Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental

Cucina di famiglia is the billing here — dishes Italian households have made for generations — and Talea holds a Michelin star for them. Luigi Stinga runs the kitchen day to day and took the first young-chef award of the Michelin Guide Abu Dhabi. The list is Italian almost throughout, with Prosecco from producers you will not have met.

Cantonese, dark and very large — a restaurant, a bar, a lounge and 4 private dining rooms behind carved wooden screens and lattice. It took a star in the Michelin Guide's first Abu Dhabi edition. People who are not staying at the palace drive in for it, and there is a separate entrance and valet for them.

Hemant Oberoi's room, and it is in the Michelin Guide. He calls the cooking contemporary classic — plated hard, priced accordingly, and pitched at people who arrive sceptical about eating Indian food in Abu Dhabi and leave having booked again. There is a cocktail bar called Tikka Le at the front and private rooms behind it.

Warayaki comes from Kochi, in Japan, and it is the whole of this room: a metre of flame going up around the food for a few seconds, and a taste no grill gives you. Ross Shonhan built the menu around it, and the grill stands in the middle of the dining room where you can watch it work. It is in the Michelin Guide.

The one to eat in twice. Gilber Sakr cooks the Levantine repertoire without shortening it: charcoal-grilled meat, whole fish, seafood platters, and a mezzeh list long enough to be dinner on its own. It seats 90 indoors and 130 more outside, which tells you what kind of evening it expects.

Under the main dome, and really 4 counters sharing one name: a tea apothecary, a deli, the Mandarin Cake Shop and a gelateria. You can have rare leaf weighed out and brewed, or a sandwich, or an ice cream, without leaving the rotunda. It is also where afternoon tea at the palace is served.

One meal a day, and then the room goes dark until the next morning. The spread takes the Middle East seriously — the foul and the manakish are not an afterthought — with the international expectations threaded through it. The honey comes from the beehives in the palace gardens.

A modern American brasserie with a bar built for drinking rather than eating, and enough theatre in the design to earn the name. It is in the Michelin Guide for 2025, on the strength of comfort food taken seriously. It is also the one room in this building where the formality drops away, which after a day of gold leaf is the point.

Named for the waterfalls in the water park next door, with a terrace onto the Gulf under palms and a lawn in front of it. International cooking with a Greek lean, a separate list for the pool and the beach, and a children's menu that is a menu rather than a concession. If you are here as a family this is the room you will use most, and it is a good room rather than a tolerable one.

Built on the beach and built around fire: raw, smoked and charred seafood, unusual cuts, skewers off the coals, crudo with cocktails, and a DJ on the deck at the hour the yachts go past. It is meant as a beach club — long brunches, big tables, nobody in a hurry. It is dark for now, with no reopening date.

Mexican cooking reimagined rather than replicated: ceviche, tacos rolled by hand, lamb barbacoa to share, and a bar that takes agave seriously. The best of it is the hour when the pool goes gold and the sea behind it does not. It shuts over the worst of the summer and comes back at the end of August, which is the sensible thing to do with an outdoor room in an Abu Dhabi July.

Its whole reputation rests on one hour: the light coming off the towers at the end of the afternoon while a coffee and a pastry go cold in front of you. It looks out over the city rather than the water. It is closed for now, with no reopening date, so ask us before you plan an afternoon around it.