A kitchen inside a mall has two clients. One is the operator paying for it. The other is the mall, which decides when work can start, who is allowed on site, what may be installed, and whether the unit opens on the date the brand has already announced.

Most of the schedule risk sits with the mall. It usually gets planned for last.

The short version

  • In a mall the landlord’s approval sequence sets the programme, and it runs ahead of procurement
  • The kitchen lives in the MEP submission, which only opens once architectural approval has cleared
  • Site handover does not entitle anyone to start work
  • The fit-out period is part rent-free and part on rent, and missing the contracted opening date adds a penalty on top
  • Most malls restrict who may work in the unit to a pre-approved contractor list
  • Extraction, LPG, grease and hood suppression are where kitchen submissions come back
  • The unit’s extract, fresh air and electrical allocation is fixed by the base build, and more may simply not be available
  • Every mall publishes its own manual, and the principle is constant and the detail is not

What approvals do you need to fit out a restaurant in a Dubai mall?

Architectural approval first, then MEP, followed by civil defence approval and a decor permit before any work may begin. A mall fit-out runs through a fixed order of gates. In the Dubai malls that publish a full tenant manual, it begins with a retailer briefing where the landlord’s retail delivery team issues the tenant manual and the lease outline drawings, and the tenant nominates an authorised representative. Everything afterwards — design submissions, inspection requests, variation requests — goes through the landlord’s tenant portal. Hard copies are not registered, so a drawing emailed to a project manager has not been submitted.

Then the design approvals, in order. Architectural first — some malls take this in one stage, others split it into concept and detail. Only once that is cleared does the MEP submission open. Each stage carries its own checklist, and the forms are numbered so everyone can see which gate a unit is sitting at. A submission returned for resubmission goes back to the start of its own queue, which is why a single incomplete drawing set can cost a fortnight.

The step operators misread most often is site handover. A joint inspection takes place, observations are recorded, the tenant signs. It feels like the starting gun. It is not. Work cannot begin until the design approvals are complete and the civil defence approval and decor permit are in hand. We have seen contractors mobilise on handover and stand idle for three weeks.

After that come progressive inspections at set stages, with works held until each one passes; testing and commissioning witnessed by the landlord’s own teams; and a pre-opening list that includes the civil defence completion certificate. Only once the installation is validated is a contractor cleared to connect to the landlord’s mains.

What does it cost if the fit-out overruns?

First you start paying rent on a unit that is not trading. Then, if you miss the opening date written into the lease, late opening penalties on top of it.

The lease sets a fit-out period, and in most cases it is split. Part of it is rent-free — the landlord’s contribution to getting the unit built. The remainder runs on rent, so you are paying for a space that is still a building site. How long each part lasts varies by mall and by deal, and it is the lease that sets it, not the tenant manual.

Separately, the lease names a contracted opening date. Failing to open on it triggers a late opening penalty, charged by the landlord for every period you are not trading. That is a different mechanism from rent, and the two run at the same time.

So a delay in the approval sequence is not an inconvenience to be absorbed. Once the rent-free portion is used up, every week costs rent; past the contracted opening date, it costs rent and penalty together. And as above, time spent waiting on a variation request to correct an allocation the base build could not meet is not deducted from any of it.

This is the clearest argument for front-loading the work. The submissions are the long pole, equipment selection has to be settled before the MEP package can be completed, and both happen while the rent-free clock is already running.

Who approves what

A restaurant in the UAE clears several separate approvals, and they come from different bodies. The landlord’s process sits alongside these, not instead of them.

Trade licence
From the Department of Economy and Tourism, or from the relevant free zone authority where the premises sit in a free zone.
Food safety approval and food licence
From the food safety department of the authority with jurisdiction. It covers the premises and how it will operate: the layout and finishes against food safety requirements, separation of raw and ready-to-eat paths, handwash and sanitising provision, and a food safety management system built on HACCP principles. An inspection precedes permission to trade, and the same department inspects you afterwards.
Kitchen layout approval
Cleared before fit-out begins. This is why the kitchen layout is drawn to food safety standards from the outset.
Fit-out or decor permit
This is the one that varies, and it cannot be read off a map. The issuing authority follows who owns and develops the land. In Dubai, mainland premises go to Dubai Municipality. Premises on land held by the Ports, Customs and Free Zone Corporation or Dubai World entities — Nakheel and DMCC among them — go to Trakhees. The TECOM clusters go to the Dubai Development Authority. In Abu Dhabi municipal approval runs through the Department of Municipalities and Transport and the relevant municipality; in Sharjah, through Sharjah Municipality. Two malls a short drive apart can answer to different bodies, and the permit, the forms and the processing time differ with them.
Civil Defence approval
Fire and life safety, covering hood suppression and LPG installations, with a completion certificate required before opening.
Utilities approval and connection
From the utility authority for the emirate — DEWA in Dubai, TAQA in Abu Dhabi, and the relevant provider in the other emirates. In a mall the supply usually comes off the landlord’s base build, so the application covers the account, the metering and the connected load against what the unit has been allocated. This is where an equipment schedule that exceeds the allocation shows up as a problem. The connection itself follows the landlord validating the installation.

