The Editor’s Choice at the What’s On Dubai Awards are given to the restaurant, the chef, the newcomer, and the homegrown story that we believe have most meaningfully moved the needle on Dubai’s food and dining scene this year. Here’s who won in 2026, and why.

There are 47 categories at the What’s On Dubai Awards, the vast majority of which are decided by the public – huge amounts of votes from the residents and visitors who eat, drink, stay, and play their way through this city every week, and whose opinions are the most honest reflection of what Dubai’s hospitality scene actually looks like from the inside.

The Editor’s Choice awards work differently. Four trophies. No public ballot. Just the What’s On team, drawing on a year of eating, reviewing, revisiting, and arguing about which restaurants, chefs, and openings have genuinely raised the bar rather than simply filled a room.

Among our winners in 2026, one restaurant earned a Michelin Star in five months. One chef turned a 10-seat apartment supper club into a MENA 50 Best listing. One London institution chose Dubai – of all the cities in the world – for its first international home. And one small, bookshop-cum-eatery on Alserkal Avenue reminded everyone that the best new openings in this city don’t always announce themselves loudly.

These are the four. Here’s the case for each.

 

WHAT’S ON RESTAURANT OF THE YEAR 2026

Manāo is the restaurant that changed the conversation.

The number that tells you everything about Manāo is five. Five months from opening to Michelin Star, making it one of the fastest-starred restaurants in UAE history, and the kind of achievement that makes the industry sit up and reconsider what’s possible in a city that already has more acclaimed restaurants per square kilometre than almost anywhere on earth.

But the Michelin Star, remarkable as it is, is a consequence rather than the point. The point is what Chef Abhiraj Khatwani is actually doing in the kitchen at Wasl Vita in Jumeirah: a deeply personal, meticulously researched love letter to Thailand’s culinary heritage, built on techniques and ingredients that most Dubai diners will never have encountered in this form. Heritage grains. Ancient ferments. Flavour profiles that reward attention rather than just delivering the immediate hit of pleasure that most restaurant cooking aims for.

Khatwani won the Michelin Young Chef Award in the same year his restaurant was starred. His co-founder is Mohamad Orfali — the mind behind Orfali Bros, named the Best Restaurant in the Middle East three consecutive years running, and a man who has demonstrated, repeatedly, that he understands how to build a restaurant that matters rather than one that merely performs. Together, they have created something ranked ninth on MENA’s 50 Best Restaurants 2026: a 34-seat tasting menu experience where the line between fine dining and something far more intimate is deliberately, beautifully blurred.

The Restaurant of the Year award exists to recognise the restaurant in Dubai that has most meaningfully shaped the dining conversation over the past 12 months. In 2026, that conversation has been shaped by Manāo more than anywhere else. The star was confirmation. This award is ours to give.

WHAT’S ON CHEF OF THE YEAR 2026

Gabriela Chamorro proves that the best restaurant stories start small.

In 2019, Gabriela Chamorro sent a WhatsApp message. It was an invitation to dinner at her Dubai apartment – 10 seats, a menu drawn from her grandmother’s recipes and her years living and eating across Central America, and the kind of warmth at the door that makes strangers feel like they’ve been coming for years.

She called it Girl and the Goose. Over the next five years, she cooked 5,000 meals from that apartment – meals that built a word-of-mouth following so devoted that when she finally opened a bricks-and-mortar restaurant inside the Anantara Downtown Dubai Hotel in 2024, it landed at No.43 on MENA’s 50 Best Restaurants in its debut year on the list.

The menu she serves is a genuine first for Dubai’s dining scene. Central American cuisine – pupusas, miso seabass ceviche, clay-pot short ribs in toasted cornmeal, fermented hot sauce made to a recipe she has been refining since she was a child – has never had a serious standard-bearer in this city before Chamorro. It does now.

