Half a century of sweetness: How a 74-year-old kunafa maker helped shape Abu Dhabi’s story

Abu Dhabi: Try to find something in Abu Dhabi that has not changed in fifty years.

Naeem Mohammad Youssef Shneik will hand you a piece of kunafa and tell you to taste it.

He is 74, Jordanian, and has been making it the same way since he was sixteen.

Few people in Abu Dhabi have had his particular seat for the city's transformation. A fixed spot behind a kunafa counter, decade after decade, while everything else rearranged itself around him.

"Everything has changed," Naeem, owner of Naeem Sweets, said.

"But the taste of my kunafa is still the same."

Sneaking out of school for kunafa

Naeem was born in 1952 in Jordan, into a family that already knew its way around a sweets counter. His relatives ran shops there, and by sixteen he was not just watching.

"I learned to make kunafa when I was sixteen by my uncles," he said and added:" I used to leave school to go work with them at their shop."

It did not take long before he was not the boy just fetching trays, he was the one running the floor.

"I was young but at that age I was already supervising on the whole shop," he said, still proud at himself. "My uncle would leave me alone in charge."

His parents wanted the more ordinary story; school, a diploma, a plan B. But Naeem wanted none of it.

"My family wanted me to have an education, but I did not want to. I was so attached to this job and that was it, I left school." He stopped after 9th grade.

A new start in the UAE

In 1974, a 22-year-old Naeem left Jordan for a country he had never been to or seen before, with an ambition to introduce his family's way of making kunafa.

"When I came to Abu Dhabi, it was a desert," he said.

He did not ease into it. Alongside his brothers he opened a sweet shop that same year, on what was then Hamdan Street, betting an entire trade's worth of training on a city that barely existed yet.

He talks about that decision less like a business plan and more like a love story.

"From the beginning, it was a year of blessing for me," he said of leaving his old shop in Jordan's Irbid behind.

"It was very good for me, because the work meant a lot to me. I brought my love for sweets and my passion, and I gave a piece of that love to this country, the Emirates."

Fifty years on, and he still talks about kunafa as something he gave the UAE, not something he sold it.

18 layers for the 18th Nation Day

Of the brothers who stood beside him behind that first counter, Naeem was the one who stayed. His siblings went home to Jordan a couple of years in. He never did.

"I never wanted to go back. I am so attached to the land of the Emirates. The people of this country are like my brothers, my children studied alongside theirs, the architecture, the culture. Everything.

Naeem has five children of his own - four sons and a daughter - raised entirely on Emirati soil. Today, they have built their own lives here, some in banking, some in real estate, one also still showing up helping his father run the shop.

That attachment found its most personal expression on the UAE's 18th National Day, when a delegation from the Ministry of Culture and Information came to visit him. "I thought deeply what I could do, and the idea came to me to make a cake, and on the 18th layer, I placed the UAE flag. It was a festive day with music, and all the sheikhs were present," he said and added:

"That day was certainly a moment of joy, because it confirmed that we are part of the family of this land"

Making kunafa at home

Here is the part of the story that does not fit on a shop sign. After roughly 24 years on Hamdan Street, circumstances beyond the kitchen made him close his doors. Most people would call that the end of a chapter. For Naeem, it was closer to a long pause. For the next years, almost as long as the shop itself had run, he kept making kunafa. Just not for customers.

"During those 24 years, I used to make kunafa for my relatives," he said.

"I had an oven at home. Whenever someone needed it for gatherings, I would make it for them. Not a single day did I leave kunafa behind."

24 years is long enough to do a lot of things. Naeem spent his making desserts in the kitchen of his own home in Abu Dhabi, refusing to let the craft die.

Back to business

Four years ago, at seventy, he decided to reopen Naeem Sweets. Not on Hamdan Street this time, but at Marsa Mina. He talks about that first day back the way other people would talk about weddings or homecomings.

"I cannot describe how I felt. People were so happy. I was beyond happy. There was a line for women and men, which was so long it reached down the street," he said and pointed to the long distance from his shop to the street.

Half a century after a 22-year-old opened his first shop in a city made of sand, the same 70-year-old man opened another door in the same city, now made of highways and high buildings, and the street lined up anyway. Nobody had forgotten the taste of his kunafa.

Ask Naeem what has kept people coming back across two shops and fifty years, and he refuses to be mysterious about it.

"This whole business, the secret of it, is really the material we work with," he said and added:" Our customers know we use ingredients from Denmark and from Balkan countries."

Refusing to let go

At 74, Naeem's children tell him to stop working, but he refuses to let go.

"I do have people who work in my shop, But I still want to work," he said.

He still walks in at three every afternoon and does not leave until nine, the same rhythm he has kept ever since he was a teenager sneaking out of a Jordanian classroom.