Lovin Dublin launches new site in Dubai

Lovin Dublin, the food blog and restaurant review site founded by Irish entrepreneur Niall Harbison, is expanding to Dubai.

A new site – Lovin Dubai – will go live tomorrow, headed up by advertising executive Richard FitzGerald, who will lead a team of five on the ground in Dubai.

Lovin Group editor Aidan Coughlan said Dubai has a huge expat population and nearly 7,000 restaurants, making it the perfect place "for the company to do what it does best – help people separate the signal from the noise, and pick out the best bits of a city".

Graham Kinsella, general manager of the Lovin Group, said going east is unusual, but the Middle East region is in hyper growth when it comes to all things digital, and thus is the place to be. Kinsella said the company would continue to expand worldwide.

“When I first met Niall he said he wanted 10 cities by the end of 2015, so we’re delighted to get another step closer to this goal,” he said.

Dream

“Our ambitions with Lovin Group are to grow a global brand – the first place you check before you go out, not just for visitors but for those that live in the city.”

Dubai will be the third city that Harbison has launched his hugely popular site in. In July 2014, the company launched Lovin Berlin.

“While Dublin is where our hearts are, the dream has always been to make something much bigger and to replicate what we have achieved in Dublin across other cities,” Harbison said at the time of the Berlin site launch.

However, the Berlin site has not been updated in four months. “Berlin was a test. I always used it to measure how scalable the business is. With Berlin we sent team members short term. Our learning was you need to be on the ground here,” Kinsella said.

He said content is key on this and although Berlin has regular web traffic it needs daily content. “Once we have the right people there we will relaunch with gusto.”