Dining out is leisure for your guests and a workplace for your staff. Both have to work, or neither does. We have delivered restaurants including Chinese Grill, Social Grill, MooMoo, Montanelli’s, Empire Burger Co and Brunch Street Café & Deli — front of house, back of house, flow, lighting, acoustics and the finish that makes a room feel worth staying in.
Restaurant and bar interior design, from a studio that has done it six times
A restaurant fit-out is one of the least forgiving categories in interior design. The room has to look right in a photo, function under service pressure on a Friday night, meet health and safety requirements in the kitchen, and survive years of hard daily use — all at once. HEID’s hospitality work in Johannesburg spans six completed restaurants, from casual dining to full-service grills, and that repetition is exactly what makes the next one better.
Front of house and back of house, designed together
We do not treat the dining room and the kitchen as separate briefs handled by separate people. Flow between the two determines whether service works: how servers move, where plates land, how the bar interacts with the floor, and how deliveries and staff movement stay out of a guest’s sightline. Getting this wrong is expensive to fix after the fact — it means retrofitting a working restaurant instead of designing one properly from the start.
Lighting and acoustics get the same attention as the visual concept. A beautiful room that is too loud to hold a conversation in, or lit in a way that makes food look wrong, has failed at its actual job. We design lighting scenes for lunch service, dinner service and bar hours separately where the brief calls for it, and treat acoustic treatment as part of the interior scheme rather than an afterthought bolted on once complaints start.
Delivered work
HEID has delivered hospitality interiors for Chinese Grill, Social Grill, MooMoo, Montanelli’s, Empire Burger Co and Brunch Street Café & Deli. Each brief was different — a grill concept needs a different kitchen relationship to the floor than a café-deli hybrid — but the process was consistent: concept and space planning, technical documentation for kitchen and back-of-house compliance, procurement of fixtures and furniture, coordination of appointed trades, and on-site project management through to opening.
Social Grill and Chinese Grill both required new construction alongside remodelling work on tight timelines, delivered to the client’s satisfaction with the professionalism and attention to detail a live hospitality opening demands — there is no soft-launch buffer when a restaurant has a booked opening date.
Our approach
We take on every hospitality project with the same integrity and attention regardless of scale — a full new-build restaurant and a remodel of an existing space both get the same rigour. Our “beyond boundaries” approach means we treat every brief as its own problem rather than applying a house formula, because a Chinese grill concept, a burger restaurant and a café-deli do not succeed by looking like the same room with different signage.
Project minimum
We typically take on hospitality projects from R750,000, with smaller scopes considered case by case where the brief is a good fit for the studio.
Start your restaurant or bar project
If you are planning a new restaurant, bar or café in Johannesburg, or need to remodel an existing space that is no longer working for service, tell us about the space, the brief and your timeline. We reply to every enquiry within two working days.
