Best Italian Restaurants in Dubai (2026)
A ranked guide to the ten best Italian restaurants in Dubai for 2026, from Carbone's supper-club theater to Niko Romito's fine dining at Bulgari, with the room that fits your night.
Why we wrote this guide
Dubai does Italian food at a range no other city quite matches, from red-sauce theater to three-Michelin-star restraint, and the good rooms are spread across DIFC towers, Palm resorts, and quiet island hotels. This guide ranks the ten that matter most in 2026, in the order real search demand puts them, so you can read it top to bottom and know where to start.
The spread is the whole point. Carbone runs Italian-American by way of Greenwich Village. Cipriani carries Venice and Harry's Bar. Il Borro cooks Tuscan off the Ferragamo family estate, Alici works southern-Italian seafood from the Amalfi Coast, and Il Ristorante puts Niko Romito's fine dining inside the Bulgari Resort. Between them sit Roberto's, Scalini, and Fi'Lia, each with its own room and its own reason to book.
Outside Las Vegas the restaurant reservation sits with the venue, not with us. What we do is point you to the right room, help you time it, and build the rest of the trip around it. Last updated September 2026.
The ranked guide
1. Carbone (Palm Jumeirah)
Carbone opened in Dubai on October 6, 2025, the tenth global outpost of the Italian-American supper club that Mario Carbone, Rich Torrisi and Jeff Zalaznick started in Greenwich Village in 2013. It sits inside Atlantis The Royal on Palm Jumeirah, and the room plays like a postwar New York time capsule: crimson velvet banquettes, walls hung with towering Venetian mirrors, custom chandeliers, and bold abstract prints.
The service is half the reason to come. Captains in tailored Zac Posen tuxedos present each dish with its story attached, pacing the meal into a ritual that runs across the whole evening. The layout moves from intimate two-tops to communal tables built for cross-table noise once the room fills at peak hours. This is Italian-American cooking as performance, best taken with a group who came for the show as much as the plates.
See Carbone.
Best for: a high-energy anniversary or celebration dinner with a group.
2. Cipriani (DIFC)
Cipriani Dubai is the DIFC outpost of the family whose Harry's Bar opened in Venice in 1931, the room that gave the world the Bellini and beef carpaccio. It stands in Gate Village Building 10, in the financial district, and carries the Cipriani signatures throughout: nautical blue and white, high-gloss wood, polished steel, and the brown leather chairs the group uses from Venice to New York.
The kitchen keeps to the classics that built the name, centered on the original Bellini and beef carpaccio alongside the rest of the Cipriani menu. Portions are generous, the trolley comes to the table, and service is old-school and precise, tuned equally to a business lunch or a dressed-up dinner.
See Cipriani.
Best for: a polished DIFC business lunch or classic dinner.
3. Chic Nonna (DIFC)
Chic Nonna brings chef Vito Mollica's Tuscan-influenced style to DIFC, an haute-Italian address that lands squarely between Michelin-listed dining and one of Dubai's most closely watched scenes. This was the first Chic Nonna, opening in 2021 - a Florence location followed a year later - and it has quickly become a fixture of the Gate Avenue after-work and weekend circuit.
The interiors blend classic Italian design with modern touches, aiming for what the restaurant calls the epitome of Italian elegance. The kitchen serves handcrafted pastas and seafood alongside antipasti built on fresh, seasonal ingredients, in the Tuscan-influenced style Mollica is known for, with service that leans toward the theatrical to match the polish of the room. Come at lunch for a calmer, business pace, or in the evening as the DIFC after-work crowd arrives and the energy climbs.
See Chic Nonna.
Best for: haute-Italian glamour and a DIFC scene that climbs after nine.
4. Roberto's (DIFC)
Roberto's has anchored Italian dining in DIFC since 2012 and reopened on January 31, 2026 after a full redesign. It sits in Gate Village Building 1 and now runs as a restaurant, cocktail bar and terrace under a refreshed look and a new culinary direction, keeping the following it built over more than a decade while giving regulars a reason to come back and look again.
The cooking stays modern Italian: house-made pastas, wood-fired and grilled mains, crudo and antipasti to start, and a raw bar that leans on the day's seafood. Truffle and seasonal produce move through the menu when they are at their best, and the plates are built to carry from a business lunch straight through to a later dinner on the terrace, where the skyline view becomes part of the draw once the sun drops.
See Roberto's.
Best for: modern Italian with a DIFC terrace at sunset.
5. Scalini (Jumeirah Beach)
Scalini brings its London pedigree to the Four Seasons Resort Dubai at Jumeirah Beach, in the resort's Restaurant Village just off the water in Jumeirah 2. The original opened in Chelsea in 1988 and helped set the template for the classic Italian trattoria in Britain; the Dubai room carries that lineage in Art Deco lines and a warm 1960s trattoria feel.
The kitchen keeps to traditional Italian cooking done properly: handmade pasta, whole fish and veal, a long run of antipasti, and the kind of table-side attention that is old-school hospitality rather than performance. It is a menu built for lingering, for ordering a second bottle and letting the courses arrive at their own pace. Come for a long, unhurried dinner near the beach, not a quick one.