These are the approvals that gate the build and the opening. Operator-side obligations such as staff food handler training sit alongside them and are not part of the fit-out.

Which bodies apply to a given unit is worth confirming at the lease stage. It changes who you are submitting to, what the submission looks like and how long it takes — and a mall’s own programme assumes you already know.

What does the mall MEP submission ask of a kitchen?

Extraction, hood fire suppression, LPG and grease management. All of it lands in the MEP submission, after the architecture is settled. Architectural approval covers the shopfront, the signage, the finishes and the ceiling. The kitchen design behind it is a separate exercise. The kitchen barely features. It appears in the MEP submission, and that is where the detail gets examined.

For a kitchen, the package we put together usually runs to:

The equipment specification sheets are the part that catches people out. Every item needs one, which means the equipment has to be chosen — make and model, not category — before the submission can be completed. A schedule with three items still marked “TBC” is not a submission.

What gets asked for varies from mall to mall, and sometimes between phases of the same mall. What stays constant is the shape of the question. Four areas account for most of what comes back:

Extraction. The requirement is written as an outcome: the kitchen has to be free of smoke, grease and odour, with both eliminated at source. How you get there is where malls diverge. Some name the filtration they want, down to cyclonic or high-performance baffle stages. Some go further and specify approved hood manufacturers, so the brand is decided for you. Others state only the performance to be achieved and leave the make open, provided the submitted specification meets it. It is worth establishing which of those three you are dealing with before the hood is priced, because a mall that names a brand can turn a budgeted line into a very different number. What does not vary is that a hood sized to the wall instead of to the cook line underneath it will fail the review wherever it is submitted.

Hood fire suppression. An automatic wet chemical system, specified for grease fires. This is a separate approval track with the civil defence authority and it has its own lead time.

LPG. Where gas is used it is generally assessed against NFPA 58, and the tenant usually carries the obligation to obtain civil defence approval for it. Gas provision differs by emirate and by building, and a range ordered for one gas type cannot be re-tasked to another on site.

Grease management. Expect to be asked for under-counter grease trap units on outlets producing greasy waste, with the drain routed through the trap before it reaches the floor trap. Here too the approach differs: some manuals name the acceptable makes and require municipality certification, while others set the duty and leave the selection to you. Either way it is a line item that gets left out of equipment budgets almost every time.

There is also a general prohibition on fixing equipment or services to the structural slab without specific approval, which catches extract ducting and suspended services more often than it catches equipment.

What if the unit’s extract, fresh air or electrical load is not enough?

You raise a variation request, pay the landlord to carry it out, and wait — and the waiting does not excuse a late opening.

A retail unit arrives with a base-build allocation: so much extract, so much fresh air, so much electrical load. Those numbers were set when the building was designed, against an assumption about what would occupy the space. They were not set against your menu.

Kitchen demand follows from the equipment schedule. A wok line, a charcoal oven or a bank of fryers draws far more extract and far more power than the sandwich-and-coffee operation the allocation may have anticipated. Fresh air has to be made up in proportion to what is extracted, and in an F&B unit the tenant is usually the one installing the fresh air handling unit, conditioning make-up air into the kitchen at a specified temperature and humidity so the extract has something to replace it with.

Where the kitchen needs more than the base provision, the route is a tenant variation request. It is worth understanding what that means in practice:

That final point is the one worth sitting with. Opening late in a mall usually carries a penalty, and the weeks spent correcting an inadequate power or extract allocation do not buy relief from it.

All of which argues for checking the allocation against a realistic equipment schedule before the lease is signed. By the time the MEP submission is being prepared, the unit is already yours and the numbers are already fixed.

Services are not the only allocation a unit arrives with. The slab has one too, and it is checked far less often.

From a project

Three tonnes of oven, and a slab nobody had checked

A Wood Stone FD-9660-RFG-L stone hearth oven weighs around three tonnes. The delivery route into the unit had been agreed with the mall well in advance. What had not been settled was whether the floor could carry the oven once it arrived, and the mall’s management raised it only days before the unit was due on site.

