Privacy Policy

This website is owned and operated by FIRAS RESTAURANT L.L.C (مطعم فراس ش.ذ.م.م), a restaurant based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, serving authentic Levantine cuisine. Our website address is www.ferasrestaurant.ae.

For any question about privacy or your personal information, you can email us at info@ferasrestaurant.ae, the mailbox designated for such requests, or call us on +971 54 584 4844.

For clarity, this policy separates two kinds of data that differ in how they reach us and what they are used for, each with its own section below. The distinction concerns their source and use; it does not mean that either kind necessarily falls outside the scope of personal data:

• Customer information: what you yourself choose to give us when you contact us — such as your name, phone number, and order details. This is information that identifies you as a customer.
• Technical data in server logs: data the website’s infrastructure records automatically whenever a page is requested, such as an IP address. It is not information you give us by choice, and depending on the context it may qualify as personal data — see its own section below.

This website is an informational site that presents the restaurant and its menu. It has no customer accounts, no sign-up or subscription forms, no data-collection forms, no shopping cart, and no online payment.

This section is not about customer information; it is about the technical data produced by running the website itself. As with any website, our hosting provider automatically records technical data in server logs whenever a page is requested. This typically includes:

• The IP address the request came from — an identifier of the network connection, which may qualify as personal data depending on the context.
• The browser, operating system, and device type.
• The page or file requested, and the date and time of the request.
• The response status code, so we can tell whether the request succeeded or produced an error.

We use this technical data for three purposes only: delivering the website's pages to your browser, protecting the site against misuse and unauthorized access attempts, and diagnosing technical faults when they occur.

In terms of actual use: we do not use server logs or IP addresses to identify a particular customer, to link them to a name, phone number, or order, to build visitor profiles, or for any marketing or advertising purpose.

This website does not use any analytics, advertising, or visitor-tracking cookies. The only cookie we set is a session cookie for the content management dashboard, which is created solely after an authorized member of restaurant staff signs in. It is not set for website visitors.

All fonts used on the site are served from our own domain, so your browser does not send any request to external font providers while you browse.

Unlike the technical data above, customer information reaches us only when you choose to contact us yourself — by phone, on WhatsApp, by email, or by visiting one of our branches. It may include:

• Your name, or the name you prefer we use.
• The phone number or email address you contacted us from.
• The details of your order, enquiry, or feedback, and the content of the conversation.
• A delivery address or location, if you choose to share it so we can complete a delivery order.

We never ask you for payment card numbers or card details through the website or through messages.

Orders and payments are not processed on this website. The site displays the menu, prices, and branch information; ordering itself happens by calling +971 54 584 4844, by sending a WhatsApp message to that same number, or by visiting one of our branches.

Our WhatsApp number is +971 54 584 4844 — the same number as our phone line. When you tap a WhatsApp ordering button on the site, your browser opens the WhatsApp application with a short starter message already filled in, which you can edit or delete before sending. No message is sent until you send it yourself.

The next section explains in detail how WhatsApp conversations are handled, because that differs materially from simply browsing the website.

We use what you share through these channels to receive, prepare, and deliver your order, to answer your enquiries, and to contact you about that order when necessary.

We use Meta’s WhatsApp Business Platform to receive and reply to your messages. The service is operated for us by MarkCognition as our technology provider and data processor, acting on behalf of and on the instructions of FIRAS RESTAURANT L.L.C.

Your replies may be automated. The assistant reads your message and generates a response automatically using artificial-intelligence technology. It can show the menu and prices, record an order, determine the appropriate branch for delivery, and answer common questions. The assistant can sometimes be wrong, and its replies are not a final confirmation of an order.

The information processed in these conversations is:

• Your WhatsApp phone number, used as the identifier for the conversation and to link it to your order.
• Your WhatsApp profile display name, where the platform makes it available.
• The text of your messages and your choices from buttons and lists.
• Voice notes, if you send them: these are converted to text automatically so the assistant can understand and reply.
• Photographs, if you send them: these are described automatically for the same purpose. Other file types (video, document, sticker) are recorded by type, filename and caption without their contents being analysed.
• Your location, if you share it, used to determine the nearest branch and the delivery range.
• Order details, a delivery address, and a contact card if you send one.

We do not ask you on WhatsApp for payment card details, identity or passport numbers, or any health information. Please do not send them.

Conversations are accessible to authorized restaurant staff who handle orders and customer service, and to MarkCognition’s technical team as far as necessary to operate, maintain and troubleshoot the service.

How long information is kept differs by type. There are four separate categories:

• Temporary conversation data: the state of an active conversation — such as the session identifier, recent messages and conversation context — is held in a temporary operational cache, and those entries expire automatically within 24 hours. This applies to those temporary operational entries only.
• Persistent customer and order records: order data created from the conversation (name, phone number, address and order details) is saved in the restaurant’s system as an order record and kept for as long as needed to manage orders and serve customers, subject to the rules in the “How long we keep information” section.
• Processing by external service providers: message content is sent to our artificial-intelligence technology provider to generate the reply, and the provider may retain a limited copy for a limited period under its own terms, including for abuse monitoring. Those periods are set by the provider’s terms, not by us.
• Legal exceptions: the law in the United Arab Emirates may require us to keep certain records for longer, such as accounting and tax records, or until a dispute or claim is resolved.

