One&Only One Za'abeel

Nobu Matsuhisa's Japanese-Peruvian cooking, 30-odd years on from the first one, in the best position in the building — up in The Link with the traffic passing 100 metres below the windows. The menu is the one you know and it is cooked to the standard of the flagship rooms: the black cod, the yellowtail with jalapeño, the tiradito. Dinner runs Tuesday to Saturday and lunch at the weekend, and the bar keeps later hours than the restaurant, so it is worth a drink even if you are eating elsewhere. Children are welcome until 9, after which the room is 15 and over and the bar 21.

The hardest room here to describe and the easiest to enjoy: a food hall in the sky, 11 chef-led counters under one roof with the skyline through the glass, and no single menu over any of it. The chefs are ones Dubai already knows from their own restaurants rather than names flown in for the address, so a table of 4 can eat 4 different cuisines and nobody has to compromise. It runs all day from noon, and it is where you send the people who cannot decide.

The building's Michelin star and, when it is running, the reason a certain kind of guest chooses this address over the beach: modern French cooking from the most decorated woman in the profession, built on the aromatic layering her family's kitchen in Valence is known for. It is temporarily closed, with no reopening date given. If you are booking a room in order to eat in this one, ask the concierge where it stands first.

The private lounge every suite has the run of, and the room that quietly justifies the step up from a guest room. Breakfast is taken here with the Burj Khalifa in the window rather than downstairs in the buffet; afternoon tea follows at the same table; then it turns into a bar and stays one until midnight. Through the back is the cigar lounge, which is 21 and over and keeps a dress code of its own.

One&Only's signature breakfast, included on every rate here. The spread is wide, the cooked side is à la carte rather than heat lamps, and the pastry comes from the same kitchen that runs Maison Devoille downstairs. From 7 until 11, casual, and unhurried enough that people stay for 2 hours.

Named for the Batak pepper, and built around cooking from across the archipelago rather than the handful of dishes that usually stand in for it. Sambals are made in the kitchen, the fish comes in whole and is priced at the market, and a good part of the list sits at the sour and smoky end. It runs from noon straight through to 11, which makes it the room for a late lunch or an early, unfussy dinner. Casual, and the least ceremonious address in the building.

A pastry boutique in the Parisian sense — a vitrine, a marble counter, a small number of things made properly that day — run by Christophe Devoille, whose kitchen also supplies the breakfast upstairs. Come for the viennoiserie in the morning and the coffee at any hour; the bar side opens at noon if the afternoon calls for something else. It is the one room here you can walk into without a plan, which in a building this vertical turns out to be the thing you use most.

The bar at the Garden Pool, and the reason a day at this hotel can be spent horizontally. South-East Asian food from noon, drinks from 8 in the morning, a swim-up counter, and enough real planting that you forget which floor you are on. It is the family end of the building — every age welcome, under-12s accompanied in the water — and the deliberate opposite of the adults-only pool in the beam above it. Pool casual, which here means a cover-up and nothing more.