Abraj Al Bait · Clock Tower Mall · Makkah
Every café and restaurant inside the Clock Tower mall — where it is, plus two scores out of 100, using Yasmina's nutrition rules. For the health score, high is better. For the Char & Fry score, lower is lighter.
Health score asks: “Is this good fuel for today?”
It looks at fat, sugar, salt and freshness — and whether the menu gives you real choices.
Char & Fry score asks: “How heavy is this if we eat it all the time?”
It looks at how much of the menu is charred, deep-fried or processed.
Why both? A place can be fine once and heavy as a habit — or the reverse. The two numbers together tell the whole story.
The highest health scores in the whole building. Nothing in the mall scores above 46 — so these are the champions. The big circle is health; the smaller circle beside it is Char & Fry, where lower is lighter.
Salads, dips (mezze) and grilled food. The most real-food menu in the whole mall — the name means "olive and fig".
Chicken grilled over charcoal, served with rice. Grilled beats fried, every time.
Plain drinks are fine — but a Frappuccino is a dessert in a cup: 54 grams of sugar in one Grande.
The Saudi smash-burger place. Burgers are smashed on the grill when you order — not deep-fried.
Big milky drinks carry a lot of hidden sugar — 18 grams in a large latte before any syrup is added.
A real sit-down Turkish restaurant — grills and proper dishes — with a very tempting dessert and ice-cream counter.
Where everything is. Each scored name has two numbers: H is health (higher is better) and F is Char & Fry (lower is lighter). "No score" means nobody publishes enough information to score it honestly.
A whole food court — plus a supermarket, where real food lives.
The main food court. Pizza Hut's listings disagree about whether it is open — check before you queue.
That's it — two food places among about 120 shops. If this floor feels empty of food, that's why.
Tim Hortons' Iced Capp is pre-sweetened — 37 grams of sugar. Plain coffee or tea is the honest route.
The best food stop in the building. Fruit, yogurt, salads and sandwiches — with labels you can actually read.
These are in the mall, but no listing says which floor — so we don't guess. Most of them belong to the P3 / P4 food courts.
Yummy? Yes. Food? Not really. These are once-in-a-while treats — never the plan for a meal. The second circle is Char & Fry: notice that Cinnabon and Baskin Robbins score low there because sugar — not charring or frying — is their main problem.
One cinnamon roll is about 880 calories and 60 grams of sugar — the biggest sugar hit in the mall.
Ice cream is a treat, not a snack. The small scoop is the smart move — it's still ice cream.
Deep-fried doughnuts under a sugar glaze. One is a treat. A box is a problem.
Everything is fried, and the garlic sauce is basically a cup of oil that rides along with every meal. If you go: two pieces max, and fries OR bun — not both.
Giant pizza slices. One pepperoni slice can carry more salt than half your whole day.
Wherever you end up eating, these work.
Every score above comes from the research in the report — the evidence, the sources, and the bits nobody could verify.
Abraj Al Bait · The Clock Towers Shopping Center · Makkah
Scope is strict: only businesses inside the Clock Tower commercial center — nothing on the surrounding streets, nothing in the tower hotels. The inventory is built on the mall's own official directory (tctshoppingcenter.com), cross-checked against chain locators and place listings. Each score is a nutrition judgment in Yasmina's nutritherapy frame, and each one is flagged by what it rests on: the chain's own published figures, or a menu judgment where the chain publishes nothing at all. Beside each health score now sits a cancer-risk exposure score — also 0–100, but in the opposite direction: higher means more of the menu is built from IARC-classified hazards. A second pass adds a floor-by-floor map (section 02), drawn only from placements a location-specific source actually evidences.
The health score runs 0–100 on processing level, deep-fry load of the menu, sodium, the sugar ecosystem (drinks and desserts as the default), ingredient quality, transparency, and escape routes — whether a careful eater can build a decent meal there at all. The cancer-risk score beside it also runs 0–100, but higher means more exposure. Tap any row for the evidence and reasoning behind both numbers.
