Even before I ask the chef to define the current culinary landscape, I know he won't come up with a definition that will satisfy my doubt-ladled mind.
There is simply too much going on.
Food, once cooked with a bit of this and a bit of that, using good old measuring jugs, cups, spoons and scales, is now cooked with a kitchen-sized version of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). OK, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but an honest one at that.
The likes of Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal, international chefs both famous and infamous, have turned the art of cooking into a science class and our plates into pipettes. Did we protest? Well, let's just say that when Blumenthal tried to give his diners savoury crab ice cream they didn't - and I quote from his column in The Sunday Times - bat an eyelid. He tried it in 1997.
Ahead of that, there have been all sorts of movements - slow food, umami cuisine and cooking apps (most recent), among others. Each movement has made its way into our culinary lexicon and punctuated it with generous references to immunity diets, calories on menus, ethical buying and low carbon food. In fact, so garbled is our lexicon that even a real alphabet soup would seem easier to read.
To boot, we also have enough ecological awareness to know the name of the person we buy the turkey from to be able to question where ‘he' got the turkey from. And our dining culture? Let's not even jump into the fire on that one given that we rarely indulge in gustatory pleasures of dining at a table.
So yes, I dread the definition of the current culinary landscape, especially from a chef and bon vivant who has worked in the hospitality industry for the past 30 years in Melbourne, London and Dubai. And Andy Cuthbert, general manager at Jumeirah Bab Al Shams Desert Resort and Spa and the chairman of the Emirates Culinary Guild (ECG) for the past ten years, isn't one to mince his words.
"Firstly, residents expect value for their money whether they are eating at Vu's restaurant at the Jumeirah Emirates Towers or a roadside restaurant in Satwa. It doesn't matter whether you are paying Dh1,500 or Dh15; the food has got to be good. People are knowledgeable, well travelled, adventurous and discerning. You cannot get away by throwing in tomato and buffalo mozzarella and calling it pizza," he says.
I tell him Dubai has become a bit like a food safari with people exploring global cuisines and sampling exotic ingredients every day. He nods in agreement and goes on to talk about his children - a microcosmic example. "My kids eat and love Japanese food like miso soup, and raw squid, tuna and calamari. They are exposed to so many flavours. They are able to experiment. When I was growing up in Australia, my mother had a repertoire of 14 dishes. It was a cycle. So my exposure was very limited."
I take the food safari analogy a bit further saying that in addition to the palate-teasing choices, top-notch chefs - Gordon Ramsay, Gary Rhodes, Pierre Gagnaire, to name a few - have pitched their Michelin-star tents in Dubai as well. Given these factors, would it be easy to define the city's culinary landscape?
Chef Cuthbert reasons. "It is an evolving city. It is associated with everything that is new, trendy and up-and-coming. It has attracted big names like Zuma and Nobu - hits with cosmopolitan, vibrant cities of the world. But does Dubai have a culinary identity? Not yet. It is the one thing we miss."
When he moved to the city in 1992, every hotel he says had to have a coffee shop and Italian and Arabic restaurants. "This hasn't changed much for almost two decades." However, he says there have been other milestones. "Emirati cuisine has come into its own with male and female Emirati chefs in five-star kitchens. The guild, in association with The Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing (DTCM), launched a cookbook on Emirati cuisine titled A Culinary Journey: Celebrating 30 Years of Our History. Then, at this year's Salon Culinaire competition at Gulfood exhibition, there were classes dedicated to Emirati cuisine. We are finally looking at it [Emirati cuisine] as a cuisine in its own right."
He also talks about how in the past chefs would visit cities around the world, but today chefs and hoteliers visit Dubai "to see what is happening". He says, "The reputation we have here is that we are the best. We are able to compete with the rest of the world. The pressure on the hospitality industry is to make sure they deliver."
So would it be easy to look into Dubai's future? Would we be able to define the culinary landscape of a city that belies definition? According to chef Cuthbert, trends are cyclical. He says, "We will always come back to traditional elements whether it is nouvelle cuisine or sous-vide [food cooked in airtight plastic bags at low temperature in water for a long time]. Twenty-five years ago, it was all about novelle cuisine. That went and came back. Then 20 years ago [when he was in the UK], it was sous-vide. It went out because people were scared that food may get contaminated. Now it is the rage again! However, the one thing that will not change is being honest to food and using the best ingredients… and cooking and eating food that will make memories and stimulate senses."
Still, hard as it seems to pick trends that will define Dubai, chef Cuthbert gives it a go, predicting six.