Delivery was rescheduled while the structure was assessed. Resolving it took the mall’s engineering team and their structural consultant, the civil and MEP contractor and their structural engineer, and roughly two to three weeks.

There were two separate problems, and they needed different answers.

In its final position. Three tonnes bearing on the oven’s own footprint concentrates the load onto a small area of slab. The solution was a load distribution plate beneath the oven, spreading the load across enough slab area to bring the bearing pressure within what the structure could take.

Getting it there. A three-tonne object being moved across a floor concentrates its load onto whatever it is bearing on at that moment. Steel plates were laid along the whole route so the load stayed spread throughout the move, and the move itself was planned as one continuous operation. Pausing part-way would have left the full weight standing on a single spot of slab for as long as the pause lasted.

The oven was always going to weigh three tonnes. That figure was on the specification sheet from the beginning. What was missing was anyone checking it against the slab until the oven was nearly at the door.

Can you use your own kitchen contractor in a mall?

Often not. This is the requirement that surprises operators most. Many malls maintain a list of pre-approved fit-out and MEP contractors and require the tenant to appoint from it. Where such a list exists it is usually revised periodically and published through the tenant portal.

An operator who has selected a kitchen contractor, agreed a price and signed, can find that the contractor cannot be given access to the unit. The work then gets split, re-tendered under time pressure, or handed to whoever is on the list and available — which is rarely the best available outcome for the kitchen.

It is worth establishing, before a lease is signed, which list applies and who is on it.

Do all UAE malls follow the same fit-out rules?

The principle is the same and the paperwork is not. The principle holds across the market: approvals before access, staged inspections, witnessed commissioning. The documents differ considerably in how they get there.

Some malls run everything through a portal with a design audit committee reviewing concept submissions before they are accepted. Others publish criteria zone by zone, with the food and beverage clusters carrying their own storefront, interior and outdoor-seating rules separate from the general retail criteria, so that two units in the same building are assessed against different sections of the same document.

For a kitchen contractor the practical consequence is that the engineering is portable and the paperwork is not. The same cook line, the same extraction calculation and the same drainage logic will serve in any of them. The submission that carries it has to be rebuilt each time, in the format that particular landlord expects, at the stage that landlord expects it.

How does mall approval change the order of work?

It forces the equipment schedule to be fixed before the MEP drawings are produced. On a standalone site, equipment selection and kitchen design can run alongside each other and settle late. Inside a mall they cannot. The MEP submission has to carry the extraction route, the gas provision, the drainage and the suppression system, and those follow from equipment decisions that are therefore being made before anyone has approval to install anything.

That has two consequences worth planning around. Long-lead equipment has to be committed early enough to meet the opening date, while the approval that permits its installation has not yet been granted. And any change made after the MEP approval — a different fryer bank, an extra combi, a relocated pass — becomes a variation request through the portal, not a conversation on site.

Kitchens that go smoothly in malls are the ones where the equipment schedule was fixed before the MEP drawings were produced.

Which malls have we worked in?

Malls and retail developments account for around forty per cent of the projects we have delivered. Across the UAE that has meant working inside:

Emaar — The Dubai Mall and Souk Al Bahar, Dubai Hills Mall and Dubai Creek Harbour.

Majid Al Futtaim — Mall of the Emirates, Mirdif City Centre, Deira City Centre and City Centre Al Zahia.

Dubai Holding — City Walk, The Beach at JBR, J1 Beach at La Mer, Palm Jumeirah Mall and Circle Mall, following the 2024 consolidation that brought Meraas and Nakheel into the group. Skylight Mall, under Dubai Retail, is in progress.

Al Ghurair — BurJuman, Reef Mall and Al Ghurair Centre.

Line Holdings — Silicon Central, RAK Mall and Al Wahda Mall.

Al-Futtaim — Dubai Festival City.

DIFC — Gate Avenue.

Alongside these: Mega Mall in Sharjah, and Galleria Al Maryah, Marina Mall and Dalma Mall in Abu Dhabi.

That is most of the mall managements operating in the UAE, and the reason it is worth listing them by operator instead of by location: the operator is what decides the process you will be working to.

Each has its own manual, its own portal, its own pre-approved list and its own view of what a complete submission looks like. The kitchens behind them are built on the same engineering — the same extraction calculations, the same drainage logic, the same gas discipline. What changes is the route the paperwork takes.

Knowing that route before you commit to a programme is usually the difference between opening on the date the brand announced and explaining why you did not.

If you are taking a unit in a mall and want to understand what the submission schedule will ask of your kitchen fit-out, that is a conversation worth having early.