From the skies to the kitchen: How a former cabin crew member built one of Dubai's favourite Korean cafés

Dubai: Jennifer Hsu spent years at 35,000 feet, and she made the most of every landing.

As a cabin crew member flying across Asia, she ate her way through Korea, Japan and China, collecting flavours and food memories the way other travellers collect fridge magnets. Born and raised in Jakarta, she moved to Sydney at 17, where she studied baking as part of her undergraduate degree, building the formal foundation that would later define everything she made.

In 2014, at just 21 years old, she was hired by Emirates and moved to the UAE, flying across Asia and eating her way through Korea, Japan and China along the way. When in 2019 she had left Emirates and she found herself in the UAE with nowhere to fly back to. Covid had grounded everything. So she baked. She and her husband started Gato from their home kitchen in 2020, and by 2021 they had opened their first physical store.

"I'm a foodie," she says. "I travel to a lot of places in Asia and I watch a lot of TikTok and Instagram Reels, so I understand what's trending. I wanted to bring it here so people don't have to travel far to get it."

What she built is Gato, a Korean-inspired cake studio and café that started in 2021 from her home kitchen and now has two locations across Dubai, Al Mina and Gato Bakehouse at Dubai Creek Harbour Beach.

A certified pastry chef who started from scratch

Jennifer is not a self-taught baker who stumbled into cakes. She is a certified pastry chef with formal patisserie training, which is part of what makes Gato more than just another pretty café. That training goes back to her undergraduate years in Sydney, where she studied baking before a career that took her to the skies and eventually to Dubai.

When she launched during the height of the Korean minimalist cake trend, she was not following a template. She was applying real technique to something she genuinely loved.

The early days were stripped back. It was three people running everything: Jennifer handling all the baking, her husband managing paperwork behind the scenes and a friend covering the front of the café. They opened during Covid, which meant navigating restrictions, tight budgets and a level of uncertainty that would have stopped most people before they started. Somehow they kept going.

"We had customers that were very understanding," she says. "When it was really busy and it was only a few of us working, they were very patient. So somehow we managed."

The UAE gave her room to grow

Jennifer is quick to point out that Gato's story is inseparable from Dubai's. She has spent most of her life here, and the city's openness to homegrown businesses, its appetite for new food concepts and its genuinely supportive community are things she talks about with real warmth rather than polished gratitude.

"UAE is like a home for me," she says. "I grew up here. I came when Dubai was still not like today. We grew together. They accept me as a non-Emirati to have a business here and they give me space to create."

That community showed up when it mattered. Earlier this year, when many small businesses felt the pressure, Gato's regulars came back. Faces Jennifer had not seen in a while started reappearing. DMs arrived from customers offering encouragement on new product launches. March was hard, she admits, but they never closed.

What she makes

The menu is a direct reflection of Jennifer's travels and her training. The salt bread, a soft Japanese-style buttery rolled bread with a slightly crispy base and a signature gentle saltiness, has been on the menu since day one and remains the bestseller. Jennifer calls it her personal favourite.

Her vanilla strawberry cake took the longest to develop. The sponge is deliberately light, the filling measured carefully so it never feels heavy, and the frosting is cream cheese rather than standard whipped cream. Fresh strawberries sit inside. It has been a Gato signature from the beginning.

Beyond cakes, the all-day menu reflects the same instinct that drove Jennifer to open in the first place. Udon carbonara. Breakfast dishes built around the salt bread. Matcha strawberry cake. The kind of menu that could only come from someone who spent years eating across Asia and genuinely could not stop thinking about the food.

The name, she explains with a smile, is its own quiet piece of storytelling. Gato is a nod to the French word gateau, meaning cake, Asianised in spelling. It also means cat in Portuguese and Spanish, which suited Jennifer perfectly. She loves cats, and created a feline mascot for the cafe which sits at the entrance holding a UAE flag.