Dubai is strongly becoming a foodies’ paradise as at least four food businesses in a day would open in the city.
The Dubai Municipality reports 2, 074 restaurants have opened in the Emirates in the last 18 months, the rate rocketing over the past two years, with only 1, 540 restaurant openings in 2015 and 500 in 2014, according to Sultan Ali Tahir, head of the Food Inspection Section.
The emirate is now home to more than 16,000 food outlets, including international chains as well as locally-owned restaurants, cafeterias and coffee shops. 40 percent of the new restaurants are in Dubai’s newer neighborhoods. Tahir states that this is the highest increase Dubai has in recent years.
Rohin Thampi, regional director of restaurant review website Zomato, said he has seen a huge surge in number of eateries in Dubai since the website was launched, with only 3, 500 restaurants listed in 2012 up to more than 8, 000 today. The previous year alone had over 1, 750 new listings in Dubai.
Tahir and Thampi both believe that this increase can be attributed to social media.
Thampi shared that people would snap pictures of food and then upload them onto social media sites, with figures of 25,000 reviews and 60,000 pictures every month. This, in turn, fuels over 1.1 million unique visitors looking for new restaurants every month.
It is now common for customers to walk into a restaurant and ask for dishes that they’ve seen on apps like Instagram.
“Every day people would come and show me a dessert that they’ve seen on Instagram and ask for it,” The National quotes a waitress at Dubai’s Home Bakery in Galleria Mall, which also has more than 100,000 followers on the photo sharing app.
However, the booming restaurant industry presents a problem of so much competition that many food businesses are forced to close shop.