What makes the Chef of the Year award feel easy this year isn’t the ranking, impressive as that is. It’s the journey. Chamorro trained at the Culinary Institute of Barcelona and Copenhagen’s MAD Academy. She flew as an Emirates cabin crew member for years, eating her way through cities and filing the experiences away. She built an underground dining institution from scratch, with no venue budget, no PR machine, and no safety net – just cooking and the conviction that people would come if the food was good enough.

They came. And when the time came to scale, she did it without losing a single note of what made the supper club worth queuing for in the first place. That is the hardest thing in hospitality. Gabriela Chamorro has done it better than anyone in Dubai this year.

WHAT’S ON NEWCOMER OF THE YEAR 2026

Barrafina chose Dubai. Dubai should feel proud of that.

For 18 years, Barrafina did not leave London. Not to New York. Not to Tokyo. Not to any of the world’s dining capitals that would have welcomed it with open arms. Five locations across the capital and queues on Dean Street that have been a rite of passage for serious food lovers since 2007 – and not one restaurant outside the UK.

Until Dubai.

Brothers Sam and Eddie Hart – raised in Mallorca, trained in Spanish cooking, and the creators of one of Britain’s most revered restaurant groups – chose this city for their first international outpost. That decision is worth sitting with for a moment. It says something about where Dubai sits in the global dining conversation in 2026: not as a market to exploit with a franchise concept and a licensing deal, but as a city serious enough to receive a restaurant that has never needed to leave home.

The 55-seat counter at Gate Village in DIFC – surrounded by Zuma, Gaia, Torno Subito, and the rest of the city’s fine-dining first division – is everything the original is, in a room that feels like it was built for it. The gambas rojas. The Classic Tortilla, made to order in front of you and served slightly underdone in the way that separates the initiated from everyone else. The chicken thighs with romesco. All of it emerging from an open kitchen with the unhurried care that has defined the brand since day one.

There is no theatre here. No signature cocktail moment, no Instagram installation, no theatrical tableside finish. Just counter stools, an open kitchen, impeccable Spanish tapas, and the deeply unfashionable belief that the best seat in any restaurant is always the one closest to the chef. In a city where dining experiences can sometimes feel designed from the outside in, Barrafina is designed from the plate outward. It is the Newcomer of the Year because it is, without question, the best new restaurant to open in Dubai in 2026.

WHAT’S ON HOMEGROWN RESTAURANT OF THE YEAR 2026

Middle Child is what happens when someone trades a Google career for a kitchen.

Lynn Hazim spent a decade at Google, then, in 2025, she opened Middle Child at Alserkal Avenue – and the hospitality world gained something more interesting than Silicon Valley lost.

The concept is three things at once, which ought to be a warning sign. In practice, it is the most coherent new opening in Dubai this year. An all-day eatery,and a gourmet pantry of small-batch condiments, honeys, and preserves that you buy on instinct and then wonder how you managed without. All of it in a narrow Alserkal Avenue warehouse that has been stripped back to the point where the food and the books have to do the work.

They do. The menu is concise and deeply personal: labneh with yuzu kosho, cured sea bass, pappardelle Bolognese, and a club sandwich that has achieved near-mythological status among its regulars in what is, objectively, a very short time. No reservations. An eight-seat counter where strangers reliably become regulars. Service that has the warmth of somewhere that cares about the experience rather than the throughput.

MENA’s 50 Best Restaurants gave Middle Child its One to Watch Award within months of the doors opening. We are giving it the Homegrown Restaurant of the Year because the award exists to celebrate exactly this: a Dubai-born concept, built by a Dubai resident, that has arrived with a clear point of view and the cooking to back it up.

Dubai’s restaurant scene is, justifiably, celebrated for its international ambition. The Homegrown award is a reminder that some of the most compelling things happening in this city’s food culture are the ones being built from scratch, here, by people who have chosen to make it home. Middle Child is the most compelling argument for that proposition in 2026.

The What’s On Dubai Awards 2026 Editor’s Choice awards were presented during the awards ceremony on June 4 at The Agenda in Media City. For the full list of winners across all 47 categories, see our complete What’s On Dubai Awards 2026 winners rundown.