It’s September, which in Dubai means lots of new restaurants to tempt your palate — most of them international offerings from the US or UK.
While no restaurant lover would complain about the presence of Gordon Ramsay or Bistrot Bagatelle, how is our food scene to really mature if local entrepreneurs don’t get to join in the fun?
That’s why the opening of Pi.Dubai last month is so interesting. It’s not just that it’s a new restaurant by Dubai-based restaurateurs (go to JLT — it’s packed with them). It’s that Pi.Dubai is a fairly high-profile opening — at The Dubai Mall’s lower ground floor, a strip of restaurants that includes big players such as Texas Roadhouse, PF Chang’s and Hummingbird Bakery.
It’s by Amber Haque and Rami Badawi, the couple who created Pizza Guys, with chef Joe Truex in the kitchen, bringing high-end culinary skills to a menu of Italian classics (and yes, pizza).
“We wanted to stand apart because we are in a hall filled with international heavyweights,” says Haque. “They have their place and we have ours. For us it was about attention to detail and food, and somewhere for people to be proud, to realise the owners made an effort to make it Dubai’s own. That’s our message: that this is Dubai’s own.”
This is not your average pizza joint: The menu is brief but creative, and the toppings aren’t what you might expect. They call it contemporary Italian soul food.
“We did not have a plan for this,” says Badawi. “I think we were offering a product at Pizza Guys that was very upscale there, everything from scratch. We wanted a space to do justice to what we were doing.”
Having brought in a chef experienced in French and Italian cuisines — but not specifically a pizza chef — the onus is on unique flavours, not trotting out the classics.
“People come in here and are a little shocked because it’s not your typical mall restaurant,” says Badawi. “We’re honouring tradition but not being bound by it. On a lot of our pizzas you will find things that you wouldn’t elsewhere. For example we have a shrimp pizza and we were wondering what to use for the base; chef came up with an artichoke cream. And we want to do a mushroom pie but we don’t want it to be usual mushrooms, so he tried a fricasse.”
There are nine pizzas on the menu, along with salads, meat and seafood dishes and some old-school Italian items you may not see anywhere else, such as gnudi (Dh45), a ricotta dumpling that you simply must try. It’s got the texture of a very light pasta ravioli, drenched in cheesy, buttery sage-scented goodness, but contains no flour.
The pizza base is the same one used at Pizza Guys, which Haque trained in making in Naples; it rests for two days to create more texture and flavour, and the wait is worth it. Everything is made in-house, including the Moroccan sausage for the merguez pizza.
“We’re doing it the other way round,” she says. The attitude is — pizza can be a vehicle for flavour, so think of a new way to present ingredients on top of the dough. “[Truex] is thinking, ‘how can we deliver this experience through pizza?’”
Everything at the restaurant was built from the “from the ground up”.
“A lot of chefs come on consulting gigs, we moved [Truex] and his family. He’s here now. It was very important to us to be authentic to the city, to the food, and the space. Everything here is real. The only thing we weren’t able to get is natural sunlight.”
The design of the restaurant, with comfortable banquettes (important, they learned, via feedback from their Pizza Guys customers), New York subway tiles and cool music, was as considered as the food, with input from concept designer David Irvine — the man who gave Voss Water its cool factor. Their “garden” is a unique space that looks like a greenhouse but has hidden lighting replicating sunlight, that missing factor that could not be supplied due to the site at the mall.
That mushroom fricasse pizza (Dh80) is soulful walk through the woods, thanks to the rich flavours of porcini mushrooms, caramelised onions and slightly smoky fontina cheese (“no truffle” joked Truex as he served it to me — that would overpower it, and he’s bang on). A delicate salmon dish sees the fish thinly sliced, cooked for the briefest time, then topped with sparkling lemon, capers, fennel and roasted cherry tomatoes.
And if you think you’ve had pistachio ice cream, talk to me after you’ve had Truex’s roasted pistachio gelato, served with a chocolate brownie. It’s outstanding, and I do not say it lightly.
Don’t miss it!
Pi. Dubai, The Dubai Mall, lower ground floor. Open daily mall hours.