Published figures
The score rests on the chain's own published nutrition data — an official calculator, nutrition guide, brochure, or regulated product label. Caveat that applies to every one of them: no Saudi-specific table was found for any chain; the figures are the chain's global / US / UK editions, except that McDonald's operates a Saudi calculator.
Menu judgment
The chain publishes no nutrition data at all, so the score is a judgment from the menu's character — what it sells, how it is cooked, what the defaults are. Publishing nothing is itself one of the things the score penalises. KFC is a hybrid: no Saudi table exists, but third-party figures from its US menu anchor the judgment.
Cancer-risk exposure — higher = more
Is a restaurant “carcinogenic”? Not as a yes/no label. This second score is an exposure index, not a measurement and not a claim that eating somewhere causes cancer. It estimates how much of a menu is built from hazards classified by the IARC (WHO): processed meat is Group 1; red meat and acrylamide — formed when starchy foods are fried or baked at high temperature — are Group 2A; and heterocyclic amines and PAHs formed in flame-grilled or charred meat include Group 2A/2B compounds. Coffee itself is Group 3, “not classifiable”. Every cancer-risk score here is a menu-composition judgment, never published chain data. Dose and frequency are what matter: an occasional meal is not a diagnosis, and an IARC group describes the strength of evidence for a hazard, not the size of risk from one serving.
| Outlet | Health /100 | Cancer-risk /100higher = more exposure | The short verdict |
|---|
The headline finding: nothing inside the mall scores above 46. The best options are a Levantine restaurant and a grilled-chicken specialist — both unscored by any published data, because neither publishes any. The chains with the best paperwork (Starbucks, McDonald's) sit mid-table: transparency helps, but it cannot outrun the menu itself. The cancer-risk index does not simply mirror the health score: Burger King has the highest exposure (68), while Cinnabon has the lowest (15) — sugar is Cinnabon's problem, not classified carcinogen exposure.
A second research pass (25 October 2026) went floor by floor through chain locators, place data, review-site addresses and Arabic sources. A tenant is drawn on a floor below only where a location-specific source puts it there. Everything else sits in the "floor not evidenced" box at the bottom — in the mall, but never assigned to a guessed floor. On each scored chip, the first number is the health score and the C number beside it is cancer-risk exposure — higher means more exposure.
The official directory is a logo wall — no floors, no unit numbers, no plan — and the complex's own site publishes no floor plan at all. The mall's About page does embed four graphics named "About-us-Floor-Map"; all four were opened and inspected for this update (25 October 2026). The large one (413×1024) is an unlabelled isometric illustration of stacked shopping floors — shoppers and clothing rails, no floor names, no tenant names, nothing marking food. The other three are small decorative geometric motifs (~210px across), not maps. No licence is stated for any of them, so they could not serve as a reusable tenant map in any case.
OpenStreetMap carries point locations only, no floor-plan polygons, and no indoor-mapping provider covers this mall in any source found. The closest visual guide that exists is a December 2024 walking-tour video with per-floor timestamps — linked under Sources, not reusable. So the map below is drawn from the verified placements themselves.
It is not empty of food — but it nearly is. Exactly two food businesses are evidenced on the 2nd floor: Starbucks (the chain's own Saudi locator: "Abraj Al Bait – 2nd Floor", open 24 hours) and MADO, the Turkish restaurant and café (TripAdvisor address "2nd Floor, Abraj Al Bait", with visitor reviews from August 2025 to January 2026). There is no food court and no restaurant row up there — everything else evidenced on the floor is retail: clothing and abayas, perfumes and oud, watches, H&M, GUESS. Two food units among roughly 120 shops is why the floor reads as empty. All mass dining is one and two floors up, on P3 and P4.
