Location

The Royal Atlantis Hotel is situated on The Palm, Dubai. The Palm is an artificial island off the coast that literally looks like a palm from above. From my hotel at Burj Khalifa to the island you can either take a car, which takes about 25 to 30 minutes. Or you can take the metro to Dubai Marina, then the tram, and then the monorail out onto the island. From the monorail terminus to The Royal Atlantis you can either walk twenty minutes in the sweltering heat, or you can take the shuttle from the lobby of the Atlantis Hotel to the Royal Atlantis in about ten minutes.

The Café Royal at Atlantis The Royal

Where the Atlantis has firmly established itself as a family oriented beach resort hotel, the Atlantis The Royal is clearly aiming for a more upmarket clientele. If there are kids here, they’re expected to behave like grownups.

The style of the hotel is ostentatious and flashy in the extreme. Some may call it oppulent and extravagant – I find it rather gaudy. It reminds me a bit of Las Vegas.

I must say, though, that it’s a great place for people watching – mainly because of the kind of people the hotel seems to attract: from the wannabe influencers busily pulling the most hideous duck faces for their TikTok or Instagram profiles, to the inappropriately dressed young people who really aren’t quite as hot as they’d like to think.

The afternoon tea is served at The Royal Café behind the lobby, with big floor to ceiling windows overlooking the garden with its abundence of palm trees and a huge water feature.

The Service & Staff

The service at the hotel is quite amazing. The afternoon tea service is elaborate and well paced. From start to finish it takes about 2.5 hours, making it one of the longest afternoon teas I’ve experienced. The staff are excellent, personable, and very knowledgeable about their product. As I work my way through their extensive list of teas, our server makes excellent recommendations for which tea to choose for each individual part of the afternoon tea.

The Afternoon Tea

The Royal Café’s afternoon tea has been carefully curated by chef Christophe Devoille – a Frenchman from Strasbourg. Hence, this afternoon tea is in the French style. In the list of savouries in the menu below, the wagyu was kindly replaced by an non-beef option at my request, which was a shrimp mimosa with black and white truffles.

We start the afternoon tea with a seasonal mocktail made with white tea infused with seasonal berries. This is a nice and refreshing drink that gets by without being overly sweet. I also order a bottle of sparkling water and a gunpowder tea with nana mint, which is served Moroccan style and expertly poured by the excellent waiting staff.

The first part of the meal arrives on a five-tier étagère that is delivered by two servers. It contains the savouries and the sweets. At least part of them. The individual items are all very well prepared and combine a rich variety of flavours. I also like that the items on the étagère are quite light.

Once we’re done with the pastries, we are brought a small, flat brioche with vanilla cream and strawberries, which is nice and buttery and simply tastes divine. At the same time, our server also brings out the warm scones.

There are two scones per person – one plain scone and another with orange peel, which is quite unusual but excellent. The scones are served with mascarpone and orange marmalade.

And then to conclude this epic afternoon tea, the Fontainebleau turns out to be a meringue filled with raspberries and covered in fluffy Greek yogurt and served with raspberry consommé. It’s very nice and amazingly light, despite the richness of the yogurt.

And then for the coup de grace, as a parting gift, our server hands each one of us a bag with a box containing a small gugelhupf, which is typical of the region of France that chef Devoille is from. Our server spends a few more minutes chatting, asking us if we enjoyed our stay at the Royal Atlantis and how much exploration we’ve done in Dubai.

Conclusion

And that concludes a rather epic afternoon tea experience at Atlantis The Royal on Dubai’s Palm island. The food and the service at The Royal Café must rank among the best I’ve experienced. The food was nicely balanced both in terms of sweetness and richness. The waiting staff were charming and attentive and the pace of the service made this afternoon tea experience highly pleasant. The hotel itself is a matter of taste and personal preference, although I will admit that my initial impression of it was heavily influenced by the sight of the seemingly endless catwalk of influencer wannabes tripping over thenselves as they tried to walk and take selfies at the same time. They’re hard to avoid because there are just so many of them!