INTENDED: Abu Dhabi’s New Destination for Conscious Indulgence

What if a café could offer more than something good to eat? What if the experience could also encourage you to pause, choose more consciously and reconnect with the simple pleasure of enjoying what is in front of you?

That is the thinking behind INTENDED, a homegrown Abu Dhabi café founded by Emirati entrepreneur Afra Al Darmaki, where wellness is not treated as a list of restrictions, but as a more thoughtful approach to everyday choices.

The concept began in December 2025 as a cloud kitchen before evolving into an intimate physical café on Al Jiwa-a Street in Al Nahyan. While the setting may have changed, its founding philosophy has remained the same: taste first, with no compromise.

“I never wanted INTENDED to become just another café, or for people to choose us simply because something is considered healthy. Taste always comes first. The intention is to create something you genuinely want to eat or drink, while also making you feel good afterwards,” says Afra Al Darmaki.

It is an increasingly relevant idea. As wellness becomes woven into everything from what we eat to how we spend our free time, the language around food can sometimes become overly focused on what we should eliminate, avoid or restrict. INTENDED takes a different approach, asking whether a more conscious way of eating can still be indulgent, comforting and genuinely enjoyable.

The answer, in this case, comes in the form of brownies, banana bread, chocolate chip cookies, speciality coffee and matcha. The menu is entirely gluten-free and refined sugar-free, with no artificial flavours or preservatives, but the intention is not to make those credentials the main event. Instead, they sit quietly behind the experience.

The ingredients themselves are carefully considered, too. Dates used in INTENDED's signature Date Walnut Cookie, for example, are sourced from Afra's family farms in Al Ain, bringing a distinctly personal connection to an ingredient deeply rooted in the UAE's food culture.

Then there are the drinks, designed to make the everyday coffee ritual feel a little more considered. Alongside speciality coffee and matcha is the Coconut Cloud Espresso, one of the café's distinctive offerings. It is a reminder that mindful choices do not necessarily have to mean sacrificing pleasure or turning every meal into a nutritional calculation.

That is where INTENDED's approach to wellness feels most interesting. The name itself comes from Afra's own journey of self-discovery and reflects the idea of moving through life with greater awareness rather than simply operating on autopilot. It is a philosophy that extends beyond the menu and into the way the café hopes people experience the space.

In that sense, INTENDED is less interested in telling people how to live and more interested in creating moments that make them want to slow down.

Although the café is rooted in Abu Dhabi, the concept has already extended beyond its neighbourhood, with delivery available to Dubai, and for Afra, the long-term vision goes considerably further than F&B.

She sees INTENDED eventually evolving into a broader platform centred around wellness, connection and intentional living, with community experiences and, in time, retreats designed to encourage people to slow down, reconnect and spend more time with themselves and one another.

It is an ambitious evolution for a concept that only began as a cloud kitchen less than a year ago, but that’s precisely what makes INTENDED interesting: the café is not being built around a fixed idea of what wellness should look like. Instead, it is exploring what happens when food, pleasure and wellbeing can exist in the same space.