What a hospitality fit-out actually costs.

Our worked example below prices an 1,800 square foot restaurant line by line: AED 203,899 of measured building work, or about AED 241000 to AED 255000 turnkey once preliminaries, night working and contractor’s overhead are added. That excludes the two biggest variables in any F&B job — the kitchen equipment and the extract canopy — which are specified by your kitchen consultant and quoted on drawings. A café with a reduced kitchen comes in well below it; a hotel restaurant with a show kitchen comes in well above.

Yes, and in hospitality that is usually the whole brief. Night shifts after last service, hoarding and dust containment, extract and gas isolations agreed with the operator, and the space cleaned and returned every morning before opening. Night and weekend working carries a labour premium — we show it as its own line rather than hiding it in the rate, because it is a decision you should get to make.

More than any other commercial fit-out. A landlord or mall NOC and fit-out permit; a municipality building and fit-out permit; food safety approval of the kitchen layout, which governs flow, finishes, hand-wash positions and storage; Civil Defence approval of fire detection, suppression and the kitchen hood system; a DEWA application where the load changes; and a trade licence covering the activity before you can open. Requirements change and vary by emirate and by landlord — we confirm the current set at survey rather than working from a saved checklist.

Because it is a wet, hot, heavily serviced room with a regulator looking at it. Full-height wall tiling, a washable sealed floor with falls to drainage, a grease trap, an extract canopy with fire suppression, make-up air, dense power and plumbing, and a layout that has to satisfy a food-safety inspector before it satisfies a chef. A dining room is finishes and lighting. A kitchen is services with finishes attached.

Yes, and the same discipline applies as in a hospital: a floor at a time, guests and staff separated from the works, noise windows agreed, and each room or zone handed back complete rather than left part-finished. Roughly half of everything we have delivered has been executed in premises that stayed open, including occupied government hospital departments under infection-control protocols. A hotel corridor is a gentler version of the same problem.

Common and straightforward, with three things that catch people out: floor loading and impact absorption where free weights are involved, ventilation and fresh-air rates that are higher than a normal commercial space, and plumbing density in wet areas — showers, wash stations, steam rooms — which drives both cost and programme. We have delivered and currently quote work in this category.

Six to ten weeks on site for a restaurant or café of this size once approvals are in hand, with the kitchen as the critical path. Approvals typically add four to eight weeks and run in parallel. The long-lead items that actually set the date are the extract canopy, bespoke joinery and anything imported — we identify those at survey, not at order.

Yes, and in F&B you want that agreed before you open rather than after the first breakdown. Commercial AMC starts at AED 7,500 a year for a unit of this size, covering air-conditioning, plumbing, electrical and building items, with a four-hour emergency response written into the contract. Grease trap servicing and extract cleaning are scoped separately because their frequency is set by use, not by the calendar.