Arabic and English Menus in UAE Restaurants: What Is Actually Required

The common phrasing is that UAE restaurants are required to offer Arabic and English menus. That is close, but it is two different rules wearing one coat, and the difference matters if you are deciding what to spend money on.

Arabic is the part written into federal law. English is either a Dubai Food Code expectation or, everywhere else, a commercial decision almost everyone makes anyway. Below is what we could verify from primary sources, what we could not, and what goes wrong when a venue bolts Arabic onto a system never built for it.

We build restaurant software, so treat the last two sections as interested. The rest is not.

The federal rule: Arabic, plus anything else you like

Federal Law No. 15 of 2020 on Consumer Protection, Article 26, is titled Use of the Arabic language in statements, advertisements, and contracts. The operative sentence is one line long:

The data, advertisements, and contracts related to the Consumer shall be made in Arabic, and other languages may be used in addition to Arabic.

Source: Ministry of Economy and Tourism — Federal Law No. 15/2020, Article 26 (also listed at uaelegislation.gov.ae)

Note the shape of it. Arabic is the required language; every other language is permitted in addition. There is no reading of Article 26 under which an English-only menu is compliant, and no reading under which English is itself required.

The same law, Article 8(4), applies the same logic to the receipt: the invoice shall be in Arabic, and the supplier may add any other language. That is a separate obligation from the menu and it lands on your POS, not your print shop.

This is federal, so it applies in every emirate.

What non-compliance costs

Cabinet Decision No. 66 of 2023 carries the executive regulation and the penalty schedule. Its table of financial penalties lists an AED 100,000 administrative fine for failure to state particulars, advertisements and contracts related to the consumer in Arabic, and a separate AED 100,000 fine where the invoice is not issued in Arabic. Sanctions are graduated — notice first, then fine, with the fine doubled on repetition, and temporary closure available for the worse cases.

Source: Cabinet Decision No. 66/2023, Addenda 1 and 2; consumer rights summary at u.ae

What Dubai adds

Dubai Municipality's Food Code is the food-safety instrument that governs the roughly 25,000 food businesses in the emirate. Section 8.4 of Food Code 2.0, Product Menu and Food Related Claims, states that food service establishments such as restaurants and cafeterias shall have the product menu printed in both Arabic and English, and that food containing non-Halal ingredients must be clearly identified on the menu.

Source: Dubai Food Code 2.0, Version 12, July 2023, §8.4 — the copy we read is marked Final Draft. Dubai Municipality's food business hub is at dm.gov.ae.

Two caveats on that citation. The document is labelled a final draft — Gulf News reported in June 2023 that the code was still with the legal department pending approval, and we found no official announcement of a commencement date. And it is a Dubai instrument, binding nowhere else.

Source: Gulf News, 8 June 2023 (news reporting, not an official notice)

Allergens: the requirement most menus fail

This is the one that actually changes how you build a menu. Food Code 2.0 requires 14 named allergen groups to be declared on the label or the menu when present, no matter how small the amount — crustaceans, peanuts, soy, tree nuts, sesame, fish, eggs, milk, gluten-containing cereals, molluscs, celery, mustard, sulphites and lupin.

For food sold directly to customers in a restaurant or cafe, §3.6.4 allows three ways to satisfy it: full allergen information on a menu, digital device or board; a written notice in a clearly visible position explaining how to obtain the information; or allergy and intolerance icons. Where cross-contact cannot be prevented, a warning must appear on the label or menu. For online platforms and phone takeaway orders, the information has to reach the customer before the purchase completes.

There is also a bilingual obligation buried in the raw-and-undercooked rules: where raw or lightly cooked animal products are served on request, the consumer advisory must appear on the printed and digital menu in Arabic and English, with prescribed wording.

Source: Dubai Food Code 2.0, §3.6.1, §3.6.4 and §3.2 consumer advisory

Notice what that implies. If allergen data lives in a digital menu, you satisfy the requirement everywhere at once and can change a recipe without reprinting. On a laminated card, every recipe change is a print run.

Calories: we could not establish the current position

Dubai Municipality originally set calorie declaration deadlines of November 2019 for chains with more than five branches and January 2020 for everyone else. In July 2019 the municipality deferred it: the CEO of its environment, health and safety control sector said display would be optional for the next two years while the industry prepared, with voluntary participation encouraged through the Foodwatch programme.

Source: Gulf News, 21 July 2019. The Foodwatch programme’s standalone portal no longer resolves, so we cannot link it; current status is best confirmed with the Dubai Municipality Food Safety Department.

