On 15 December 2025, MICHELIN published its first selection for Saudi Arabia, holding the awards ceremony in Riyadh that February. Fifty-one restaurants across Riyadh, Jeddah and AlUla. Eleven Bib Gourmands. Three special awards. And no stars — not one, at any level.
The reflex reading is that this was a snub, or worse, a slow-walk by a company that had taken a tourism authority’s money and delivered a guide with nothing in the window. The opposite is true. A guide that arrives in a new market and hands out three stars to prove a point is worthless within two years. A guide that arrives and awards none has told you something you can use.
Source: Diriyah Company
What the Gulf's guides actually look like
Four Gulf guides exist. Dubai launched in 2022, Abu Dhabi later the same year, Doha at the end of 2024 and Saudi Arabia in 2026. Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman have none.
Dubai is the only one operating at the top of the scale. Its 2025 edition, announced on 22 May, awarded two three-star restaurants for the first time — Trèsind Studio and FZN by Björn Frantzén — with Trèsind becoming the first Indian restaurant anywhere in the world to hold three stars. Below them sit three two-stars: Row on 45, Il Ristorante–Niko Romito and STAY by Yannick Alléno. Then fourteen one-stars, twenty-two Bib Gourmands and three Green Stars, across a total selection of a hundred and nineteen restaurants.
Abu Dhabi, forty minutes down the road, has three one-star restaurants and no two- or three-stars at all: Erth, Hakkasan and Talea by Antonio Guida, the last two both inside Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental. Ten Bib Gourmands. Its 2026 edition, announced in October 2025, also removed a star from 99 Sushi, which is the sort of thing that establishes a guide’s seriousness faster than any award does.
Doha is at three one-stars in its second edition: Alba, newly promoted, with Jamavar and IDAM by Alain Ducasse retained. Eight Bib Gourmands.
Source: Diriyah Company
And then Saudi Arabia
Fifty-one restaurants, no stars, eleven Bib Gourmands and forty in the Selected category. The three special awards went to Chef Elia Kaady of Maiz in Riyadh for Young Chef, Il Baretto in Riyadh for its mocktails, and Yaza in Jeddah for service — cited specifically for greeting guests with Arabic coffee and dates.
Read that award list again, because it is the most interesting paragraph MICHELIN has published about the Gulf. A young chef cooking contemporary Saudi. A bar recognised for what it does within the constraint of a country without alcohol. And a Saudi restaurant honoured for hospitality performed in its own idiom.
None of those three awards could have been given anywhere else. MICHELIN did not arrive in Riyadh and grade it against Paris. It found the three things the market is genuinely good at and said so.
The zero, and why it is the honest number
Riyadh’s restaurant scene is currently an import market. Carbone and Sadelle’s from New York, Gymkhana and Berenjak from London, Long Chim by way of Perth and Bangkok. These are good restaurants and several are very good, but a star is awarded to a kitchen for what it does on the plate in that room, and a well-run franchise of a starred restaurant is not the starred restaurant.
Dubai’s stars mostly went to the same category of import — FZN, Il Ristorante–Niko Romito, STAY. The difference is that Dubai has been doing it for twenty years, long enough for those outposts to develop their own kitchens rather than execute someone else’s. Saudi Arabia has been doing it for four.
MICHELIN’s International Director framed the inaugural selection around an emerging gastronomic landscape, which is diplomatic. The plainer version: the inspectors ate well and did not find a kitchen operating at star level yet. Saying so, in a country that had just paid to be covered, is the only thing that makes the guide worth reading next year.
About that payment
It is not a secret that MICHELIN’s international expansion is funded by the destinations it covers. Tourism authorities enter multi-year partnerships to bring the guide to their city; reported figures elsewhere in the world run to four and a half million dollars over five years for Bangkok and one point six million for Tel Aviv. The Gulf’s terms have not been disclosed by MICHELIN or by any of the four tourism authorities involved.
This is the structural objection to every new MICHELIN market and it deserves a straight answer rather than a dismissal. The answer is that the commercial arrangement buys coverage, not outcomes, and the only evidence anyone can weigh is what the guide does once it arrives. On that test the Gulf guides look reasonable: Abu Dhabi has taken a star away, Doha has promoted exactly one restaurant in a year, and Saudi Arabia awarded nothing at all.
A guide bought and paid for would not have done the last of those.
The Green Star, and what it does not yet mean here
MICHELIN’s Green Star recognises restaurants doing serious work on sustainable sourcing and practice. In the Gulf it exists almost nowhere: Dubai has three — BOCA, LOWE and Teible — and no other Gulf guide has awarded one.
This is the most legitimate criticism available of the region’s dining scene, and it is not about cooking. A restaurant industry built on airfreight in a place with almost no agriculture has a structural problem, and three Green Stars across four guides is an accurate score. AlUla, with 2.3 million date palms and a working agricultural oasis around it, is the one place in the Gulf where a genuinely local kitchen is a plausible proposition — and AlUla is in the Saudi guide.
What the Bibs are telling you
The Bib Gourmand — good cooking at a moderate price — is the category that actually describes a food culture, and it is where the Gulf’s guides get interesting. Dubai has twenty-two. Saudi Arabia, in year one, has eleven.
Eleven is a lot for an inaugural selection, and it is where the Saudi restaurants worth crossing a city for currently sit. In Jeddah, The Lucky Llama for Nikkei and Samia’s Dish for Hijazi home cooking. The signal is not that Saudi Arabia cannot cook. It is that what it does best is not yet priced or plated the way a star requires — which is a fixable problem and, arguably, not a problem at all.
Read also: The best table in Riyadh faces a ruin
How to use these four guides
For a Dubai trip, the stars are a genuine shortlist and the three-star pair is a serious international proposition. For Abu Dhabi and Doha, the one-stars are worth booking and the Bibs are where the value is. For Saudi Arabia, ignore the absence of stars entirely and eat straight off the Bib list.
And notice what the region’s guides have in common. Every top star in the Gulf is an imported name; almost every award for something specific to the place went to a local kitchen. That gap will close from the bottom up, in the Bib Gourmand tier, in Jeddah and Riyadh, over the next five years.
The first Saudi restaurant to take a star will almost certainly be cooking from the peninsula, not from somewhere else. MICHELIN just spent a year not awarding one, which is how you make that eventual star mean something.
Featured Image Source: Diriyah Company
