Buddha Bar's chef Black

The first encounter with Dubai often evokes mixed reactions. Typically, for Spencer Lee Black, a 33-year-old American chef, there was no ambiguity whatsoever.

"I hated it. I hated it when I got here. I despised everything about it," he says.

Three years on, though, the city has grown on him. He has became a father and, crucially, his stress is now back to a decent level.

Exciting

"When I first came here I wasn't busy enough," he says. "I am used to so much pressure. Now it's exciting again. I am back into an environment where it's fast - 300 diners a night. It's exciting again."

Lee Black - whose side-buttoned chef uniform and beard evokes a youthful Confederate general - is chef de cuisine at Grosvenor House's Buddha Bar. Its recent high-profile launch was a feast even for this adrenaline-glutton.

"It was one of the biggest openings in a long time in Dubai," he says. "It is a big venue for Dubai. I couldn't have any mistakes and I had a few sleepless nights."

The concept of the bar is based around the original celebrated Parisian nightspot - with the extra twist of Lee Black's fusion cuisine and the occasional sprinkling of humour.

"It can't be all sterile and boring," he says. "It has to be fun. I used to pull pranks on people coming to my diner. They'd be doing all this fine-dining and in the middle of it, I'd send them a glass of clear liquid and some jam - I'd love to watch their faces when they figured out it was only water. It's entertainment. Dining can be so pretentious. Sometimes you have to knock people down to reality," he says.
 
Popular approach

Anyway, his approach has proved popular and Lee Black expects the stress to keep its enjoyably stratospheric level.

"It is hectic, chaotic and crazy every night," he says. "It's like a show in the back there."

It was this craving for activity that impelled Lee Black 14 years ago to embark on a career as a cook - even if, awkwardly, he had already started a Civil Engineering degree.

"One day I just got fed up of looking through a microscope," he said.

"I don't have the attention span. I wouldn't want to build a bridge. I remembered the chaos, the noise and activity I had seen at the back of restaurants in strip malls."

The other motives for the switch were childhood memories of family meals in Hollywood restaurants after concerts by the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

The music did little for him ("I used to rate the classical music on how quickly I fell asleep," he says).

But the food made an impact. "I can remember liking to try a lot of things. I would think, 'how cool is that? I can go out and eat snails'," he says.

Change of course

So, leaving his parents in shock, Lee Davies gave up his degree to become a bus boy in an Italian restaurant in Reno - a casino town in the middle of Nevada's cowboy country.

"I was basically the waiter's assistant. I just cleared tables," he says.

In the end, though, it worked out okay. The menu of the Buddha House reflects a global culinary odyssey with stops in Bangkok, Myanmar and Cambodia.

He was finally "discovered" in Phuket where he ran a tiny New York-style restaurant in a strip mall.

"It was the strangest one I had," he said. "The hotel nearby was really, really exclusive. During the season, you'd have Kate Moss, one of the Spice Girls, Naomi and the Gallaghers."

"I lived upstairs. I waited tables, went to the market in the morning, got all the food, came back, cooked it, worked behind the bar," he says.

When visitors asked him what he was doing hiding his talents there, he told them he enjoyed getting to surf in the afternoons.

Still, when they asked him to head a swanky diner in New York, he went.

"It was one of the best Japanese fusion restaurants in New York," he says.

"You'd have parties for P Diddy and Madonna there - though no one ate any food. You would have a party for 300 and cater for 20. They spent all the time in the bathroom - they were all models and things like that."

He then fell out with his partners and switched to building walls in Brooklyn.

"I think manual labour is great," he says. "It gives you a satisfaction you don't normally have. Sometimes you've just got to take a break."

Even so, after 6 months he was eager to get back to the kitchen. He made a phone call and found himself in Dubai, to which he has thawed now the heat is on.

In the early afternoon, when I met him, he was already preparing for the evening rush.

"A chef is a chief - he's someone in charge. I still consider myself a cook. You still see me at the end of the night with my uniform dirty, my hands cut up," he says.

To prove it, he shows me a hand still bleeding from another painful incident in his mission to feed the people.

"Most of my fingers are broken now - by oven doors and things like that," he says.

"You know, they get caught on things like somebody's apron. I think a plate fell on this one - you just carry on cooking."