On artificial intelligence: we do not use your messages to train or improve artificial-intelligence models. Under the technology provider’s published terms, data sent through its API is not used by default to train its models unless the customer explicitly opts in. Our instruction to the technology providers acting on our behalf is that your messages must not be used for model training, and we do not authorise any such use.

If you would prefer to speak to a member of our team rather than the automated assistant, ask for that in the conversation, or call us on +971 54 584 4844, or email us at info@ferasrestaurant.ae. The phone and email are always available as an alternative to WhatsApp.

In most cases you start the conversation, and we reply within that same conversation. Our policy is that we do not start messaging you on WhatsApp unless you have given us your number and agreed to receive messages from us, and that any such message relates to your order or your service.

We do not send promotional WhatsApp messages except to customers who have expressly asked for them. You can ask us to stop at any time by replying “STOP” in the chat, by emailing us at info@ferasrestaurant.ae, or by blocking us from within the WhatsApp application; blocking us in the app stops our messages reaching you immediately.

Our commitment, once this service is operating, is that our team will action any request to stop and will cease sending messages. That is an operational commitment carried out manually; it does not rely on an automated suppression system.

We use customer information for the following purposes only:

• Receiving, preparing, and delivering food orders.
• Responding to enquiries, reservation requests, and feedback.
• Improving the quality of our service and menu based on customer feedback.
• Meeting obligations under the applicable laws and regulations of the United Arab Emirates.

Technical data in server logs, by contrast, is used only for the three technical purposes set out in the server logs section above.

We do not use your information to send you marketing messages unless you have expressly asked us to, and you can ask us to stop at any time.

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information with anyone for commercial or advertising purposes. Access to your information is limited to the following:

• Authorized restaurant staff, and only to the extent needed to do their work.
• Our website hosting provider (Railway), which runs the servers the site operates on and holds their technical logs. Its access concerns technical data, not customer information.
• Our image storage provider (Cloudinary), used only to store menu images uploaded by the restaurant team; no customer data is kept there.
• MarkCognition, the technology provider that operates our WhatsApp assistant service on our behalf.
• Our artificial-intelligence technology provider, which generates the assistant’s replies, converts voice notes to text and describes photographs (OpenAI).
• Meta’s WhatsApp Business Platform, through which messages necessarily pass.
• Our mapping provider (Google Maps), used to determine the nearest branch and delivery range when you share your location.
• Our push-notification provider (OneSignal), used to alert restaurant staff devices to new orders and bookings. These notifications do not contain your name, phone number or address — only the order or booking reference and the restaurant’s own number identifier. An order reference can still be linked back to you through our records, so we treat it as personal data rather than treating it as falling outside that scope.
• Competent government or judicial authorities, where required by law or to protect our legal rights.

Technical data may be processed or stored on servers located outside the United Arab Emirates, depending on the infrastructure locations of the service providers named above.

We take reasonable technical and organizational measures to protect the information in our care, including:

• Encrypting all traffic to the website using HTTPS/TLS.
• Storing management-account passwords in a hashed, non-reversible form rather than as plain text.
• Restricting access to the management dashboard behind an authenticated login and a cryptographically signed session.
• An internal log recording the changes dashboard users make to site content.

We keep customer information for as long as it is needed for the purpose it was collected for — such as completing your order or answering your enquiry — and delete it as soon as reasonably possible after that purpose ends, unless the applicable laws of the United Arab Emirates require us to keep a record for longer, such as accounting and tax record-keeping requirements.

Technical server logs are retained by our hosting provider according to its own configuration and operational cycles; we do not set those periods ourselves and do not control them. If you want to know what can be done about such logs, see our Data Deletion Instructions page.

Under the applicable laws of the United Arab Emirates, you have the following rights in relation to your personal information:

• Ask what information we hold about you and request access to it.
• Request correction of any information that is inaccurate or incomplete.
• Request deletion of your information, to the extent this does not conflict with our legal obligations.
• Withdraw your consent to receiving marketing messages at any time.
• Object to how we process your information, or raise a complaint about it.

To make any of these requests, email us at info@ferasrestaurant.ae. We may need to verify your identity before acting on a request, in order to protect your information from unauthorized access.

This includes requests concerning technical data. We do not exclude such data from a request in advance; we review each request against the criteria set out on our Data Deletion Instructions page: the identifying information available, technical feasibility, and our legal obligations.

This website is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If we become aware that we have received information relating to a child without a guardian's consent, we will delete it. A parent or guardian can email us at info@ferasrestaurant.ae to request this.

Our website contains links that take you to external platforms, such as WhatsApp for ordering and contact, Google Maps for branch locations, and our Instagram and Facebook pages. These platforms are independent of us, operate under their own privacy policies and terms, and we do not control what data they collect once you move to them. We encourage you to review their policies.

The links on this website to Instagram and Facebook are outbound links to our official pages on those platforms, and nothing more. The website does not read your account data on those platforms, does not offer sign-in through them, does not collect your messages or comments there, and does not use advertising trackers.

If you choose to message us through our pages on those platforms, the conversation happens on the platform itself under its own privacy policy, and we receive your message as any page would. If that changes in future and we begin processing data from those platforms more broadly, we will update this policy before doing so.

We may update this policy from time to time so that it continues to reflect our actual practices or to comply with regulatory changes. The date of the most recent update is shown at the top of this page, and we encourage you to review it occasionally.

For any privacy question or request, email us at info@ferasrestaurant.ae, call us on +971 54 584 4844, or see our Contact Us page for further contact methods and our branch locations.