Above the mall podium — outside this inventory: P9 men's prayer hall · P10 women's prayer hall · P11 and up: hotel floors and hotel restaurants
Al Baik's own place data gives "Food Court, 4th floor" (9am–2am); a single February 2025 blog loosely names it among P3-court choices — judged an error against the chain's own address. Spice Bowl is the most recently evidenced outlet in the mall: its own post of 7 October 2026 places it on P4, "opposite Al Abraj Hyper Market". The hypermarket itself (9,000 sqm, open 24/7 per its own plan) is food retail, not a restaurant — and a 2017 review mentions an Abraj supermarket on P3 instead; see Conflicts.
Burger King's P3 placement comes from a visitor review carried by Wanderlog ("located on P3 of the Abraj Al Bait"); Costa's and Krispy Kreme's from their own place data ("3rd floor" / "Diamond Tower, 3rd floor"). Coffee Counter gives its own address as "Level P3"; Taste Palace's own place data reads "Food Court 3rd floor". Pizza Hut's floor is agreed by every listing (unit Shop P-03-5-08) — only its open/closed status conflicts. "Coffee IceCream – 3rd Floor" is an OpenStreetMap place name next to Burger King; nothing more is known about it.
The complete food offer on this floor. Starbucks: the chain's own Saudi locator page is titled "Abraj Al Bait – 2nd Floor" (open 24 hours), and the GUESS store locator independently reads "Second Floor, front of Starbucks". MADO: TripAdvisor address "2nd Floor, Abraj Al Bait", reviewed August 2025 to January 2026, and it is on the official directory. Everything else evidenced on this floor is retail — no food-court seating, no fast-food frontage, no restaurant signage row.
Tim Hortons from the chain's own place data ("1st floor, Gate 9601"); Cafe Moment from its own place data ("first floor, Clock Towers", active). Simit Sarayi's 1st-floor address is confirmed by its TripAdvisor listing, but the latest review seen is from 2016 — whether it still operates is not evidenced.
Bin Dawood is confirmed on the ground floor by visitor reviews and branch lists, and is also on the official directory — the complex's real-food escape hatch (see section 03). Häagen-Dazs appears once, in an old TripAdvisor review of ground-floor takeaways; no current listing was found — treat it as historical, not a tenant to count on.
No named food outlet is evidenced on either basement level. A place listing exists for an "Abraj Al Baith Basement Food Court", but it names no stalls. The fullest floor list found (2015) gives −2 as barbers, accessories, parking and the taxi exit, and −1 as parking; other reviews describe the basement levels as a souk of small, cheap shops.
These are in the mall — on the official directory or in listings — but no location-specific source fixes their floor, so the map does not guess one. Most are food-court tenants by their listings, so they belong to the P3/P4 court system; which court is not evidenced. Chicking's unit code (P-G1-6-03…) hints at a podium-ground unit, but that reading is not evidenced either. McDonald's is directory-only: no live in-mall listing exists — see Conflicts.
Floor labels: sources use the podium labels P3/P4 and plain floor numbers interchangeably — P3 is the 3rd floor, P4 the 4th. The mall's own About page describes the lowest two stories as The Clock Souq and the next five as The Clock Towers Shopping Center. Scores shown are the section 01 scores; "not scored" means no usable nutrition evidence exists for that outlet.
Two lists, kept separate because they carry different weight. The first is the mall's own official directory — authoritative for the tenants it names, but partial: it shows roughly 88 tenant logos against the 625 retail outlets the complex's official site claims, its assets date from 2023, and it gives no floor or unit for anyone. The second list is outlets that location-specific listings place inside the mall but the directory omits. Absence from the directory is not proof of absence from the mall.
| Business | Category | Cross-check / floor evidence | Health · Cancer-risk |
|---|
| Business | Category | Location per listing · source | Health · Cancer-risk |
|---|
Checked and not found inside the mall on either the official directory or in-mall listings: Herfy (nearest branches at Makkah Mall and Al Hijaz Mall), Kudu (its listing is for Makkah Tower, a different building), Subway, Domino's, Dunkin', and Barn's Coffee.
