Let’s talk food

Trying to define Dubai’s culinary identity is like staring at modern art. You are convinced it must have a meaning, but it is challenging, even overwhelming, to make sense of it.

The food alone does not sate my hunger. It is the journey of ferreting out local flavours that leaves me feeling full, and more importantly, connected to the place. The people I meet, the street corners I turn, the markets I visit, the tales I hear, the unexpected situations I often stumble into – all of these make the eventual meal far more than just ingredients on a plate.

We inherit trends from the West. The overwhelming cupcake chatter of the past five years has finally been cleared for the latest course of gourmet burgers and cronuts. Food trucks have become the rage, as has Peruvian cuisine. Dubai infuses these Western templates with its own twist, often with a sprinkling of gold dust and a world record in tow.

As the founder of Frying Pan Adventures, Dubai’s first food tourism venture, I have been on a singular mission to track down those experiences that give meaning to the city’s canvas of eclectic culinary impressions.

One of the meanings I have found is that Dubai is a great preserver of Old World food traditions and techniques, often practised by the people who will never make it to the front cover of a glossy magazine. Take for instance the Emirati mother who graciously invited me home to learn about the traditional salting and preservation of fish (malleh). Or the Emirati, Iranian, Indian, Pakistani and Filipino home cooks who gather at the Friday market in Mamzar to share their family recipes in a celebration of the city’s delicious diversity. Or the Ethiopian restaurateur Sara who fed me fermented injera and chicken stew with her own hands in the ultimate act of hospitality, or gursha. And the most humbling of them all during Ramadan, when a charitable association gave me the privilege of sharing dates and soupy Tamil kanji with 3,000 fasting men on a pavement in Naif.