Your audience is four occasions, not one age group
Stop thinking about age and income. A restaurant in Kuwait sells to four different buyers, and what separates them is the occasion, not the demographics. The weekday lunch crowd works in Sharq, Kuwait City or Hawally, has forty minutes, spends 2–4 KD, and decides by 11:40. The family dinner crowd comes Thursday and Friday night, spends 15–35 KD, and will travel further for a good table. The late-night crowd is out after 11pm and wants dessert, not a main course. The catering buyer is an office manager or someone planning a gathering, ordering 150–600 KD at a time. Same kitchen, four buyers.
Each occasion needs its own campaign, because everything about it is different — the hour, the creative, the offer, and the number you judge it on. Lunch ads should run Sunday to Thursday between 10:30 and 12:30, show one dish and one price, and push a delivery link. Family dinner ads run Wednesday evening through Friday night, show the table and the atmosphere, and push directions or a booking. Late night runs 9pm to 1am, mostly on Snapchat, dessert and shisha creative. Blend them into one campaign and the algorithm spends your money on whichever is cheapest, usually lunch, and the weekend never gets built.
The catering buyer deserves a build of its own, and most restaurants ignore it completely. This person is not scrolling for dinner — they have been asked to feed 40 people at an office or a family gathering, and they need a price per head (3.5–7 KD is the normal band in Kuwait), a menu they can forward, and a human on WhatsApp who answers. Run it as a lead campaign during weekday business hours, and put the catering menu and the deposit on your own ordering page with KNET, so a 400 KD order does not live in screenshots and voice notes.
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Delivery radius and dine-in radius are two different maps
Delivery is a radius business. Realistically your food travels 3–5 km before it arrives cold and the review turns bad, so delivery ads should be capped there — not set to "Kuwait" as a country. A restaurant in Salmiya advertising delivery to Jahra is paying for impressions it cannot serve. Set the radius around the branch, and if you have two branches run two ad sets, not one national campaign. And if all your delivery still goes through Talabat and Deliveroo, remember the 25–30% commission is the real reason the kitchen looks busy while the bank account does not move.
Dine-in is a different map. For a place worth the drive, people in Kuwait will cross 10–15 km on a Thursday night without thinking about it, so dine-in campaigns can run a much wider radius than delivery — the whole Salmiya, Kuwait City and Hawally band, plus Avenues traffic. Weekday dine-in is the opposite: that is the 40-minute lunch crowd, and it is a 2 km walk-or-drive radius around the office towers. Same restaurant, three different maps, and the only thing that changes between them is the day and the hour you choose to run the ads.
You do not have to guess any of this. Pull the addresses from your last 200 delivery orders and count the blocks; that is your real delivery audience, and it is usually tighter than you assumed. Do the same for dine-in by asking at the till for one week. Then check the calendar: Ramadan flips everything to the two hours before iftar and the late suhoor window, Hala February fills the malls, and July and August empty the country — so cut spend 30–40% in summer instead of paying to reach people sitting in Georgia or London.
Broad targeting with real food creative beats a stack of interests
Stop stacking interests. Kuwait is a small market, and once you layer "foodies" plus "fine dining" plus "luxury" on top of a 5 km radius, you have squeezed the audience so tight that your CPM climbs and the platform never gets enough data to learn who buys. Give Meta and Snapchat the geography, the language, and an age band as wide as 18–55, then let them find the buyers. Keep each audience above roughly 100,000 people. The one honest exception is catering, where a job-title or employer layer genuinely helps, because the buyer is an office and not a household.
Creative is the actual targeting. A close, well-lit, loud video of the food — the pour, the cheese, the steam, shot vertical, price on screen inside the first two seconds — selects the right person faster than any interest box ever will. Put Arabic text on screen even when the voiceover is English; half of Kuwait scrolls in Arabic. Make 3–5 pieces per occasion instead of one polished film, and change them every 2–3 weeks before fatigue kills your reach. If a dish is the best seller inside the branch, it is also your best ad. Trust the till, not the mood board.
For budget, a split that works for most restaurants is 40% on delivery and weekday lunch, 40% on the weekend family occasion, and 20% on catering and retargeting. Do not run an occasion on less than 8–10 KD a day — below that you are buying noise, not customers. Exclude anyone who ordered in the last 14 days from your acquisition ads so you are not paying to reach people who already come. And keep one small retargeting audience of website visitors and Instagram viewers running all month at 2–3 KD a day; it is usually the cheapest order you buy.