RESTAURANT DESIGN

A restaurant interior has to do two jobs at once. It has to give guests a room they want to sit in and return to, and it has to let the business run: covers turned, food delivered hot, staff moving without collisions. A design that serves only the first produces a beautiful room that loses money. We design restaurants where both are resolved together.

The concept comes before the drawings

Every meaningful decision follows from what the restaurant is. Average spend, service style, expected covers per sitting and how long a table is held all drive seat count, spacing, lighting level and material selection. A fine dining room and a high turnover casual venue can occupy identical floor areas and require completely different plans.

We start there rather than with a mood board, because the concept determines the numbers, and the numbers determine whether the room can support the business plan. Adjusting seat count after the joinery is made is expensive; adjusting it during design costs nothing.

Circulation, kitchen and the parts guests never see

The route from kitchen pass to the furthest table decides how food arrives. Service stations have to be near enough to be useful and screened enough to be invisible. Staff and guest circulation should not conflict, and the path from entrance to host stand to table needs to be legible to someone visiting for the first time.

Back of house sets the ceiling on what front of house can deliver. Kitchen layout, extraction, cold storage, dishwash, staff facilities and deliveries have to be planned to the menu and the covers, and they have to satisfy local health and fire requirements. We design these alongside the dining room, not after it, because the kitchen dictates what the rest of the plan can be.

Lighting and acoustics

Lighting does more to set the character of a restaurant than any other element. Light on the table makes food look right; light on faces makes guests comfortable; everything else is atmosphere. We design in layers with dimming scenes, so the same room works for lunch and for dinner service. Colour rendering is specified deliberately, because poor rendering makes carefully plated food look flat.

Acoustics decide whether guests stay. Hard surfaces look sharp and turn a full room into a space where nobody can hold a conversation. Absorption has to be built into the ceiling, the upholstery, the wall treatment and the screening between banquettes, and it has to be designed at the start. Correcting a noisy restaurant after opening is possible, but it is visible and it is expensive.

Materials and furniture

Restaurant finishes take commercial wear. Table edges, chair backs, banquette corners and the first metre of every wall absorb daily contact, and cleaning is constant. We specify for that reality and detail the junctions where wear concentrates. Furniture is made to the plan rather than adapted from stock, so seat spacing, table sizes and banquette runs match the layout the covers were calculated from.

From concept to opening

Antonovich Group has been designing and building from Dubai since 2010, and we deliver interiors, custom furniture and full fit out under one contract. For a restaurant that means the concept, the technical drawings, the joinery and the construction come from one team, which matters when a programme is tied to an opening date and every trade depends on the one before it.

If you are planning a restaurant, send us the unit plan along with your concept, target covers and menu direction. We will come back with an assessment of what the space supports and where the constraints are.

Call or WhatsApp +971 54 299 5555, or use the contact form. Related work is shown in our restaurant design and fit-out projects.