Interiors · Dubai
Reading time: 6 minRialto does not serve generic Italian glamour. It serves one specific place, the Ligurian Riviera, designed by AvroKO with a nod to the great Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa, and it does so inside a building shaped like a superyacht. Dining here is a small, complete fantasy: a mid-century holiday on the Italian coast, aboard a boat that never leaves Dubai.
The most important fact about Rialto is one the restaurant’s own quiet arrival almost hides: it was designed by AvroKO, one of the most admired hospitality design studios in the world.
That matters, because it explains why Rialto is more than another handsome hotel restaurant. Set inside Jumeirah Marsa Al Arab, the superyacht-shaped resort that opened on the Dubai coast in 2025, Rialto is an Italian restaurant with an unusually precise idea of which Italy it wants to evoke. Not a vague, postcard Italy, but the sun-drenched Ligurian Riviera of the mid-twentieth century, the golden age of Italian glamour, filtered through the eye of AvroKO’s Bangkok studio. And the setting completes the illusion, because to reach it you step aboard a building designed to look like a superyacht. The concept and the container agree with each other perfectly. You are dining on the Riviera, on a boat, in 1962, without leaving the emirate.
AvroKO, and the ghost of Carlo Scarpa
Start with the studio, because a name like AvroKO changes what you should expect.
Founded in New York and now working globally, AvroKO built its reputation on narrative-driven design, the idea that a great restaurant is not decorated but authored, built around a story you can feel in every detail. For Rialto, that story is specific and sophisticated, and it reaches past the obvious references to something far more interesting: the work of Carlo Scarpa, the revered Venetian architect and master of the exquisite detail.
You can read Scarpa in the bones of the room. AvroKO composes the space through stepped ceilings, false façades and geometric trompe l’oeil illusions drawn from the old buildings of the Ligurian coast, the visual games and layered planes that Scarpa made his life’s work. This is a real architectural intelligence at play, not a set-dresser’s shortcut. Where a lesser design would hang a few Italian film stills and call it cinematic, Rialto builds its drama into the architecture itself, through depth, framing and illusion. The name helps too. Rialto is the ancient heart of Venice, Scarpa’s own city, so even the word on the door points home.
The restaurant that suits its ship
Here is where Rialto becomes cleverer than it first appears, and where it connects to the building around it.
Jumeirah Marsa Al Arab, designed by Shaun Killa, is shaped like a superyacht gliding across the water, and its interiors lean deliberately on a 1960s aesthetic, the era of the ocean liner and the Riviera cruise, when a boat was the most glamorous place a person could be. Rialto takes that theme and makes it dinner. A mid-century Italian Riviera restaurant is precisely the right thing to put inside a 1960s superyacht, because they are the same daydream told twice. The building imagines the golden age of sailing the Mediterranean in style. The restaurant imagines where you would eat when the yacht dropped anchor off Portofino. Guest and vessel and menu all belong to one continuous fantasy, which is a rare and satisfying kind of coherence in a hotel of many separate venues.
This is why Rialto rewards being read alongside its host building rather than in isolation. The restaurant is not a tenant of the yacht. It is part of the voyage.
Materials, light and the choreography of arrival
Within that concept, AvroKO handles the atmosphere with real control.
Arrival is deliberately staged. Guests move from the hotel’s expansive public spaces into something more intimate and dim, where the lighting drops, the textures deepen and the mood shifts, the hospitality equivalent of house lights going down before a performance. Inside, the palette is warm and enveloping, all deep ambers, burnished bronzes and muted jewel tones, with rich marbles, dark timbers and polished metals that feel indulgent without tipping into excess. Reflective finishes catch the low light and keep the room subtly in motion as the evening deepens.
Crucially, the lighting is treated as an instrument rather than a utility. Low ambient light sets the intimacy, while accents pick out the bar, the artwork and the shelving, so the room flatters both the food and the faces around the table. Banquettes gather people into sociable clusters, while quieter tables offer retreat, and open sightlines let you feel part of the scene without being exposed to it. It is theatrical, but it knows when to whisper.
The food is a performance too
The design sets the stage, and Chef Roberto Rispoli fills it, which the original coverage barely mentions.
Rispoli brings his Pompeian roots and two decades of Mediterranean cooking to a menu that is traditional at heart and elevated in execution. And AvroKO has built the theatre of that cooking directly into the plan. There is a wine room with a bespoke trolley service, a crudo bar where raw seafood is prepared in front of you, and an experience kitchen where chefs perform for private dining groups. These are not incidental features. They are the restaurant making good on its central promise, that dining is a social ritual and a performance, by letting you watch the craft happen. Food and design are running the same play.
Frequently asked questions
Where is Rialto? Inside Jumeirah Marsa Al Arab, the superyacht-shaped resort on the Dubai coast that opened in 2025. Rialto is one of its signature restaurants, with an adjoining Rialto Bar.
Who designed it? The globally acclaimed hospitality design firm AvroKO, through its Bangkok studio, drawing on the golden age of Italian design and the architecture of Carlo Scarpa.
What is the concept? The mid-century Ligurian Riviera, Italy’s Italian coast in its most glamorous era, expressed through stepped ceilings, false façades and trompe l’oeil illusions inspired by old Ligurian buildings.
Who is the chef? Executive Chef Roberto Rispoli, whose menu reflects his Pompeian roots and twenty years of Mediterranean cooking.
What makes it distinctive? Its precise sense of place and its fit with its host building. A Riviera restaurant set inside a superyacht-shaped hotel, so the design and the setting tell one continuous story. Its sibling restaurant, Iliana, reinterprets the same yacht-deck language through a Greek lens just a few steps away.
Final thoughts
Dubai is full of Italian restaurants, and most of them settle for a general idea of Italy. Rialto is better than that, and the reason is precision. AvroKO did not design “an Italian restaurant.” It designed a specific coast, in a specific decade, with a specific architect in mind, and then had the good fortune, or good sense, to set it inside a building that was already dreaming the same dream.
The result lingers because everything agrees. The superyacht outside, the Ligurian Riviera inside, Carlo Scarpa in the ceilings, a Pompeian chef at the pass, and a room lit like the last golden hour of a Mediterranean afternoon. It is a restaurant that knows exactly where it is pretending to be, and takes you there completely. In a city that often mistakes more for better, that clarity of vision is the real luxury.
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