The Friday Brunch: Dubai’s Secular Ritual

Friday brunch in Dubai is less a meal than a social institution — the weekly gathering that defines the city’s expatriate community and has, over decades, developed into something approaching ritual. The format is simple: unlimited food, unlimited alcohol (where licensed), and four to five hours of eating, drinking, and the particular bonding that long lunches facilitate. The execution varies from adequate buffets to elaborate productions whose stations could rival trade shows.

We chose Zuma, whose Friday brunch has been voted Dubai’s best often enough to constitute consensus. The experience began at 12:30pm and ended, somewhat hazily, around 5pm. The food arrived in waves: sushi and sashimi, then robata dishes, then more sushi, then dessert, each course accompanied by champagne or sake or cocktails whose consumption no one seemed to be monitoring. By the third hour, the restaurant had transformed from a place people ate into a place people celebrated — birthday tables, hen parties, reunion gatherings, all lubricated by the bottomless glass.

The cost (AED 950/£210 per person with champagne) sounds excessive until you calculate what similar consumption would cost in London; the atmosphere is something money cannot replicate elsewhere. Friday brunch is Dubai’s acknowledgement that its expatriate majority needs social infrastructure, that a city of transient workers requires spaces where connection can happen. The religious significance of Friday (the Islamic day of rest) has been repurposed for secular communion — a transformation that some might find offensive and others find perfectly appropriate for a city that has always made its own rules.