Five restaurants, five different reasons to book a table.

Dubai’s better-known restaurants have started building around a specific experience this year, not just new dishes. A Sunday afternoon at a beach club now comes with its own set menu, paced deliberately for a long, unhurried sitting. A Tuesday night might mean phones away, a dish shared family-style. The experience is being designed on purpose, leaving tasteful memories.  

That shift shows up clearly across five of the city’s more closely watched dining rooms this year: L’AVENUE, Flamingo Room, Avli by Tashas, Sakhalin and Bungalo 34. Four of the five have recently built, or rebuilt, a curated experience with its own format, its own menu and its own reason to return. One celebrates its longevity in culinary excellence. 

L’AVENUE

L’AVENUE’s addition is the newest of the four. On the second floor of Fashion Avenue at Dubai Mall, the Costes Group’s Parisian import, the UAE’s first outpost of the restaurant, now serves Afternoon Tea daily between three and seven, AED 240 a person, with Mariage Frères teas, coffee and the restaurant’s own hot chocolate. The savoury side centres on a mini croque monsieur à la truffe, made with veal ham, aged Comté and black truffle, alongside a lobster roll served warm in brioche with citrus mayonnaise. Dessert closes on a classic millefeuille. It’s a slot the restaurant didn’t previously hold, tucked between lunch service and the evening view over the Dubai Fountain and Burj Khalifa, and it turns what was once a dinner-and-occasion address into somewhere that can just as easily absorb a shopping break or an afternoon meeting.

Avli by Tashas

Avli by Tashas has taken a somewhat opposite approach, building its new experience around fewer covers rather than more foot traffic. The Shared Table Dinner returns as a monthly fixture at DIFC’s Gate Village, held the first Tuesday of each month from seven until nine, where AED 280 buys a three-course, family-style Mediterranean menu eaten at one long communal table, with phones asked to stay in pockets.

Chef Vlassia prepares a sharing dish from her own family recipe for each sitting, and guests leave with the recipe itself, an unusual gesture that extends the evening well past the table. The regular menu runs through dishes like feta saganaki and lemonato baby chicken, finished with a baklava sundae and more. The restaurant’s own line for it says as much: one long table, phones away, stories shared, guests arriving as strangers and leaving as friends.

Check it out here: https://www.avlibytashas.com/ 

Sakhalin

Sakhalin is the exception in this group, and it’s worth naming as one. Its news this season is a straightforward seasonal menu, launched August 31 under Brand Chef Vladimir Mukhin and Dubai’s Executive Chef Aleksei Vershinin, built entirely around new dishes rather than a new hour. The cold course brings the Sakhalin salad, Kamchatka crab with avocado, tomato and rouille, while the pasta course offers tagliatelle with chanterelles.

For mains, there’s miso-marinated black cod, alongside the restaurant’s ongoing option to select whole fish, crab and shellfish straight from the aquarium, and dessert closes with a Sakhalin tiramisu. Where the other three restaurants are selling a specific window of time, Sakhalin is doing something closer to what a kitchen has always done, changing the plate with the season.

Check it out here: https://sakhalin.rest/dubai/en 

Flamingo Room

Flamingo Room‘s Sunday format sits somewhere between those two approaches. It carries the recurring structure of Avli’s dinner and L’AVENUE’s tea, even though the menu underneath it is drawn straight from the restaurant’s own signatures rather than built new for the occasion. Starters open on a butternut carpaccio, mains run through a cornflake chicken schnitzel, and dessert closes on Lizel’s lemon meringue tart. What’s new here is the rosé partnership with Château Minuty and the four-hour window built around it, AED 395 a person, running across the restaurant’s dining area and terrace from noon until four. The pitch is explicitly unhurried: longer lunches, ongoing conversation, an afternoon meant to be spent rather than passed through.

Check it out here: https://www.flamingoroombytashas.com/

Bungalo 34

Bungalo 34, within Nikki Beach Resort & Spa on Pearl Jumeirah, runs on the same premise it opened with: long lunches, sunset moments and all-day dining along the water, as the first beachside dining concept from Natasha Sideris and Tashas Group. The menu, curated by Sideris and Culinary Director Jill Okkers, draws on Italian, French and Greek coastal traditions. Starters lead with a Mazara carpaccio of red prawns finished with caviar and tangerine leaf, pasta runs through a trofie pomodoro, and the seafood paella anchors the mains, built for sharing. Its chefs will also prepare fresh catch to preference, grilled, baked or raw. Where the other four restaurants have carved out a specific window to be booked, Bungalo 34’s pitch has stayed the same since it opened: the whole day, open to whoever arrives.

Check it out here: https://www.bungalo34.com/ 

Across Dubai’s dining scene this year, plenty of restaurants have built a specific format around the visit itself: a day, an hour, an occasion attached to the table. Others have simply leaned on the strength of the food, letting the dish carry the visit on its own terms.