Project Details:
| Built Year: | 2021 |
| Built duration: | 2 Week |
| Sector: | |
| Dome Size: | One Dia. 10m |
| Location: | Purok 5 Lunotan, Civoleg, Gingoog City, Philippines, 9004 |
Project Background
In the restaurant world, if you don’t stand out, you’ll quickly get lost in the crowd. Your advantage usually comes down to three things: food, service, and atmosphere. Great food comes from unique recipes and skilled chefs. Great service comes from proper training. A nice atmosphere comes from thoughtful design.
But there’s an easier way—a tent. A well-designed tent restaurant instantly creates a unique vibe, makes your place memorable, and gets people talking. The dome restaurant tent for Project Moi Kitchen + Bar in the Philippines, designed by Shelter Dome, is a perfect example. Their dome tent restaurant has won plenty of praise and attention.
Next, we’ll use Project Moi Kitchen + Bar as an example to show how a tent restaurant can work. We’ll also look at the challenges you might face when setting up and running a tent restaurant, and the possible solutions. This way, you’ll get a clearer picture and more options to consider.
How Tent Restaurants Can Boost Your Business?
If you still think of tents as small, cramped spaces that can’t stand up to the weather, it’s time to update that picture. People’s creativity with tent design has gone way beyond that. Using a tent as a restaurant isn’t just about saving money — it also brings many other benefits:
High Customization
If a restaurant space doesn’t stand out in appearance, it’s hard for it to succeed. One of the biggest advantages of using a tent as a restaurant is its high level of customization. Traditional restaurants are usually built with standard materials like bricks, concrete, and steel, and the layout often ends up being very square and uniform. Restaurant tents, on the other hand, can be designed in different shapes, sizes, and layouts. They can also be customized in color, fabric, branding, windows, doors, and even interior setups.
The same goes for Project Moi Kitchen + Bar. They use a dome tent design. The frame is made of many triangles connected to form a half-sphere. From both the inside and outside, the geometric frame creates a unique and eye-catching look, drawing in customers who want a dining experience that feels different.
Highly Weather-Resistant
Most people think tents aren’t very strong or durable. But when used as a restaurant, tents can be customized to match the strength of traditional buildings, able to withstand strong winds, heavy snow, and even earthquakes.
Take Project Moi Kitchen + Bar, for example. It’s located in Misamis Oriental, in the northern part of Mindanao, Philippines, where the weather is hot, humid, and rainy for most of the year.
Its dome tent restaurant uses a triangular frame design, which links the frame pieces together for extra stability. The frame is made of rust-resistant mild carbon structural steel, giving it both strength and flexibility. The tent fabric is tear-resistant PVC, weighing 950g/m² and 850g/m², which is UV-protected, fully waterproof, mold-resistant, and fire-retardant. These features help the structure hold up well in the challenging local climate.
Flexible
Unlike traditional restaurants, which require a significant amount of work and manpower to build and tear down, a tent restaurant is highly flexible. Setting it up or taking it down usually takes just a few days, and sometimes it can be done in a single day. This makes it perfect for restaurant owners who want to try out a unique space for a trial run. If the restaurant tent uses a modular structure, it’s also easy to expand or change the layout later using simple accessories once the trial proves successful.
In addition, the flexibility of the tent restaurant is also reflected in the interior space design. Thanks to its strong structure, the inside usually doesn’t need extra support columns, so all the space is usable. Inside Project Moi Kitchen + Bar’s dome tent restaurant, the layout is completely open with nothing in the way. Its tall, vertical design also makes the space feel even bigger and more open for everyone inside.
Low Cost
You might think tented restaurants are expensive with these benefits. But in fact, even with careful design and manufacturing, they’re still cheaper than building a traditional restaurant from scratch. Tent restaurants use prefabricated structures, which are mostly made in a factory and then transported to the site for assembly. This saves a lot of the foundation work and labor costs required for a traditional building, making it perfect for restaurant owners who have a limited budget but want a unique space.
For example, a 1,000 square foot dome tent, including the frame, fabric cover, and other features like doors and windows, usually costs less than $30,000. For restaurant owners looking to create a brand-new and cost effective dining space, this is a very attractive option.
Challenge and Solutions
While tented restaurants offer many benefits, creating the perfect tent restaurant can also present challenges. Below, we share some of the challenges and possible solutions Project Moi Kitchen + Bar encountered:
- Space Layout: Even though all the space inside a tent restaurant can be used, it’s still hard to manage things like soundproofing and smoke control inside the tent. Because of this, planning where to put the kitchen, dining area, and storage is a big challenge. At Project Moi Kitchen + Bar, the solution was to use the bubble tent restaurant only as the main dining and guest area, while setting up a separate traditional building nearby for the kitchen and other functions.
- Ventilation: Ventilation challenges are different depending on the type of tent. For example, an open-sided tent might have too much airflow, which makes dining uncomfortable on windy days. In that case, adding side walls can help. On the other hand, a closed bubble tent restaurant like the one at Project Moi Kitchen + Bar can feel stuffy because air circulation is limited. To fix this, we installed two solar-powered exhaust fans on the top of the tent. These fans push out hot air that rises, which helps cooler air flow through the space below, creating a more comfortable and well-ventilated dining environment.
Outcome
Overall, building a tent restaurant is a cost-effective choice, especially for restaurant owners who want to create or expand a dining space with less risk. After it opened, Project Moi Kitchen + Bar quickly drew steady crowds and received great feedback. If you’d like to achieve a similar result, reach out to Shelter Dome. We can provide you with a free design plan and quote.
