From a single chair on Al Wasl Road to a multi-specialty group.

Yousef Al-Marri opened the original CityDental in 2014 — a single dental chair in a converted villa on Al Wasl Road. He had spent the previous five years in London, finishing an MSc in Prosthodontics at the UCL Eastman Dental Institute and then working in two Harley Street practices. Coming home to Dubai meant starting again from scratch.

The first four years were quiet. He built a base of long-term patients one referral at a time and reinvested every dirham of profit into the practice. By 2017 the single-chair villa had become a queue management problem — patients were waiting because Yousef was the only dentist. In 2018 the current Jumeirah premises opened across the road from the original villa, with two surgeries and the first general dentist on staff.

Layla Mansour joined as Director of Operations in late 2018, bringing the project-management discipline she had picked up at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi. She is the reason the practice runs to time. She is also the reason new patients receive a written treatment plan within 48 hours of their first visit — that single process change moved our case acceptance rate from around 60% to over 80%.

The Marina branch opened in October 2022 in response to two years of patients telling us they wanted a closer option. Faria Naqvi joined the same year to lead the paediatric programme — a children-only suite with softer lighting and a smaller chair. By the end of 2024 we had eight specialists across the two locations covering every dental specialty most patients will ever need.

Today the practice sees around 280 patients a week. Around 65% are insured, with the eight insurance panels we are in-network with covering most of the Dubai expatriate population. We deliberately do not run paid social media campaigns or offer "first-visit free" promotions. Most new patients come through word of mouth or through their insurer’s recommended-provider list.

Both branches are licensed by the Dubai Health Authority — Jumeirah under PROF-CL-1011243, Marina under PROF-CL-1041896. Every clinician on this site holds an active DHA professional licence (numbers shown on each clinician’s page). We are independent and family-owned.