The official directory lists Bin Dawood, the hypermarket — confirmed on the ground floor by reviews and branch lists. A second supermarket, the Abraj Hypermarket, is confirmed on P4 (9,000 sqm, open 24/7 per its own plan; Spice Bowl's October 2026 post places itself opposite it). A 2017 review also mentions an Abraj supermarket on P3 — two units or a relocation, unresolved. Both are food retail, not restaurants, so neither carries a score — but they are the places inside the complex where the default is fresh food: fruit, yogurt, salads and packaged goods with labels you can actually read. On a nutritherapy view, they beat every scored outlet in the building.
What the chains themselves publish, flagship item first. Where two published reproductions disagree, both are shown — the disagreement is part of the evidence. Chains that publish nothing are listed after the table; for them, no figure is quoted as fact.
| Chain | Flagship item (published) | kcal | Fat | Sat fat | Sodium | Sugar | Protein | Escape route |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| McDonald's | Big Mac (US edition) | 590 | 34g | 11g | 1,050mg | 9g | 25g | Other reproductions of McDonald's data give 550–570 kcal / ~1,010mg sodium — version variance. No verified light-item figure extracted. |
| Burger King | Whopper, no cheese | 670 | 40g | 15g | 980mg | 9g | 37g | Conflict: another reproduction of BK data gives 710 kcal / sodium 1,250mg; USDA (with cheese) 790 kcal / 1,431mg. Whopper Jr. is the smaller route; verified figure not extracted. |
| Starbucks | Grande Caramel Frappuccino | 380 | 16g | 10g | 350mg | 54g | 5g | Brewed coffee, Grande — on Starbucks' own site: 5 kcal, sugar 0g, sodium 10mg. Ingredients listed as "Brewed Coffee, Water". Another Frappuccino reproduction gives 67g sugar with whole milk. |
| Costa Coffee | Large Latte, whole milk, in-store (UK data) | 280 | 15g | 10g | 0mg* | 18g | 14g | Plain black coffee / Americano is the escape route; a Costa-specific figure was not extracted, so no number is quoted. *Sodium as listed in the UK in-store data. |
| Pizza Hut | Medium Pan slice, cheese only (chain brochure) | 240 | 11g | 4.5g | 530mg | n/f | 11g | Veggie Lover's Pan slice: 230 kcal, sodium 500mg; Thin 'N Crispy Veggie: 180 kcal. Sugar column not extractable from the brochure — shown as not found, not guessed. |
| Tim Hortons | Iced Cappuccino (cream), 12oz (chain's US guide) | 310 | 16g | 10g | ~40mg† | 37g | 3g | Coffee (1 cream, 1 sugar), 10oz: 70 kcal, sugars 9g. †Sodium shown as 40mg in a partially garbled table — treat with caution; a third-party summary gives 330 kcal / 42g sugar / 105mg sodium. No GCC/Saudi table found. |
| Krispy Kreme | Original Glazed doughnut, 49g (regulated label) | 190 | 11g | 5g | 85mg | 10g | 3g | No light item exists on the menu. The label itself lists palm oil, soybean oil and hydrogenated soybean oil in the dough. One label reproduction gives sodium 100mg. |
| LAMMA | Lava Chicken items — calories only, chain's own ordering site | 479–551 | — | — | — | — | — | Three Lava Chicken variants listed at 551, 495 and 479 kcal. Fat, sodium, sugar and protein are not published — hence the dashes, not estimates. |
These figures come from third-party databases, mostly built on US menus. They are labelled estimates wherever they appear on this page, and they are why these scores carry the "menu judgment" flag.
Al Tazaj, Chicking, MADO, I'M HUNGRY, Crispy Rolls, Mama Buns, Zeytoun w Teen, Lahzet Kaif and the directory's generic entries publish no nutrition table, and no credible third-party figures were found. One marketing blog claims a Chicking burger at 680–750 kcal — it is not the chain and is not used anywhere on this page.
