Inside the Waterfront Market in Dubai

Written by:
Alice Holtham
20th February 2019

As well as getting your hands on the freshest catch, you can buy fruit and veg for a fraction of the supermarket price…

The Waterfront Market replaced Dubai’s long-standing Deira Fish Market in the summer of 2017, and in the last 18 months it’s been filling up with an array of shops and stalls, plus the four huge market halls.

As well as housing the largest fish market in the GCC – with some 400 vendors selling their fresh catches every single day, the market is home to a big fruit and veg market, meat market and spice & dry food market.

At the fish market, guests can purchase an array of fish and seafood 24 hours a day (the fish market closes for deep cleaning for a couple of hours only). While some fish are priced per kilo, you can often haggle for the best price if there’s something in particular you’re after.

If you don’t fancy cooking it yourself, you can head out to one of the waterfront restaurants and have them cook it for you, and dine alfresco on the water front. Both Yahya Seafood and Pauluto offer this service for a fee of Dhs15.

Each night, there’s also a wholesale auction which takes place from 11pm until the early hours of the morning, where some 350 containers land straight from sea at the fish market. They’re then taken straight for the auction, where fish brokers battle it out for the best prices for restaurants and hotels around the region.

At each of the markets, you can buy produce for a fraction of the price you’d pay in a regular supermarket. So, armed with Dhs100, we decided to see how much we could get for our money.