The Middle East & North Africa 50 Best Restaurants List 2026

Here are my first impressions a few hours into the afterglow.

I dictated my initial thoughts—these thoughts—into my phone while driving home and within hours of the Middle East & North Africa’s 50 Best Restaurants List (MENA’s 50 Best) being revealed yesterday, Tuesday 3 February.

These are not slow-cooked conclusions or verdicts. They are first blushes, early signals and immediate questions raised by this regional List as it enters its fifth year.

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Launched in 2022, very much in the shadow of COVID, MENA’s 50 Best now finds itself in its fifth incarnation. That alone makes this a useful moment to pause and ask how the List has evolved, what it now appears to value and what value does it have for us, the general paying public?

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First, The Special Awards

Before getting subjective, it’s worth briefly noting the special awards alongside the main list of 50 restaurants:

• Chef’s Choice Award: Himanshu Saini, Trésind Studio

• Best Pastry Chef: Omar Orfali and Wassam Orfali

• Art of Hospitality Award: La Grande Table Marocaine, Marrakech

• Sustainability Award: Farmers, Marrakech

• Champions of Change: Muna Haddad

• Icon Award: Salam Dakkak, Sufret Maryam and Bait Maryam

Alongside these sit the 50 ranked restaurants themselves, including country winners and, ultimately, Khufu’s the restaurant crowned number one in the region.

A Few Numbers Worth Pulling Out

Now that we have the full 2026 list, a few concrete patterns are worth anchoring before moving into interpretation.

Country representation (top 50):

• United Arab Emirates — 26 restaurants (52%!!) Of these, 22 are in Dubai and 4 are in Abu Dhabi.

• Egypt — 6 restaurants (12%)

• Morocco — 5 restaurants (10%)

• Lebanon — 3 restaurants (6%)

• Saudi Arabia — 3 restaurants (6%)

• Jordan — 3 restaurants (6%)

• Kuwait — 2 restaurants (4%)

• Qatar, Tunisia, Bahrain — 1 restaurant each (2% each)

While the list is regionally diverse, it is clear that the UAE, and Dubai in particular, remains MENA’s centre of gravity when it comes to dining and as far as this list is concerned.

New entrants:

• There are 14 new restaurants on the list this year, accounting for 28 per cent of the top 50. That represents meaningful renewal at the margins with high change penetration up the list, even if the core of the list remains relatively stable. It also is broadly in line with 50 Best’s target percentage to change the voting body.

Cuisines by style (approximate percentages):

• Modern or contemporary Asian: ~32%

• Middle Eastern and North African: ~24%

• European / Mediterranean: ~20%

• Contemporary fine dining or global tasting menus: ~14%

• Other: ~10%

What interests me is that the region’s jury seem to vote for concepts from outside of the region almost 3 to 1. Compare that to Asia’s 50 Best's and LATAM’s 50 Best.

First Impressions and Early Signals

Moving beyond the numbers, a few themes stand out immediately.

• The List that increasingly rewards accessibility. This now feels like a list built around restaurants people actually return to. Places you might visit four, five or ten times, rather than once for a milestone occasion.
  Restaurants such as Kinoya, Marmellata, BOCA, 3Fils (times two!) and Girl & the Goose sit comfortably alongside far more expensive, special-occasion destinations such as FZN, Row on 45, Takahisa and Trèsind Studio. This weighting was apparent last year. This year, it feels unmistakable.

• Dubai’s dominance remains unchallenged.
  The UAE continues to lead the list, but in practice this still means Dubai, raising an awkward question given that the awards are hosted in (and paid for by) Abu Dhabi, an emirate which does not yet materially benefit from the platform in the same way, and may be creating one for its neighbour...

• North Africa’s pull is becoming harder to ignore. What stands out this year is the way the list increasingly appears weighted between two North African poles: Morocco and Egypt. Morocco’s presence is reinforced by volume and special awards, particularly in Marrakech, while Egypt’s influence is sharpened by clarity of narrative and confidence at the very top of the list.
  It is also worth asking whether moments such as Cairo Food Week are beginning to cast a longer, more positive light on Egypt’s restaurant scene internationally. Events like this help frame Cairo not simply as a city with good restaurants, but as a place with momentum, discourse and ambition. In that context, the success of Khufu’s this year feels less like an isolated win and more like a culmination.

• A quiet question around sustainability.
  The Sustainability Award appeared at number 49. Lowe, previous winner, is out of the list. BOCA remains. Whether that reflects scarcity or prioritisation is a question worth revisiting.

• A sharper awards presentation.
  The ceremony moved with more pace this year, even if the familiar attempt to manufacture tension at the top still underserves second place.

• A venue that matched the moment.
  Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi felt appropriately scaled to the ambition of the list.

• On the number one spot, Khufu’s.
  As usual, someone else said it best and someone whispered the following in my ear as we walked out of the ceremony hall: a good regional list should crown a good regional restaurant that genuinely reflects its region. In that sense, Khufu’s makes sense. It was also the 2025’s World 50 Best Restaurant List’s One to Watch. Net, this was less a shock than a culmination.

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Where This Leaves Us

Is this the most complete and representative MENA 50 Best list so far? I could argue yes.

There are still absences — Oman, Iraq, Iran and Yemen remain unrepresented — often for reasons tied to conflict, infrastructure or more than likely, voter presence. There’s also one country glaringly missing from the list and those of us living in the region can clearly point to it. Those cuisines still struggle to find a voice, even within the neighbouring countries that do feature.

That said, it would be naïve to ignore the fact that some restaurants on this list almost certainly benefit from prodigious PR machines, expansive corporate expense accounts or sheer visibility rather than purely qualitative superiority.

The List continues to read, at least in part, as a reflection of who is hot right now, and arguably less as a truly exhaustive or forensic exercise into which restaurants are objectively the 50 best in the region, let alone a precise cascade of how they relate to one another.

There are rankings here that are hard to reconcile, and inclusions that will raise eyebrows. Over time, though, my increasing impression is that lists like this function more as mosaics than North Stars: messy and incoherent when examined up close and tile by tile, but it still reveals something more telling, more interesting when you step back and look at the whole.

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Liam is a restaurant critic, food and travel writer based in the Middle East. He co-authored The Rise of Indian Food: Recipes Reimagined by Trésind Studio, out 6 May from Phaidon Press. He owns EatGoSee and contributes to other publications. You can find Liam on Substack, Threads, Instagram, BlueSky or Facebook.