Eugène Eugène

Classics held under group hands

The tartare is cut for the table, seasoned cleanly, and sent into a room of palms and teak. Giuseppe Pezzella, Chef at Eugène Eugène in Dubai, works here through a Group Executive Chef post that began in 2024, carrying responsibility across the pass rather than a single station. His record in the city has moved through Head Chef posts at Cinque in FIVE Palm Jumeirah and Trattoria by Cinque in FIVE Jumeirah Village, then Group Executive Chef work at Chic Nonna and RIKAS Hospitality Group. At Eugène Eugène, that breadth matters because the restaurant asks for control in a different register: French brasserie dishes, Mediterranean ease, and a room built for long tables rather than ceremony. Pezzella’s own cooking is known for seafood and Italian food, a language of shellfish, dairy, citrus, and balance. Here, the brief is not to turn the menu Italian. It is to keep the standard legible across a house whose classics need restraint, timing, and repetition.

A brasserie program with measured directness

The kitchen works from an à la carte brasserie frame, with small plates and larger signatures moving through the same modern French register. Lobster pasta in white wine, cordon bleu, duck confit, steak tartare, and croque monsieur carry the weight of recognition; the method has to make them feel chosen, not rehearsed. The wider menu has been described through sea bass tartare, tomato concassé, shrimp risotto, small farm chicken, and Gillardeau oysters, with the emphasis placed on clean sourcing and a direct hand with the classics. The restaurant opened in 2023, and the space itself came from a substantial conversion of the Kempinski Hotel’s tennis court into a greenhouse-style brasserie on the Mall of the Emirates rooftop. That origin explains the scale of the room, but the food still depends on smaller gestures: the cut of raw fish, the seasoning of tartare, the heat held under confit, the way white wine sharpens richness in lobster pasta. The wine program is curated, and cocktails sit beside it, but the kitchen remains the spine.

The room around the pass

The room gives the pass a particular kind of pressure. Greenery hangs and rises around the dining floor, soft textures temper the height of the space, and the garden terrace pulls the brasserie away from the enclosed rhythm of the mall below. It is lively, not hushed, with the feeling of a market hall softened by upholstery and leaves. The counter and the stations have to feed a dining room that can turn from small plates to brasserie mains without changing its pace. Upscale casual service suits that rhythm: plates arrive with polish, but the room still allows conversation to stretch. In a city fluent in spectacle, Eugène Eugène keeps its argument closer to the bench. A cordon bleu has nowhere to hide.

Why the house holds

Making a greenhouse brasserie feel settled inside a hotel and mall complex takes discipline at every service. RIKAS Hospitality Group built the address as part of a wider Dubai collection, and Pezzella’s 2024 appointment placed him inside that broader operating structure. If the next chapter is quiet, it will still be visible in the same places: the tartare, the lobster pasta in white wine, and the steadiness of the Eugène Eugène pass.