Opening a restaurant in Dubai: the operational checklist

Four to eight months, and the sequence matters more than the speed. The expensive mistakes in Dubai are almost all ordering things in the wrong order — building a kitchen before the layout is approved, signing a lease before checking the location is zoned for food.

Before you sign anything

• Check the location is permitted for a restaurant. Not every commercial unit is. Verify before the lease, not after.
• Check the extraction. Kitchen ventilation is the single most common reason a fit-out costs double the estimate. A unit that has never been a food outlet may need a duct run you cannot afford.
• Get the Ejari — the tenancy registration. Nothing else proceeds without it.

The licences, in order

1. Initial approval from the Department of Economy and Tourism — permission to proceed, and your trade name reserved.
2. Kitchen layout approval from Dubai Municipality's Food Safety Department. Before you build. They will comment on flow, on the separation of raw and cooked, on hand-wash placement. Building first and asking after is how a kitchen gets rebuilt.
3. Fit-out, to the approved drawing.
4. Food safety inspection once built.
5. Trade licence issued.
6. Liquor licence, separately and much more slowly, if you need one.

Tax and money

• VAT registration — mandatory above AED 375,000 of annual taxable turnover, which most restaurants pass in their first year. Register early rather than retroactively.
• Corporate tax — 9% above AED 375,000 of profit. Your bookkeeping needs to be able to produce that number.
• A corporate bank account — start this early. It routinely takes longer than everything else on this list and cannot be rushed.

People

Every food handler needs a food handler card, which means training and a medical. Build the time into your hiring plan — a full kitchen brigade that cannot legally touch food on opening week is a real and avoidable problem.

Visas take time and quota. Confirm your establishment card and quota before you make offers.

The systems that must work on day one

Not day thirty. Opening week is the worst possible time to be learning software.

• The till, with your real menu, real prices and VAT set correctly.
• The kitchen — printed tickets or a screen, with the stations split the way your line is actually built.
• Arabic and English. Not optional in the UAE, and awkward to add later.
• Stock, at least for your fifteen highest-value items.
• Table bookings, if you take them. Opening week is when you most need to not lose one.

Two weeks before opening

Run a full service for friends and family — real orders, real tickets, real payments, real receipts. It will find the things no checklist does: the printer that is out of reach, the modifier nobody set up, the fact that your busiest dish takes four taps.

Fix those with an empty dining room rather than a full one.