See Scalini.
Best for: a leisurely traditional trattoria dinner near the beach.
6. Il Borro Tuscan Bistro (Madinat Jumeirah)
Il Borro Tuscan Bistro sits inside Jumeirah Al Naseem at Madinat Jumeirah, set beside the resort's turtle lagoon on the Umm Suqeim shoreline. It is the Dubai outpost of Il Borro, the Ferragamo family's estate and winery in Tuscany's Valdarno, and it carries that provenance straight onto the plate and into the cellar.
The room is unshowy and warm, leaning on natural materials, an open kitchen, and terrace seating that catches the breeze off the water, with the Burj Al Arab framed in the distance. It feels like a proper Tuscan bistro rather than a hotel dining room, which is the whole point of the place. The menu runs Tuscan and seasonal, built on house-made pastas and wood-grilled meats, drawn from a cellar that traces back to the family's own estate and winery. Book the terrace when the weather allows.
See Il Borro Tuscan Bistro.
Best for: a Tuscan dinner with an estate wine list and a lagoon view.
7. Fi'Lia (Business Bay)
Fi'Lia occupies the 70th floor of SLS Dubai Hotel and Residences in Business Bay, where Chef Celia Stoecklin and an all-women kitchen team run a three-act menu: nonna's classics, mamma's twists, and figlia's innovations, built on handmade pasta, wood-fired pizza, and seasonal ingredients paired with Italian wines and cocktails.
Now a Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant after holding the Bib Gourmand in 2022 and 2023, the dining room and terrace sit 70 floors above Business Bay, with sweeping city views by day and a warmer glow after dark. Signature plates run from the carpaccio to the linguine alle vongole, closing with a tiramisu served in its own coffee cup. It is the most relaxed of the high-rise Italians here, a Michelin Guide kitchen doing honest cooking well above the city.
See Fi'Lia.
Best for: Michelin Guide Italian with sweeping city views.
8. Alici (Bluewaters Island)
Alici sits on Bluewaters Island, the low-rise promenade beside Dubai Marina and the JBR skyline, and takes its name from the Italian for anchovies, one of the southern coast's humblest ingredients. The kitchen draws on the Amalfi Coast and the cooking of southern Italy, built on seafood treated simply and bought fresh.
The room spreads over two floors, each opening onto broad terraces with the marina and the Gulf in front of them; the upstairs terrace at sunset is the seat to request. The look is coastal and unfussy, pale tones and open sightlines, meant to keep the focus on the water and the plates. Raw plates and crudo open most meals, and homemade pasta carries the middle of the table. Come for southern-Italian seafood and a long, slow sunset.
See Alici.
Best for: southern-Italian seafood and a sunset terrace.
9. Il Ristorante (Jumeirah Bay Island)
Il Ristorante sits inside the Bulgari Resort Dubai on Jumeirah Bay Island, the Dubai dining room built on Chef Niko Romito's philosophy of purity, synthesis and lightness. Il Ristorante itself holds two Michelin stars, and Romito's own restaurant in Italy, Reale, holds three. The design draws on the original Bulgari Hotel in Milan, with floor-to-ceiling windows toward the water and an understated, quiet finish throughout the room.
The kitchen runs a contemporary Italian menu built on precise, pared-back plates, served as a chef's tasting alongside a la carte options, with the same menu format used across Bulgari's Niko Romito restaurants worldwide. This is the quietest and most formal room on the list, Italian fine dining stripped back to technique. Book well ahead and give the tasting menu the evening it asks for.
See Il Ristorante.
Best for: a special-occasion Italian fine-dining tasting menu.
10. GIA (Dubai Mall, Fashion Avenue)
GIA sits on the ground floor of Fashion Avenue with a terrace that opens straight onto the Burj Khalifa lake, and the tables along the rail look down at the fountain. The room empties toward the glass every half hour after dark and fills back in once the water settles, which tells you what most people are here for.
The cooking is straightforward, not reinterpreted: wood-fired pizza, pasta made in house, and a grill section running through meat and fish. The white truffle risotto and the seafood linguine are the kitchen's stated seasonal favorites, the plates that turn up most often on the terrace. Service starts at 10 AM every day, so it takes a long mall lunch and a late dinner on the same booking, closing at midnight Monday to Thursday and 1 AM Friday to Sunday.
Ask for a terrace table. The indoor room is comfortable and considerably quieter, but terrace seats go first on weekends and through the fountain-show hours. See GIA.
Best for: Italian with the fountain in front of you, at almost any hour.
How the booking works
We know these rooms, and we know which one fits the night you have in mind: the theater of Carbone, the polish of Cipriani, the quiet of Il Ristorante, the seafood terrace at Alici. Outside Las Vegas the reservation itself sits with the venue, so we point you to the right table, help you time it around the crowd and the sunset, and build the rest of the trip, the beach club, the nightlife, the transfers, around it. Message us on WhatsApp with your dates and your group and we will map the plan.
Build a custom itinerary with our concierge team. Pair the venues mentioned above into a single concierge-confirmed evening. See the full Las Vegas events calendar for every upcoming DJ and pool party across the city.
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