Orfali Bros and the Rise of Dubai’s Distinctive Culinary Voices
Two Michelin stars in the 2026 Dubai guide and No. 4 in MENA’s 50 Best 2026, a year after topping the list. How three brothers from Aleppo built a restaurant that cooks from memory and travel.
On the evening of 6 October, at Atlantis The Royal on the Palm Jumeirah, Orfali Bros was promoted from one Michelin star to two. “So much fight and so much love,” Mohamad Orfali said as he accepted the award, Arab News reported. He dedicated it to his team, his brothers and his parents, and said he wanted to give it to young Arab chefs. In January 2025 the restaurant was named No. 1 in MENA’s 50 Best Restaurants; in the 2026 list, announced in February, it ranked fourth.
Three brothers from Aleppo
The restaurant is run by three brothers from Aleppo: Mohamad leads the savoury kitchen, while Wassim and Omar run the pastry side. Khaleej Times reported in 2022 that Mohamad moved to Dubai from Syria in 2007, with his brothers following in 2013, and that the family entered the food business in 2015. Orfali Bros opened in March 2021 as a roughly 60-seat bistro at WASL 51 Mall in Jumeirah, serving reworked Levantine food. It received a Bib Gourmand in the first Michelin Guide Dubai in 2022, then its first star in 2024.
The cooking has an unusual origin. Mohamad trained as a chef without knowing much about the food of Aleppo, and it was a conversation with a chef in Spain that sent him back to study it, Khaleej Times reported. Scene Eats adds that his grandmother’s cooking, which he regards as his first school, became the starting point.
Television played a part too. Mohamad built a following as a TV chef, including a Ramadan show on Fatafeat that he credits as an influence on the bistro’s menu, Khaleej Times reported.
What the two-star kitchen does
Michelin’s inspector, writing after the promotion, found a restaurant that had closed for about three months and reopened with renovated interiors and a revised menu. The two-storey open kitchen and pastry workshop remain, now set among darker wood panelling. Dining is by tasting menu only: a shorter menu built around signature creations, the OG, and a longer one, The Voyage, that follows the brothers’ travels through Syrian, Turkish and Armenian flavours.
The dishes named by the inspector show the method. The Orfali Bayildi uses the whole aubergine, with walnuts, verjus and rose petals. The Aleppo Street Bun is a single-bite filled bun with sujuk, toum and pickled pepper. A Swiss chard yalanji is a vegetarian take on a Turkish street snack, made with leftover koji rice, and the maftoul is hand-rolled moghrabieh with chickpeas and a brûléed shallot. At the end, Wassim and Omar’s tarte tatin was praised for its precision and restraint. Michelin’s own release framed the promotion as a journey from neighbourhood bistro to a flagship of Middle Eastern gastronomy.
A family of restaurants
A neighbourhood bistro has become a flagship, and the brothers have used it to widen the field.
The brothers have since opened Three Bros, a casual 22-seat bistro across the street, which was added to the Bib Gourmand list on the same night. According to the inspector’s diary, the team has grown from 18 people to 100. Among its recent honours, Omar and Wassim were named Best Pastry Chefs in the 2026 MENA’s 50 Best list. For the full ranking, see our report on MENA’s 50 Best 2026.
Orfali Bros is not the only room in the 2026 guide that cooks from a specific heritage. Birch, one of two new one-star restaurants, draws on its chef Arslan Berdiev’s Turkmen roots and travels, and builds dishes around produce such as Uzbek tomatoes. The other newcomer, KIGO, offers seasonal Japanese cooking at a sushi counter and a kaiseki table. Together with Orfali Bros they point to a Dubai dining scene increasingly led by chefs with a clear personal point of view. Our analysis of the 2026 Dubai guide puts those results in context.
Mohamad Orfali has also spoken of a longer-term ambition, an Orfali Bros academy to promote Aleppo’s food culture, which Michelin reported in a 2023 feature. For now, Mohamad Orfali’s own summary at the ceremony was a short one: after a hard 2025 that also brought a second restaurant, two stars.
Sources & fact-check9
- Orfali Bros earns 2 Michelin stars in 5th edition of Dubai guideArab News, 6 October 2026
- Inside two-star Orfali Bros restaurant in Dubai: a MICHELIN inspector’s dining diaryMICHELIN Guide, 7 October 2026
- Orfali Bros, DubaiMICHELIN Guide
- The MICHELIN Guide Dubai celebrates its 5th editionMichelin (corporate), 7 October 2026
- MENA’s 50 Best Restaurants 2026: winners listThe National, 3 February 2026
- Middle East & North Africa’s 50 Best Restaurants 2025 unveiledGood Food Middle East, 28 January 2025
- How Orfali brothers are redefining gastronomy and Levantine dishesKhaleej Times, 18 August 2022
- Orfali Bros in Dubai: three brothers, one dream (sponsored feature)MICHELIN Guide, 1 June 2023
- How Mohamad Orfali went from hiding his restaurant job to MENA’s No. 1Scene Eats, 21 August 2026
Every name, number and date in this story was checked against the sources above before publication. Spotted something wrong? Tell us — we correct errors openly. See our editorial standards.
