1 week ago
5
November 27, 2025 — 5:00am
Even in Sweden, a nation of rampant overachievers, Bjorn Frantzen stands out.
This country of only 10 million people has given us Alfred Nobel and Bjorn Borg, ABBA and Greta Thunberg, Ingmar Bergman and basically everyone with the surname Skarsgard.
And, perhaps above all, it has given us Frantzen, a former football star with Stockholm club AIK who is now the only chef in the world with three restaurants – in Sweden, the UAE and Singapore – that each boast three Michelin stars. It’s as if Bjorn Borg went on to front ABBA.
Frantzen, then, is a bona fide superstar; most chefs will never win three Michelin stars in total. This former sporting prodigy has done it three times, across three countries, concurrently. He’s also rumoured to be opening a restaurant in Sydney’s Crown Towers next year, so the Swede could soon be the world’s only chef with nine Michelin stars and three Good Food hats.
You expect a hint of awe, in that case, on arrival at FZN, Frantzen’s three-star eatery in Dubai. His greatness will surely be made obvious to you in this city where greatness and glamour abound. And that might even be reasonable.
FZN is set within the opulent confines of Atlantis, The Palm, an ultra-luxury resort where everything is big, bold and impressive. The foyer features a 10-metre-tall sculpture made of 3000 pieces of hand-blown glass. And there’s an aquarium holding more than 65,000 marine creatures.
And across its two adjacent properties, The Palm and The Royal, Atlantis’ restaurants boast six Michelin stars in total, an offering of high-end dining matched only by the George V hotel in Paris.
There’s a Heston Blumenthal restaurant at Atlantis. Two editions of Nobu. A couple of Gordon Ramsay joints. There’s Studio Frantzen, Bjorn’s more casual outlet, an accessible entry into this Swede’s culinary world. And then there’s FZN, which is marked not by large signage but by a single, nondescript door with those three letters printed discreetly across it.
You ring a doorbell to gain access. Someone will answer and usher you into a lift, which goes up two floors and opens to a long hallway, which in turns opens to what looks like a Swedish lounge room. And you have arrived at FZN.
What does a Swedish restaurant look like in Dubai? How do you impart a sense of place when the place you’re from is so far away, and when your restaurant has no local ingredients, no local wines and, indeed, no local staff?
This could be a problem; or an opportunity. With no distinct location to build his restaurant around, Frantzen is free to experiment here, to push boundaries, embrace global flavours and to have some fun.
Japanese ingredients will appear at FZN on this night. They will play alongside Scandinavian ideas and French techniques. The wine pairing will wander from Germany to Spain to Australia. There will be a playlist of songs, curated by DJ Frantzen, that takes in everything from The Traveling Wilburys to The Darkness and Johnny Cash.
That first room looks like a lounge room because it’s supposed to. Rather than be awed by Frantzen’s genius, diners are encouraged to feel like a guest in his home, where you’re welcomed as you would be in the Frantzen household: with drinks and snacks.
And then there’s another hallway and another elevator, more sliding doors and suddenly you’re in the kitchen, a gleaming place of stainless steel and white-coated chefs who whisk and dip and slice and steam with spotless efficiency.
Take a seat on its perimeter at a table built of Nordic wood. Get used to the sight of waiters, who will always be there filling wine glasses, delivering plates, making sure every little thing is taken care of.
This meal costs $835 a person. Before drinks. And it will be sublime.
It seems odd to remember that just a few hours ago I was lying by a pool being slowly roasted, like the pigeon that will soon appear on my plate at FZN, in the Arabian sun.
Atlantis is a gargantuan hotel that sits at the end of The Palm, itself an incredible feat of engineering, a set of artificial islands fanning out into the Persian Gulf.
Nobu By The Beach is one of two outlets of this cult Japanese-American restaurant chain at Atlantis, a place where expensive-looking tourists lie in sun loungers sipping expensive-looking cocktails, or seek relief in the cool waters of the pool. The menu leans towards the raw and refreshing: bluefin tuna sashimi, plus a tequila-based cocktail, is what’s needed.
There’s a feeling at Atlantis that if eating well is your key desire, you need never leave the property. You could spend three days here working your way through the restaurants – the Las Vegas-style buffets, the celebrity-chef fine diners, the lux steakhouses, the Arabian lounges, the beach clubs, the Tex-Mex joints, the cuisines of everywhere from Peru to Greece – and be satisfied.
My first meal is at Seafire, a steakhouse with eye-watering prices, particularly if you have a hunger for Japanese wagyu, but phenomenal attention to detail. I have breakfast the next day at Gastronomy, a buffet where you can have dim sum for your first course, hummus and Arabic bread second, a glass of champagne and a croissant third, and then find room for eggs Benedict.
Dinner by Heston Blumenthal is a highlight. This is the restaurant that graced the Australian dining scene for four years before it closed in, it has to be said, ignominious circumstances – with a bill of unpaid wages – in early 2020. Three years later Dinner popped up amid the glam of Atlantis, The Royal, where its odes to historic British gastronomy fit seamlessly into the spread of offerings.
There’s an Australian at the helm here: Chris Malone was born in Perth, learnt his trade in New York and now oversees Dinner by Heston Blumenthal. He works with the bespectacled Englishman on developing a menu that pays homage to the past while utilising modern techniques to bring it into the future.
“Everyone loves the show, the smoke and the drama,” Malone tells me before our dinner, referring to Blumenthal’s use of molecular gastronomy. “I think liquid nitrogen is the coolest thing ever.”
Then he smiles. “Dry ice, though, I’m sick of.”
There’s one superstar here, a menu item that was once one of the world’s most Instagrammed dishes and which features in almost every promotional photo of Dinner: “Meat Fruit”, a duck-liver pate covered in mandarin jelly, snap frozen at minus 40 degrees and made to look exactly like a mandarin.
It’s spectacular, too – so tasty, so amazing, that it does tend to overshadow other ideas that deserve as much attention. Scallops with white chocolate is a clever, balanced, delicious dish. Lamington Cake is a nod to Malone’s own heritage. A rose sparkling wine from England is disappointingly perfect (we have to be nice about British wine now?).
Finally, I find myself at FZN, the pinnacle of the dining options across Atlantis’ twin properties.
The dishes here feel like dreamscapes of fine ingredients: blue lobster with koshihikari rice and matsutake emulsion; turbot with tahini and caviar; French toast with foie gras, charcuterie and caramelised orange. The paired wines include legends like Joh Jos Prum, Leeuwin Estate and Barbeito.
“What was your favourite?” asks Australian sommelier Kyle Barton as I drain the last glass. I point to the riesling, a stunning wine, and Barton pours another full glass for me to carry back to the lounge room for petit fours.
It’s a fitting tribute to note that you forget, as you sit at FZN drinking fine wine and dining on turbot and pigeon and foie gras, just how much skill this takes, how much talent and dedication is required to run just one three-star restaurant. And that the chef here is running three.
THE DETAILS
Stay
Atlantis, The Palm is a resort in Palm Jumeirah, about a half-hour drive from Dubai Airport; guests also have access to facilities at Atlantis, The Royal next door (and Aquaventure World water park in between). From $605 a night. See atlantis.com/atlantis-the-palm
Dine
Atlantis has more than 30 restaurants spread across The Palm and The Royal. Tasting menus at FZN cost AED2000 ($835) a person, with drinks extra. A 50 per cent deposit is required upon booking. For reservations and more information, see restaurantfzn.com. At Studio Frantzen entrees start from AED95 ($40), mains from AED155 ($65). See studiofrantzendubai.com
The writer was a guest of Atlantis Dubai.
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