That deferral nominally lapsed years ago. We could not find any official Dubai Municipality statement confirming whether calorie declaration subsequently became mandatory, stayed voluntary, or was folded into something else. As a fact about the document rather than legal advice: the menu section of Food Code 2.0 covers language, Halal identification, ingredient disclosure and nutrition claims, and contains no general calorie-declaration requirement.

Does it differ between emirates?

Article 26 is federal, so the Arabic requirement follows you to Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Ras Al Khaimah and everywhere else. The Dubai Food Code's explicit Arabic-and-English menu wording is Dubai-only. We looked for an equivalent published menu-language rule from the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority and did not find one, which is not the same as it not existing. Confirm with the authority that licenses your venue before a print run.

Bilingual is not translation: what RTL actually involves

Here is where most implementations quietly fail. Arabic is written right-to-left, and a menu that swaps the strings but keeps a left-to-right layout reads as broken to an Arabic reader in a way that is hard to unsee.

The things that have to change, not just the words:

• Layout mirrors. Item name and price swap sides. Navigation, back arrows, chevrons and drawer directions flip. A price column pinned right in English belongs on the left in Arabic.
• Text alignment flips independently of layout. Input fields are the usual offenders — they do not reliably inherit direction from their container, so the cursor starts on the wrong side and the placeholder hangs off the wrong edge while everything around it looks fine.
• Numerals and currency need a decision. UAE Arabic conventionally uses Western digits, so auto-converting to Eastern Arabic-Indic numerals is usually wrong. Fix where the AED marker sits relative to the number and apply it across menu, cart, bill split and receipt, or one total renders three ways.
• Mixed-direction strings. "Wagyu 250g" inside an Arabic sentence needs bidirectional handling, or the segments reorder themselves on screen.
• Type. Arabic needs more vertical space at the same point size, and the letter-spacing tricks that tighten English headlines break Arabic letter joining outright.

Translation quality matters more for food than for UI

Interface strings are forgiving — Cart, Pay, Split have settled Arabic equivalents and a wrong one is merely awkward. Dish names are not. Machine translation reliably mangles cooking methods, cuts of meat, regional dish names and anything with a proper noun in it, and the failure mode is a guest ordering something they did not expect.

The practical split: translate UI strings once and reuse them; have dish names and descriptions reviewed by a native Arabic speaker who has eaten your food.

Printed versus digital

A printed bilingual menu is a fixed asset. Every price change, seasonal special and allergen correction is a reprint, and in practice venues stop updating the Arabic side first because it is the one nobody complains about.

A digital menu moves the problem into data. One item record carries its Arabic and English name, its allergen flags and its price; the layout is generated per language. Change the price once and it lands in both languages, on the QR menu, in the cart and on the receipt at the same time. Most venues end up with both — a short printed menu for the table and a QR menu carrying the full detail. Our QR ordering setup guide covers the table-side mechanics.

Setting it up without a second project

A workable order of operations:

1. Build the English menu data first, with allergen flags as structured fields rather than free text in the description.
2. Add Arabic names and descriptions to the same records. A parallel Arabic menu will drift within a month.
3. Have a native speaker review dish names before launch.
4. Check the Arabic rendering on a phone, not a desktop browser — mirrored layout, price alignment, input fields, receipt.
5. Confirm the receipt output carries Arabic; Article 8(4) treats the invoice as its own obligation. What that invoice must contain, and when it is due, is in VAT, TRN and invoicing for UAE restaurants.

If you are still sequencing your opening, the ordering of this against everything else is in the 90-day restaurant tech checklist, and the wider licensing and technology picture is in Opening a Restaurant in Dubai.

Where Shareabill fits

Arabic right-to-left support is shipped, not planned. The guest apps and the guest web app run in nine languages, and the right-to-left handling covers both the interface and the menu content — mirrored layout, text alignment, and the numeral and currency rendering described above, carried through menu browsing, the cart, bill splitting and the receipt. Item names and descriptions are stored per language against one item record, so a price or availability change lands in every language at once.

The rest of what is live: AED with 5% VAT throughout, QR ordering, bill splitting by item, share or percentage, dine-in and takeaway, delivery and third-party orders, inventory, loyalty, AR menus, and POS with terminal payments.

What is not: there is no offline mode. Shareabill is cloud-based, and if the venue loses connectivity, ordering and payment stop until it returns. And we claim no certification for tax compliance — the Federal Tax Authority does not certify POS systems, so nobody can honestly offer that.