Ethical cuisine
Earlier this year, the EWS-WWF (Emirates Wildlife Society and World Wide Fund for nature) released their guide on sustainable varieties of fish and sustainable alternatives, placing them into three categories: red for ‘over fished', orange for ‘on the brink', and green for ‘abundantly found'. Hamour got the red tag and varieties like Twobar Sea Bream and Ehrenbergs Snapper got the green.
"We have only just woken up to the fact that maybe we have over fished the waters of the UAE. We are beginning to realise the global impact in terms of food supply. Supermarkets today label ingredients which is a good step towards ethical cuisine and responsible eating. When I came here, it was common to have hamour that measured about a metre in length every single day in the market. Now it is hard to get one-fifth of that size," says chef Cuthbert.
Even restaurants he says take a stand by not serving endangered varieties like bluefin tuna "despite knowing that a fisherman sells it from across the street".
Seasonal food
At the Gulfood exhibition, one of the chefs served a dish made with radicchio that is available only at certain times of the year in Italy. "It was beautiful," says chef Cuthbert, who hopes that there will be a movement to support the seasons, and for restaurants to design their menus around seasonal produce.
"People would be able to choose food that isn't adulterated too much. Do you know the pleasure of looking forward to a dish because you can eat it only for four weeks in an entire year?" he says.
Now more and more people, he points out, are talking about the seasons and supporting traditional produce again. "Hopefully in ten years, we will have food that has been cooked simply which goes back to basic cooking techniques. It won't be about mixing things on a plate and hoping for the best."
Rediscovering the pleasure of eating
Chef Cuthbert was dining at a rather soigné restaurant recently when he spotted a group of ten adults and eight children seated at two adjacent tables. "Four of the kids had their heads buried in some kind of gadget. When I was a kid, we talked at the table. It was a social forum for friends and family to connect, to bond. Nowadays several restaurants frown upon the use of mobile phones and advise against gadgets as part of dining etiquette," he says.
Of gadgetry he believes that there will be a time when people will say "enough of this, ‘Let's bring the family back around the table.' We will go back to the goodness of sitting around the table and getting away from the iPod, PSP and BlackBerry. Restaurants will embrace this to make sure that it isn't a 25-minute feeding frenzy, but a 90-minute dining experience that keeps people entertained. The pace of life may not change, but there will be more people trying to spend quality time at the table with family, not people at work. They will realise, like me, that family is going to be around for the next 40 years, not the people you work with."
Innovation that stays true to taste
"If I am paying a lot, I expect to be wowed with creative and innovative cooking and presentation. It might still be braised Wagyu beef cheeks, but I want to know what they have added to it? What else have they done to give it that little bit extra? And most importantly, what have they done special without ruining it, without turning it into a fanciful thing that doesn't do it justice," says chef Cuthbert.
He talks about inventions that date back centuries. He says the basics were done long ago. "You can only invent the emulsion of oil and egg yolks once. It is what you do with the emulsion that is the innovation. The discoveries, mostly through mistakes, happened thousands of years ago. The Egyptians left a lump of flour and water outside for too long and the natural yeast reacted and it puffed up. They put it in the oven and it came out better than the unleavened bread they used to make. So whatever goes on a plate whether it is ten or 100 years from today, we still want to be wowed and return home, saying it was a fine meal."
Worry about depleting resources
Chef Cuthbert expresses his concern about ethanol, a biofuel. Specifically biofuel made from maize (corn) and the way it is grown against the interest of those who want food crops. A pressing question for him is: if we need unprecedented amount of food and if agricultural land is going to be used to make fuel, where is food going to come from?
He says, "It will impact on the stocks we need to feed the world. People are talking about biofuels instead of food crops - the basics with which people have survived for millennia. This will be an issue. What is going to happen when your staples aren't there? What is going to happen to the poor who depend on crops like corn and rice? Biofuels are cheaper to produce and give poor farmers a better yield, but at what cost? If this over dependency isn't kept under control, there is a definite risk."
Simple menus
From a marketing aspect, chef Cuthbert likes a single-sided card with everything on it, written in plain, understandable English. Observably, he doesn't want to read prolix prose in lieu of a dish. He says, "I want to know what is going to be on my plate. I don't want to read ‘Lightly tossed on a bed of seasoned wilted spinach leaves, harvested from the top of a Welsh farmland by a goat herd…' And what do you get? Tortellini."
Luckily, menu cards have changed for the better because they are simpler and easier to read, he says. "Gone are the days of the grand covers. Hopefully we will read menus that mention the cut of beef and the kind of sauce that comes with it. That's all." F
