Your restaurant needs fewer influencers, not more

Dubai has more food influencers per square kilometre than anywhere on earth, and most restaurant marketing budgets are being quietly eaten by them - one comped tasting menu at a time. The feed looks busy. The bookings do not move.

The problem is not influence. It is casting. Fifty micro-foodies posting the same slow-motion cheese pull creates wallpaper, not desire. Audiences in this city have seen ten thousand cheese pulls. What they have not seen is a reason to choose you on a Thursday night.

Our rule: five right voices beat fifty available ones. Pick creators whose audience actually eats where you are - right neighbourhood, right price point, right occasion. Give them a story only your venue can tell: the chef, the dish with a history, the room at golden hour. Then pay them properly and let them say it their way, because audiences can smell a mandatory caption from three posts away.

And measure like a grown-up: reservation links, named discount codes, walk-in surveys. If a creator cannot move a booking, they are a billboard - and there are cheaper billboards.