With the rise and disruption the world is currently witnessing across the food & beverage industry, recently-launched hospitality company, Limestone Lab, has geared-up to disrupt the front-end of the ‘brick-and-mortar experience’ with the introduction of “Social Distrikt”, the first, managed experiential food & bar hall venue, globally.
Conceptualized by Dubai’s renounced duo entrepreneurs, Hassan Ballout and Hani Doueik, the experiential, urban food & bar hall is set to open its doors in Q4 of 2021, spanning across the UAE’s iconic waterfront destination, The Pointe, which is situated directly in front of the world’s largest fountain, The Palm Fountain. This melting pot of the world’s most unique, trending F&B concepts will offer consumers an exceptional multi-sensory dining experience unlike any other, providing a social and cultural atmosphere for patrons to savour multiple cuisines under one roof whilst undwining to house beverages. The food & bar hall is set to feature grape gardens, gastro bars, dining lounges, social spaces, entertainment corners, culinary workshop areas and much more, all under one roof. Furthermore, the market-disrupting F&B concept, Social Distrikt, aims to be the go-to destination for consumers seeking bespoke dining experiences, offering a good conversation while enjoying delicious food, drinks and background music.
Setting it apart from other food hall experiences, Social Distrikt boasts of a unique, first-of-its-kind business model, making it an attractive opportunity for investors and F&B concepts alike to become a part of. The urban food & bar hall will offer brands, regionally and globally, the opportunity to set-up-shop at minimal capex and opex deployment by renting out a facade, a kiosk, or a pop-up kart within the venue, capitalizing on its unified back-of-house services, marketing activations and energetic entertainment platform. The unique business model will come in as a solution to global brands seeking to enter and test the market, and local brands looking to tap into other areas of the country, with easy-access and at low-risk by eliminating high fitout costs and operational expenses. This is achieved through simply allowing brands to plug into Social Distrikt’s platform, whilst still allowing them to express their brand identity. More importantly, the platform will also enable virtual or delivery-only brands to engage, for the first time, directly with customers by providing full access to their user database for enhanced marketing and customer service efforts, thus enhancing their brand equity.
Limestone Lab has a vision to launch a network of Social Distrikts on a global scale, which will be powered by the hospitality company’s innovative and synergized F&B platform. Moreover, Social Distrikts’s ground-breaking operational framework will further come in as a solution for master developers and urban city planners to have an immediate interactive social & cultural space that will serve as a unique experiential food hall space. This will represent an integrated F&B box/solution as a component of their amenity requirements for any new development, thus quickly impacting the new development’s value as well as its neighbouring assets’ lease value and revenue. In addition, Social Distrikt will be based on a flexible brand management system, where it can operate under different agreements from “franchises” to “manchises” enabling optimal operational fluidity for new F&B outlets seeking to become a part of the Social Distrikt community.
Commenting on Limestone Lab’s latest market offerings, Hassan Ballout, Co-Founder & CEO & Hani Doueik, Co-Founder & COO of Limestone Lab remarked: ‘We are excited to be able to manifest this dream into reality. We are highly confident that this agile model will bring a huge value proposition for all our stakeholders. Allowing the brand owners to express their brands freely, whilst bringing a portfolio of brands to any landlord’s new assets or repurposing their existing assets’ capex and increasing its value. While we perfect our unified Back of House (BOH) operations, marketing and entertainment to focus on bringing cultural and experiential value to the space, this will also benefit the consumer, who will always remain at the core of our focus. We are adamant to see more than one Social Distrikt in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and the rest of the region to hit the ground running.’
Limestone Lab’s team has also extended their appreciation to Nakheel as an industry-leading master project developer for enabling them to bring their innovative business concept at The Pointe to life, as a highly-popular social, leisure and F&B destination, and for contributing to the evolution of hospitality.
