The 5 Best Brunches in Downtown Dubai 2023

Background

Here at BrunchBrunch HQ we've been pondering the question of how to assign ratings to Brunches in order to be able to show our audience the best Brunches in Dubai.

The obvious answer would be to go and visit them all, and give them a rating. This idea, however, falls apart completely when you look at the sheer quantity of Brunches that are now running in Dubai. Over 300 and counting. We would have to attend at least two Brunches per week, every week, for three years!

Not feasible.

Other best-of lists

There are many best Brunch lists out there, from small blogs to major publications, but there's rarely any objective methodology behind the rating system. The reality is they are usually sponsored articles, and while having a large marketing budget sometimes correlates with restaurant quality, it is not reliable.

We wanted to produce a best Brunch list that is objective, reliable and fair; at least as fair as possible given the limitations. We wanted the customer reviews to speak loudest, and allow smaller hidden gems to rank alongside the big-budget brand restaurants.

Let the computer do the work

We racked our brains and decided the fairest way to rank Brunches would be to develop an algorithm that takes into consideration the customer review scores from the most widely-used and trusted (or the least untrusted, to put it more accurately).

Given that a Brunch is a weekly event hosted by a restaurant, we're using the restaurant's rating as a proxy for its Brunch offering. Whilst there are some Brunch-specific reviews, there are simply not enough of them to be of use when comparing hundreds of restaurants.

Source data

We settled upon TripAdvisor as being one of the most reliable, given that they have a fairly good anti-fraud system to help moderate the reviews. The second most widely-used review platform is Google reviews. They are becoming more ubiquitous, as nearly everyone has a Google account nowadays, and the sheer quantity helps to mask any spam. None of these systems are perfect, but to the best of our knowledge, they are the best there is out there.

In additional to the review sites, we take into consideration the local magazines that are renowned for their restaurant reviews, notably Timeout. Timeout has a 3- to 5-star rating system, and their team reviews many of the restaurants that host Brunches in Dubai.

WhatsOn magazine was also a strong contender as they publish fairly in-depth reviews, however the algorithm said 'no,' as they do not generate an overall score for their reviews.

Methodology

We'll spare you the maths, but in simple terms we take the average review scores from the above institutions, and weight the score based on the number of reviews. A restaurant with a high number of reviews has a 'stronger' score, as far as our algorithm is concerned. Restaurants with a moderate number of reviews would have a slightly weaker average score, and restaurants with very few reviews are ignored entirely.

We give a stronger weighting towards the TripAdvisor rating as they are a dedicated review site and make use of fraud detection technology, which helps increase the trustworthiness of their overall rating. Finally, restaurants with a 5-star Timeout rating get a slight boost. It is important to note that a restaurant is not penalised in any way for not having a magazine review.

Caveats

Our system has a slight bias towards restaurants that have been open for a long time, as it takes time for new restaurants to accumulate sufficient reviews. Rest assured that we regularly update the scores, and we do so more frequently for new restaurants.

If there is a Dubai Brunch that is not on this list and you think it should be, we recommend going and leaving a great review on TripAdvisor or Google, and tell your friends!

If you have any suggestions for how we can improve this list further then we'd love to hear them. You may reach us using the contact link below.