan. It generally needs the room layout, the food flow plan, the furniture and seating plan with the cover count, sections, and a services layout covering drainage, water supply, extract and electrical loads. Finishes need to be specified in a way that reads as cleanable, with junctions between floor and wall detailed rather than left to the tiler. The fire strategy has to agree with the layout, which means the escape routes on the architectural plan and the ones on the fire drawings cannot be two different ideas.
Before you submit anything to the authority, the landlord reads it. In a mall this is a formal process against a fit-out manual, and that manual is often stricter than the city requirements: approved contractor lists, insurance levels, permitted working hours, delivery routes, specified ceiling and floor interfaces, and rules about what may connect to the base-build services. Standalone buildings skip the manual but bring their own problems, usually around drainage capacity and where an extract duct is allowed to terminate.
A typical programme, with the obvious caveat that it moves:
- Concept design: 2 to 3 weeks, including the layout options and the cover count
- Working drawings and specifications: 1 to 2 weeks once the concept and the equipment schedule are frozen
- Approvals: 2 to 4 weeks, depending on the authority with jurisdiction and whether a landlord review sits in front of it
Mall units take longer than the band suggests, because the landlord review and the authority review are sequential and each comment round adds time. A standalone unit in an older building can also run long if the base-build drawings are missing and the design team has to survey and redraw what is actually there. Nobody can promise you a date on the first call, and a firm that does is quoting a best case.
Where restaurant projects lose weeks at design stage
The menu changing after the kitchen layout is fixed. Adding a tandoor, a pizza oven or a fryer late changes extract, power and gas, and those changes walk back through drawings that were already approved.
The equipment schedule arriving late. Until the supplier confirms models, the services drawings are guesses, and guessed drain positions become chased concrete later.
Treating the landlord review as a formality. Comments from a fit-out manual are not negotiable in the way a design preference is, and finding that out at week six is expensive.
Changing the cover count after submission, which reopens sanitary provision and escape capacity.
Appointing a designer with no food and beverage work behind them. Residential interiors are a different discipline, and a beautiful dining room with a kitchen that fails its flow review is not a usable deliverable.
Whether you hire the designer and the contractor separately or keep both under one contract changes who absorbs these coordination gaps, and we have compared the two routes in detail in the piece on design and build against a separate designer and contractor. What matters at the design stage either way is that someone is contractually responsible for the drawings agreeing with each other.
DOMECO designs and builds commercial interiors in Dubai with our own crew, a quote fixed by contract and a one-year workmanship warranty. If you have a unit under offer and want the capacity and extract questions answered before you sign, send the floor plan and the lease drawings to WhatsApp +971 54 307 4888 or info@domeco.ae, and we will tell you what the space can hold.
FAQ
How much does restaurant design cost separately from the build?
Design practices in Dubai commonly quote 10 to 15 per cent of the fit-out budget for a full package with site supervision, or a rate per square metre of the venue. Concept-only scopes cost less and leave coordination with you. Our design packages start from AED 10,000, with food and beverage projects at the upper end because of the kitchen and services work.
How many square metres do you need per seat?
As a planning figure, casual dining is usually worked out at about 1.5 to 2 square metres per cover including circulation, and fine dining needs more for table spacing and service. That is design practice rather than a published local requirement. The real answer comes out of your own plan once back of house, toilets, stores and escape widths are drawn.
What does a reviewer look at in a Dubai kitchen layout?
The food flow in one direction, with no crossing of clean and dirty paths, and the position and number of sinks for hands, food and dishes. The drainage route and grease trap, including access to service it. Extract over the cooking line with make-up air, and finishes and junctions that can actually be cleaned. Requirements differ by facility and authority, so confirm the current ones directly rather than relying on a summary.
How long does the design stage take?
Concept usually runs 2 to 3 weeks, working drawings another 1 to 2 weeks once the concept and equipment schedule are frozen, and approvals 2 to 4 weeks. Mall units sit at the top of that range or beyond it, because the landlord reviews the package against a fit-out manual before the authority sees it.
What should I check in a contract with a restaurant designer?
That the deliverables list names the food flow plan, the services coordination drawings and the equipment schedule interface, not just visuals. That revision rounds are defined, since comment cycles are where fees quietly grow. That responsibility for submission drawings and responses to authority and landlord comments is stated. And that the fee covers site visits during construction, because drawings nobody checks on site get built wrong.