One of Dubai’s Best Japanese Restaurants Popped-Up on the North Coast

On the first night of Kinoya’s residency at Moga, there is something faintly improbable about sitting within earshot of the Mediterranean and being handed a bowl of ramen that has travelled, in several important respects, from Dubai and Japan to get here.This is Kinoya, after all, a restaurant built around a food particularly susceptible to place. Its ramen depends on broth and tare, certainly, but also noodles, temperature, timing and the small constellation of ingredients that make one kitchen’s bowl distinguishable from another’s. Moving it from Dubai to Egypt’s North Coast for five nights therefore presents a more interesting proposition than simply reproducing a menu elsewhere: how much of a restaurant can actually travel?

Quite a lot, it turns out.

Kinoya has brought its handmade ramen noodles from Dubai rather than attempting to reproduce them after landing, alongside Japanese spices and seasonings and dried cherry blossoms. At Moga, Ramla by MARAKEZ’s beachside restaurant, these ingredients find themselves in conspicuously unfamiliar surroundings. Outside is the Egyptian summer in full nocturnal swing; inside, Head Chef Kenji Miura is working through the first service of a residency that runs from August 11th to 15th.The juxtaposition could easily have become the evening’s entire conceit. Instead, once the food begins arriving, geography recedes.

Miura leads Kinoya’s izakaya offering in Dubai, while founder and chef Neha Mishra develops the ramen menu, and the residency carries that duality to the table. The meal moves through the smaller plates and Japanese flavours that surround the restaurant’s better-known bowls before arriving at the ramen itself. It is here that transporting those noodles suddenly feels less like logistical fastidiousness and more like necessity. Texture is part of the restaurant’s handwriting; change it and, however faithful everything surrounding it might be, you have altered the sentence.

There is another journey embedded in the evening. Miura is Japanese, but his cooking career has taken him through Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago before Dubai, teaching him long ago what it means to cook his own cuisine somewhere else. More than a decade before arriving in Egypt, he was already encountering unfamiliar appetites, learning local ones and working out the considerably harder question of what should, and should not, bend with geography.

Egypt is simply his newest variable. This is Miura’s first visit, one that has already taken him from kebda in Old Cairo to the peculiar summer ecosystem of the North Coast. At Moga, however, the adaptation is less literal. Kinoya has not arrived bearing an Egyptian ramen or hurriedly grafting local ingredients onto Japanese food for the sake of novelty. The more compelling exchange is environmental: a Dubai ramen house, led for the week by a Japanese chef, transplanted intact enough to remain recognisable while the Mediterranean sits just beyond it.

That is, increasingly, the premise behind WHEN WE EAT at Ramla by MARAKEZ. Kinoya is the second of three restaurants being temporarily untethered from their permanent addresses and installed at Moga for a week. It follows Arca, Chef José Luis Hinostroza’s fire-led restaurant from Tulum, and will be followed from August 20th to 25th by Dubai’s Three Bros, from the family behind Michelin-starred Orfali Bros.

For Kinoya, which holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand and was ranked No. 2 on MENA’s 50 Best Restaurants 2026, the first night offers a rather persuasive answer to the question posed by its arrival. A restaurant can travel remarkably far without becoming something else. Sometimes it requires bringing the noodles with you.

Kinoya’s WHEN WE EAT at Ramla by MARAKEZ residency runs at Moga from August 11th to 15th. Bookings are available through Moga’s reservation desk.