Where the sources disagree, the page says so rather than picking a winner quietly.
The official directory lists "Mcdo" as a tenant. But no operating in-mall map listing could be found: the nearest McDonald's listings sit 2.5–3.0 miles away, and one Al Masjid Al Haram Road listing is marked permanently closed.
The directory's assets date from 2023, so the entry may be dated. Status: officially listed; current operation not independently verified. It is scored because the chain publishes full data — read the score as "if you eat at McDonald's", not as proof of an open branch in the mall.
Two official sources place it inside: the mall directory lists "Al beik", and the chain's own branch listing reads "Clock Tower Makkah — Food Court, 4th floor", active, 9am–2am.
Against that, one food guide (~2023) states there is no Al Baik in the tower and calls the map pin a delivery-only intermediary. On the weight of the official evidence it is counted as in-mall, with the dispute recorded here. Its floor is separately settled: the chain's own place data gives the 4th-floor food court; one February 2025 blog loosely associates Al Baik with the P3 court, judged an error against the chain's own address.
Bin Dawood is confirmed on the ground floor (visitor reviews, branch lists, official directory). Separately, the Abraj Hypermarket is confirmed on P4: its own marketing plan ("Located on the 4th floor of the Abraj Al Bait… 9,000 sq m… open 24/7"), a 2019 review, and Spice Bowl's October 2026 post placing itself "opposite Al Abraj Hyper Market" on P4.
Against that, a 2017 review mentions an "Abraj supermarket also on P3". Two different supermarket units, or a relocation — unresolved. Both are food retail, so neither is scored.
The floor is not in dispute: listings put Pizza Hut at the Level 3 / P3 food court (unit Shop P-03-5-08), and TripAdvisor titles it "Abraj Al Bait Mall Level 3 Food Ct".
What conflicts is whether it trades: one listing reads Active, the other Permanently Closed — and that cannot be settled from the web. It does not appear on the official directory at all; its score rests on the chain's own published brochure.
The official directory is a single logo wall of ~88 tenants against 625 claimed outlets. It gives no floors or unit numbers, does not separate restaurants from coffee shops in its text, and its files date from April–September 2023.
Ambiguous entries it leaves behind: "Texas" (possibly Texas Chicken — a separate "Churchs" entry may be the chicken chain or the shoe brand), "Indonesian" and "Turkish restaurant" (generic names only; MADO is listed separately, so the Turkish entry may be a second outlet). The older abraj-albait.com domain no longer resolves at all.
Delivery platforms (HungerStation, Jahez, Mrsool, ToYou) expose no browsable floor data to a signed-out search, so delivery availability per outlet is unverified and no outlet's floor rests on them.
Individual stall names in the P3/P4 food courts — grilled meat and rice (kabsa, mandi, Bukhari, biryani), fresh juice — could not be verified beyond Shawarmat Mix, so the stalls are inventoried as a group, not invented as named businesses.
Whether Simit Sarayi (1st floor; latest review 2016) and Häagen-Dazs (ground floor; one old review) still operate could not be verified. Starbucks' locator shows two Abraj Al Bait entries — possibly one unit duplicated or two units; both floor-bearing entries say 2nd floor, so the floor conclusion holds either way.
The tower hotels' own restaurants — Fairmont, Raffles, Pullman ZamZam, Swissôtel, Rotana, Mövenpick — sit physically inside the Abraj Al Bait complex but are not part of the commercial center, and the mall's official directory does not list them.
Per the brief, they are excluded, as is everything in Jabal Omar, Al Safwah and the surrounding streets. Two names that surface in "restaurants near Abraj Al Bait" lists were also excluded on evidence: Mazaq, whose listing wording matches a hotel lounge, and Paradise Restaurant / Shawerma, which belongs to the Al Safwah food court — a different tower.
All sources read 25 October 2026. The official directory is the backbone; everything else cross-checks it.