Restaurant Interior Design in Dubai
A 90-cover contemporary Mediterranean restaurant in a ground-floor retail unit on a premium Dubai dining street. Interior floor area: 2,400 square feet including front of house (70 covers), bar, open kitchen pass and private dining room (20 covers). Scope: full Category B fit-out from bare shell, DCD approval management, commercial kitchen design and procurement, furniture and lighting programme. Timeline: 16 weeks from brief to opening night.
01. The Brief
The client was a well-established financial advisory firm with a regional client base spanning DIFC, Abu Dhabi and the wider GCC. The firm had occupied a dated Cat A shell in a neighbouring tower for six years and was moving to its new space with a clear brief: the new office was to communicate the firm’s quality and its 20-year track record in the regional financial markets to every client who walked through the door. The reception was to be the firm’s most powerful brand statement. The boardroom was to be capable of hosting client presentations to the most senior level of GCC institutional client. The open-plan workspace was to be a genuine quality working environment for 34 professionals, not a row of desks. And the entire project was to be completed, DEWA-signed and ready for staff occupation by the first day of the lease, a hard deadline driven by the simultaneous expiry of the firm’s existing lease.
03. The Concept
The clients, two experienced Dubai restaurateurs bringing a concept that had been successful in two European cities to the Dubai market, arrived at the brief with a defined culinary concept but without a design direction. The culinary identity was contemporary Mediterranean: the best seasonal produce, a live-fire cooking station as the kitchen’s centrepiece, a wine programme of depth and the social character of a restaurant designed for long, unhurried meals with friends rather than for a transactional dining experience. The design brief extracted from this culinary identity was: a space that feels like the best version of a Mediterranean house converted into a restaurant, where the warmth and material richness of the domestic context creates the relaxed intimacy that a self-consciously designed restaurant loses the moment its design becomes more apparent than its food.
The design concept that Kat Black Design Studio proposed was a single material language of warm terracotta, hand-applied plaster, reclaimed timber and hand-blown glass, with a lighting system designed to operate entirely in the warm amber register and at the lowest brightness level consistent with legible menus. The concept rendered in 3D before a single material was specified showed the clients, within three days of the first briefing meeting, exactly what their restaurant would look and feel like on an opening night in full cover. Both clients approved the concept without amendment.
Restaurant fit-out in Dubai requires DCD (Dubai Civil Defence) approval for the completed fit-out design before any construction works can commence. The DCD approval process is the primary regulatory pathway for F&B premises and covers fire suppression systems, fire detection and alarm systems, emergency lighting and exit signage, means of escape from all areas and, for restaurants with an open kitchen or a live-fire cooking station, specialist kitchen fire suppression engineering. The DCD process has its own specific drawing format requirements, submission portal, review timeline and technical standards that are different from the DM building permit process and are not well understood by fit-out contractors without specific F&B experience.
For this restaurant commission, the DCD submission covered: full architectural drawings in DCD-required format showing all room layouts, door and exit positions, occupancy calculations and travel distances to exits; a mechanical and electrical drawing set showing the fire suppression system design (Ansul R-102 liquid agent system over the live-fire cooking station and all cooking equipment), the fire detection system (Hochiki addressable system covering all areas including kitchen, BOH and private dining), emergency lighting layout and emergency exit signage positions; and a specialist kitchen fire suppression engineer’s letter confirming the suppression system design. Kat Black Design Studio managed the DCD submission and the three-round review process, with final DCD approval received in week 6 of the programme, allowing construction to commence on schedule.
Two additional regulatory approvals managed by the studio in parallel: a DM building permit for the structural modifications required to create the open kitchen pass and the private dining room partition, and the Dubai Municipality Food Control Authority pre-opening inspection, for which the kitchen design and equipment specification was prepared to the FCA’s commercial kitchen standards from the outset.
05. Result
The commercial kitchen for a 90-cover restaurant with a live-fire cooking station as its centrepiece required careful ergonomic planning to achieve the workflow required by the head chef’s brigade of 8. The kitchen layout placed the live-fire station (a custom-fabricated Josper charcoal oven combined with a wood-fired Mibrasa grill) at the back wall of the kitchen behind the pass, visible through the full-width pass opening to the restaurant’s front of house as the room’s primary visual element from any seat in the dining room. The hot kitchen section (two combi ovens, six-burner gas range, deep fryer and salamander) flanked the fire station, with the cold preparation section on the perpendicular wall and the plating pass along the full width of the kitchen’s front wall, facing the restaurant floor.
All kitchen equipment was specified to commercial catering standard with HACCP-compliant stainless steel surfaces, NSF-certified refrigeration, a Type 2 ventilation canopy above the fire station sized to capture all effluent from the Josper and Mibrasa units simultaneously at full load, and an Ansul R-102 suppression system with automatic fuel shut-off interconnected with the fire detection panel. The FCA pre-opening inspection passed first attempt.
The front-of-house design used the restaurant’s material language of warm terracotta, hand-applied plaster and reclaimed timber at every surface and at every scale. The floor in 300x300mm hand-formed terracotta pavers sourced from a Moroccan producer, laid in a Versailles pattern with a natural sand grout. The walls in a two-coat hand-applied venetian plaster in a warm ochre tone with visible trowel marks. The ceiling in reclaimed pine boarding with stained dark walnut finish, with the kitchen canopy hood made a design feature in the same reclaimed pine. Banquette seating along the two long walls in a deep olive leather with individual brass stud trim. Individual tables in a solid walnut with a hand-oiled finish, each with a pair of hand-blown amber glass pendant lights suspended from the ceiling above.
The lighting system was designed as a purely warm amber installation: all sources are 2,200K Dim-to-Warm LED, all on Lutron dimmable circuits, designed to operate at 15 to 30 per cent of maximum brightness during service hours. At this level, the terracotta and plaster surfaces glow as if lit by firelight, the amber glass pendants create pools of warm light at each table, and the restaurant achieves the atmospheric quality that its Mediterranean domestic concept demanded. No cold-toned source exists anywhere in the front-of-house electrical installation.
The restaurant opened on day 112 of a 112-day programme, 16 weeks from the first briefing meeting to the opening night service. The DCD certificate, the DM practical completion certificate, the health authority food licence and the DEWA connection were all in place 48 hours before opening. The fit-out team completed the final snagging and furniture styling 18 hours before the first guests arrived. The opening night service was at 100 per cent capacity.
The restaurant has operated at consistently high covers since opening and has been reviewed positively in Timeout Dubai, Eat Dubai and several regional food publications, with multiple reviews specifically noting the quality and warmth of the interior environment as a distinguishing characteristic of the dining experience.
“We have opened restaurants in Milan and Barcelona and we have never worked with a fit-out studio that managed the regulatory process as cleanly as Kat Black did here. In Dubai, the DCD process can destroy your programme if you do not know exactly what you are doing. They submitted correctly on the first attempt and we opened on the day we told our first reservation. The space is everything we imagined, and our guests tell us every night.”
Co-Founder
Mediterranean Restaurant, Dubai
Kat Black Design Studio has completed projects across Dubai Hills Estate, Palm Jumeirah, Emirates Hills, DIFC and beyond. If you are ready to discuss your interior design, renovation, fit-out or landscaping project anywhere in Dubai or the UAE, request a complimentary consultation today, with no obligation.
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