Australian culinary wizards eye the UAE

After the French, the British and the Indians, UAE residents must ready themselves for the invasion of the Australians. Even as the land down under prepares to educate the world on its high-quality but undervalued culinary achievements, two of its chefs have their sights trained on Dubai as a pivot to their conquest of the Middle East — although they’re using very different strategies.

Entrepreneur and MasterChef Australia judge George Calombaris may open his first international restaurant here, in the city he says he’s come to regard as a second home. And culinary legend Maggie Beer hopes her beverages and condiments will soon be on our supermarket shelves.

“Dubai was actually the place that inspired my Sparkling Ruby Cabernet. I find the mix of cultures and geographical aspects truly amazing,” Beer tells GN Focus by email. The non-alcoholic wine is positioned as a celebratory alternative to champagne, and her company is currently in search of local distributors for its unusual products, such as verjuice, an alternative to vinegar that she was the first to produce commercially.

Calombaris runs seven restaurants in Australia and isn’t actually saying he’s going to open a restaurant in the UAE, but he admits to having been in talks with regional investors for some time now.

An Arabian feast?

Diners looking for an Antipodean experience here have so far had to satisfy themselves with two restaurants — Yalumba and Bidi Bondi — and the occasional food festival. So as the UAE’s food scene heats up along with its economy, there’s certainly space for more variety. A big trend in recent years has been Latin American food; another has been the rise of the supperclub.

“There is definitely opportunity; we’ve had plenty of discussions and meetings. At the end of the day how do I do it… and sustain the quality? I’m not going to do it if I have to compromise my quality or my name. Because that’s everything to me, regardless of the money.

“Because if I don’t do it right, then everything else I’ve put my hard work, sweat upon is going to fall down,” Calombaris says, his passionate Greek spirit coming through time and again in our interview at Bloomingdale’s home store in Dubai Mall, where he conducted sold-out TV-style cooking masterclasses for the ladies who lunch. That trip was on the back of another tour of duty earlier in the year, when he accompanied fellow MasterChef Australia judges Gary Mehigan and Matt Preston and this season’s contestants into the blistering desert to film the fifth season of the popular show. “It’s become a bit of a second home for me, Dubai,” the newly trim chef says, explaining how he’s cooked for government delegations and public dinners a few times now.

Calombaris is on the verge of reopening The Press Club in Melbourne, a fine dining establishment that operates firmly within the food-as-entertainment genre, with dishes that aim to marry childhood nostalgia with top-quality food. (One such dish is the Hills’ Hoist, which is inspired by the backyard clotheslines that children would swing from, and which arrives at the table with pegs that hold up a variety of crispy vegetables that are eaten with dips). Also this year, he opened Jimmy Grant’s, a trendy souvlaki, or kebab, bar in Melbourne that he says has “gone mental” because of its trendy vibe and affordable menu.

So is Dubai going to be home to his first international venture? “With the right concept and the right opportunity, yes, we’d open here. A Jimmy Grant’s would work here and would pump here and I could control it. But I’d never open a Press Club here. It wouldn’t work because I wouldn’t be able to get the staff I wanted,” he says, alluding to how some chefs have been unable to run such ventures remotely. “If I was to do it for the money, I would have done it two years ago,” he declares.

Glorious, diverse meals

The fact that a chef of Greek origin runs two very different concepts with very different menus in Australia is an indication of just how diverse the country’s food really is — and how far it has moved from the irreconcilable opposites of bush tucker and the Sunday roast.

Calombaris nods at the country’s status as immigrant heaven. “Our food is really a multicultural boiling pot of cultures, nationalities, religions,” he says. “MasterChef is so successful around the world because of the diversity of its characters. For example, it’s the highest rated non-Hindi show in India. They’re mental for it. What they do is latch on to the character who has Indian background as their security blanket and as the one they can yell and scream at — but then they see the other cultures and are inspired by them, they love that.”

Beer, a one-time pheasant farmer, brings it back to the land, to the sheer size of the country. “We’re very lucky in Australia to have such a diversity of cultures that we can swap and borrow from to make up our own version of local cuisine. We are such a young country, so we are developing an Australian cuisine that is an ever-growing thing, which is wonderful, but ‘produce as the star’ will always be key.

“I think our produce in this country is fantastic and has the capacity to be even more so because of the ever-increasing amounts of dedicated producers passionate about what they do, so if I had to describe Australian cuisine in a word, it would probably be fresh and vibrant.”

Restaurant renaissance

That notion is at the heart of a new tourism campaign aimed at educating the world that there’s more to Australian food than kangaroo and shrimp on the barbie. Last month, Tourism Australia launched a new marketing campaign called Restaurant Australia, developed from a poll of 13,000 people in 15 source markets that showed that food is an important factor in making holiday decisions. In the survey, only a quarter of people who had not visited Australia felt it offered quality food experiences, but more than half of those who had visited ranked the nation’s food as second after France and ahead of Italy and Spain.

“Clearly, we need to narrow the perception gap between those who have visited Australia and those who have not,” Tourism Australia Managing Director Andrew McEvoy said last month. “To do this we are evolving our global campaign with the idea that Australia could be the world’s greatest restaurant, serving up the most unique food experiences in remarkable locations every day… whether it’s devouring fresh shucked oysters in Tassie, exploring Melbourne’s multicultural cuisines or sipping coffee in a laneway, feasting on sun-kissed fruit and seafood on a Queensland island, following the Poachers Way food trail from Canberra, sampling bush tucker in the outback, fine dining in Sydney or following one of the many food trails or festivals in Australia.”

With that juggernaut behind them, then, it won’t be very long before you see even more food wizards from Oz cast their spell on diners in the Emirates.