Author: Monica Bonalto

Ask any Dubai regular for their favourite restaurant they cannot always get into, and there is a good chance 3Fils comes up. This tiny, unassuming spot on the Jumeirah Fishing Harbour has built a genuinely cult following on the strength of its food alone: no elaborate marketing, no bottle-service theatrics, just a short, confident menu and a queue that tells you everything you need to know. Location and Setting 3Fils sits right on the water at the Jumeirah Fishing Harbour, tucked among the fishing boats rather than inside a glossy hotel or mall. The setting is deliberately low-key: a small,…

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Festival City Mall does not get talked about with the same breathless energy as Dubai Mall or Mall of the Emirates, and that is precisely why its food scene is worth a proper look. It has a genuine waterfront, a nightly light and water show called IMAGINE, and a food hall that is, on paper at least, the largest of its kind in the Middle East. Put those three things together and you get a dining strip that can hold its own against anywhere else in the city, provided you know which doors to walk through. This guide skips the…

Let’s deal with the headline problem first, because pretending otherwise would be worse than admitting it. This article used to promise “40 Best Places to Eat, Ranked by Google Reviews,” complete with star ratings down to a decimal point and review counts running into the thousands. Having gone back through the actual current tenant list at Dubai Hills Mall, checked it against the mall’s own directory and cross-referenced it with what Time Out Dubai, Lovin Dubai and BBC Good Food ME are currently reporting, we can’t stand behind that framing. Google ratings shift by the week, a scraped snapshot goes…

The Dubai Mall doesn’t have a restaurant problem, it has an abundance problem. Google throws back well over 150 food and drink listings for the building, and half the “best of” guides floating around online just copy each other’s lists without checking whether the unit numbers still match reality. Tenants rotate constantly in a mall this size, so we went through the current line-up ourselves, cross-checked locations against the mall’s own directory, and left out anything we couldn’t confirm is still trading. What follows is shorter than the padded 49-strong lists doing the rounds elsewhere, and that’s deliberate: every entry…

DIFC is where Dubai eats when someone else is paying, or when the occasion demands a bit more than a mall food court. Roughly a square kilometre of glass towers and pedestrianised courtyards packs in more genuinely good restaurants per square metre than almost anywhere else in the city, but the district is not one homogenous strip: Gate Village, Gate Avenue, ICD Brookfield Place and Burj Daman each have a completely different personality and, frankly, a different budget. This is a working guide to eating in DIFC, sorted by what you’re actually there to do, not by star rating. What’s…

Mall of the Emirates has always had two personalities: the ski slope everyone photographs, and the dining scene that quietly does the harder work of getting you fed before or after. Between the Kempinski wing, the Sheraton wing, the Level 2 restaurant strip and the ground floor food court, there are now more places to eat here than most standalone dining precincts in Dubai manage, and the lineup keeps shifting. A Michelin Bib Gourmand ramen house opened in one corner, an Abu Dhabi cult favourite finally arrived in another, and by the end of 2026 a fresh wave of openings,…

Yas Mall is the biggest shopping centre in Abu Dhabi and, by extension, one of the biggest dining rooms in the capital. It sits a short walk from Ferrari World, Warner Bros. World, Yas Waterworld, SeaWorld Abu Dhabi and Etihad Arena, which means the crowd wandering through its food court on any given afternoon is a mix of theme park refugees still in wristbands, concert-goers killing time before doors open, and Yas Island residents doing a completely ordinary Tuesday grocery run. Over 100 food and beverage brands operate here, from Emirati grills that have been feeding Abu Dhabi families for…