One Life Kitchen & Café

A roastery that grew into an all-day room

Coffee is roasted in house here, and that is the thing to lead with: One Life Kitchen & Café began in Dubai Design District in 2016 as a café and roastery, and the D3 room is still the original. The brand later added a Jumeirah Village Circle branch, but this is where the format was worked out. It runs as several things at once, breakfast café, lunch restaurant, bar and roastery, which is why the same room carries a morning coffee, a working lunch and an evening table without becoming a different business. The coffee sits inside that daily rhythm rather than standing apart from it, most obviously at breakfast, where a pairing of coffee with a breakfast dish is the central offer. The D3 room was ranked 23rd in The World's 100 Best Coffee Shops in 2025.

Seven thousand square feet in the design district

The D3 setting matters. This is Dubai's design quarter, full of studios and contemporary lifestyle venues, and the café takes more than 7,000 square feet of it, with wall-to-wall views out into the district and seating both indoors and outside. That scale is what lets the different modes coexist: a solo coffee, a family meal, a long lunch with colleagues, an evening that runs later than planned. The kitchen covers breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert, with international dishes and a real set of vegan and vegetarian options rather than a token line at the foot of the menu. Smoothies, fresh juices and house-baked pastries fill the gaps between the dayparts.

Coffee with breakfast, then the burger

The clearest first order is coffee with a breakfast dish, since that pairing is the one the house builds around and the roastery is the reason to take it seriously. After that, the named signatures are worth knowing. The Big Boys Burger is the single dish most often called out. The Sunday Cookout is the other one, a barbecue platter with a choice of five items, run as an event rather than a standing menu line. Twerking Late, on Friday evenings, ties the kitchen to the bar side with food and house pours. Pastry is baked in house rather than bought in, so a smoothie or a juice with something from the case is a fair lighter alternative to a full plate.