Park Hyatt Dubai

The kitchen here runs New England cooking alongside Nikkei, on one list, and the drinks are put together with the same care. It opens at midday and does not close again until late, so lunch can turn into dinner without anybody moving.

3 separate kitchens work the room at once — one for the wok, one for the grill, one for noodles — and a fourth does nothing but Thai desserts. Thai chefs cook all of it, on ingredients brought in from Thailand rather than substituted here.

Loungers and tables sit along the water on the property's own sand. It is one of two beaches here, and the only one with a kitchen and a bar attached. Music runs through the day.

Food runs all day here, and the afternoon tea is the one sitting worth planning for — savouries first, then sweets. The rest of the time it is somewhere to sit for an hour with something small, rather than a room you come to for a meal.

Drinks and a short list of dishes, brought to wherever you have settled — the pool deck, the terrace or the sundeck. It is the easiest lunch on the property, and the least formal.

A fresh seafood display stands in the middle of the room, closer to a Mediterranean market stall than to anything a hotel usually does. Boardwalk has been an institution in Dubai for 30 years.

A single olive tree stands at the centre of the room, 900 years old and carried over from Italy. The rest of it is modern and European, held to neutral earth tones so that nothing competes with the tree.

Pizza, bar food and drinks, taken outdoors at a table by the water. It fills with groups rather than couples, and it stays open later than anywhere else on the property. Nothing about it is complicated.