Places

With visitors gone and locals thinking twice, Dubai’s restaurants are learning the difference between being famous and needed. A first-hand report from the city’s dining scene, with chefs Himanshu Saini, Solemann Haddad and Mohamad Orfali describing the pressure on fine dining, local diners and homegrown restaurants.

Luke Selby and his brothers are shifting the culinary centre of gravity to Snowdonia in Northern Wales. At Palé Hall, they are building a high-performance engine of flavour on the wilder frontiers.

The world’s most interesting chef might be working 33 hours from Europe, and has absolutely no intention of meeting anyone halfway.

Michelin has just named La Rei Natura Italy’s only new three-star. At the table, I found harmony and control, a plant-led kitchen that works with memory and place, and pairings that take brave steps and land cleanly.

In the winelands of Stellenbosch, tucked among vines and rolling hills, there is a restaurant where fire, story, and soul collide. Its name is VUUR, Afrikaans for fire. Check the story of Shaun Scrooby, who traded a life as a safari guide for a life at the grill.

High above Bergamo, a rising star turned his back on the spotlight to build something wilder: a kitchen fed by the land, a team bound by trust, and a bold, sustainable blueprint for bringing life back to Italy’s forgotten heights.

Once a dancehall lost to time and ivy, the building now holds one of Italy’s most composed dining rooms. Allegra and Stefano rebuilt it by hand, not out of nostalgia, but from instinct, proportion, and rhythm. In the kitchen, Davide Di Fabio answers with dishes that are seasonal, unhurried, and quietly inventive. From ruin to rhythm, from local landmark to quietly iconic destination.

The Dolder Grand is a lot. A turreted palace with sweeping glass wings, a spa bigger than some terminals, and enough caviar and Krug to make altitude feel decadent — all scattered with modern art like confetti. But somewhere between all this, you start to get it. It’s bold. A grand, glinting, very Swiss kind of flex: We could have done less. We just didn’t feel like it.