United Hospitality Management (UHM) has opened its fourth Middle East location of Mimo Café, the Portuguese coffee-and-pastry concept, at Mövenpick Hotel Jumeirah Lakes Towers in Dubai. Announced on 4 August 2026 with the site opening during the same month, the launch continues a steady regional rollout of a European café brand deployed inside hotel real estate rather than on the high street.
Mimo Café is built on a deliberately narrow proposition: coffee and pastry, executed properly. The pastel de nata sits at the centre of the menu, baked fresh through the day and served warm in traditional and flavoured variations, supported by other staples of Portuguese pastry.
At Mövenpick Hotel Jumeirah Lakes Towers, the café occupies part of the hotel lobby lounge and café area. That placement is the commercial point. The brand is not taking standalone retail leases at Dubai high-street rents; it is being installed into existing hospitality footprints where the landlord, the operator and the food and beverage brand are commercially aligned.
Mimo is designed to adapt to different hotel environments while keeping its core identifiers consistent across locations, from tile work inspired by traditional Portuguese azulejos to pastry presentation and floral detailing. That combination of a flexible footprint and fixed brand signatures is what allows a concept to be replicated across markets without diluting it.
United Hospitality Management is driving the regional expansion. Dominic Arel, VP Operations Middle East at UHM, framed the brand proposition around restraint:
Quality, simplicity and doing a small number of things properly.
He added that as the brand grows across the region, every new opening stays true to that idea, and described the JLT community as a natural fit for the concept. Mimo Café already has an established presence across the Middle East and Portugal.
The interesting part of this deal is not the café. It is the channel.
Placing a branded F&B concept inside a hotel lobby solves several problems that make standalone café franchising difficult in the Gulf. Rent sits inside an existing hospitality agreement rather than being negotiated at prime retail rates. Footfall is captive and predictable. Staffing, procurement, security and facilities management can be shared with the hotel. Fit-out capital is materially lower than a shell-and-core retail unit. The result is a lower break-even per site and a faster path to a second, third and fourth location.
The trade-off is a ceiling. Captive footfall is also finite footfall, and a lobby café rarely reaches the volumes of a strong high-street site. Investors evaluating this model should be underwriting a portfolio of modest, reliable units rather than a small number of high-turnover flagships.
This channel is becoming a recognised route into the region for international brands that are not yet ready to commit to standalone market entry across the Gulf. It sits alongside the more conventional route of a specialty coffee brand taking its own space, as seen when Blue Tokai opened its first GCC café in Dubai. Both routes are live; they simply carry different capital profiles.
For family offices and multi-unit operators in Asia Pacific and MENA, the practical takeaway is that hospitality groups are now credible counterparties for F&B brand rights, not merely landlords. An operator running hotels already controls the sites, the licences and the labour. Brands weighing Gulf expansion under the region’s evolving franchise frameworks should test whether a hospitality management partner delivers a faster and cheaper first ten units than a traditional retail-led master franchisee. Similar logic is reshaping how service brands scale inside existing real estate elsewhere in Asia Pacific.
