The short version
The Best in Dubai is a curated guide to restaurants, bars, lifestyle venues, neighbourhoods, and the practical resources you need to move to or live in the city. We bring together the places worth knowing about, scored against the same data that shapes how Dubai actually works: live ratings, real review counts, real prices.
We don’t try to be exhaustive. We aim to be the answer to the question “where should I actually go?” in a city with too many options.
How we score venues
Every venue on the site has a Best in Dubai score from 0 to 10. The score is a weighted aggregate of real ratings from third-party platforms (Google, TripAdvisor, and others), weighted by the number of reviews each platform contributes. A venue with thousands of reviews on one platform pulls more weight than one with a handful on five.
We don’t accept submissions. We don’t manually adjust scores to favour one venue over another. We don’t override the score for sponsors, because there are no sponsors. The score moves when the underlying data moves.
The full breakdown is shown on every detail page so you can see which platforms agreed and which didn’t.
How we choose what to feature
The catalogue is short by design. Every venue is here because the data backs it up, because it represents the best version of its category in Dubai, or because it’s the kind of place locals actually recommend. New venues are added when they earn it.
Lifestyle, neighbourhood, and editorial content is researched and written in-house. The Move to Dubai guides cover residency visas, the driving licence exchange, schools, and salary benchmarks; where they reference government processes, they link to the relevant UAE source (GDRFA, ICP, RTA, and DLD) so you can verify it yourself.
Editorial independence
The site has no sponsored listings, no paid placements, and no commercial relationships with any of the venues we feature. We don’t accept money to feature, score, or position a listing.
If we ever change this, we’ll say so plainly on this page, and any sponsored content will be labelled as such on every page where it appears.
Get in touch
Questions, corrections, suggestions, or just want to flag a great new venue? Email contact@thebestindubai.com or use the contact form. We read every message.
Open the contact form