United Arab Emirates

United Arab Emirates is a fairly “new” country founded on the 2nd of December 1971 and contains 7 Emirates. The most well-known of course is Dubai, although the capital and second most well known is the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. A Newcomer under the UAE’s holiday destinations is Ras Al Khaimah, which is spoken about as the second or new Dubai due to its massive developments in recent time and amazing future development plans, so watch out for it!

UAE is a country that is constantly changing and if you would visit Dubai once a year, you would every time discover a new city as its getting permanently bigger and better. UAE is a country that thrives to be a leading example with its constant effort to become greener, smarter, safer, happier and more advanced then every other country https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/smart-government-and-the-uae-the-happiness-of-citizens-is-the-ultimate-goal-1.681584 .

Especially the announcement of Dubai hosting Expo 2020 https://www.expo2020dubai.com/#together-h kick started a whole new level of developments. UAE selected the theme "Connecting Minds, Creating the Future", sub-themes being Sustainability, Mobility and Opportunity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expo_2020 .

Big investments flowing into affordable housing, the expansion of the already amazing Dubai Metro network (one of the cleanest metros in the world), smart Government, the Happiness initiative, sustainability and much more.

Coming to the food and restaurant scene in the UAE, most of the healthy and vegan eateries you will find in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Apart from pure vegan restaurants like Super Natural Kitchen in Gallery Lafayette, The Dubai Mall https://www.snkitchen.com/ , Healthy Patisserie https://www.healthy-patisserie.com/ and Tidjoori http://www.tidjoorirestaurant.com/ , there are meanwhile plenty of restaurants who have vegan friendly menus including few till plenty of vegan options like  Icons Coffee Couture http://meeticons.com/  , Sophie’s Café http://www.sophiesme.com/ and Urth by Nabz & G http://nabzandg.com/. Also in other Emirates you will find more and more vegan friendly menus. As the majority of citizens is from India, you will find plenty of Indian restaurants and usually they have a vegetarian section in the menu. They like to use butter and Ghee in their food, so better double check if it’s really vegan.

Apart from the restaurant and café scene in UAE, there are plenty of food delivery services like Eat Clean https://eatcleanme.com/ , meal prep companies like lovefood.me https://www.lovefoodme.com/menu and online shops with delivery like Coco Yogo http://coco-yogo.com/  and Pure Vegan Love http://pureveganlove.com/ . Organic Foods and Café https://organicfoodsandcafe.com/ is an organic supermarket chain with few organic restaurants featuring organic vegan food and regular vegan brunches.  A new trend are online supermarkets, which deliver all your groceries convenient to your home, https://gogoguy.com/ae-en has a huge variety of vegan meats and https://www.kibsons.com/ gets you all organic stuff you need.

UAE got big in markets, with Ripe Market https://ripeme.com/the-ripe-markets/ and The Farmer’s Market http://www.bakerandspiceme.com/farmers-market/ which always features a bunch of vegan friendly stalls.

Well, UAE is fun and has plenty of options, but mainly in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, while the other Emirates are yet to catch up with the future! Apart from the food scene UAE has so many events, adventures and shopping possibilities to offer, that it never gets boring!