Lebanese chef Joe Barza brings the soul of Tyre to Abu Dhabi's culinary scene

"Abu Dhabi is my second home since 1999," the Lebanese chef, Joe Barza said.

Barza is among the best-known chefs in the world. He has judged Top Chef Middle East, served as Hilton's brand ambassador for the Gulf and Africa, and taken Lebanese cooking to over 27 countries.

Yet when he lists the places that mean something to him, Abu Dhabi is the one he calls home.

It is a claim that carries weight coming from a man with such a map to choose from.

Now, in the capital, he has been asked to cook something he has known since before he could cook.

The table that never ended

Barza was born in 1963 in Tyre, on Lebanon's southern coast, a Phoenician port where the sea gave fish and the land gave olive oil, herbs and wild greens. The first kitchen he knew was his mother's, and what he remembers is not a single dish, but what the dishes did to people.

"My parents used to fill out a whole table full of food every Sunday, and our families would join the table from twelve to six in the evening," he said. "They would sit and eat."

The food gave a whole family a reason to arrive, a reason to sit down and a reason not to leave. "It is a big joy," he said. "You talk, you sing, you dance, you drink." Hours passed over the same table.

That, he said, is the thing the world misses when it looks at Lebanese food. "Especially we Lebanese. we share the food." Nothing is served to one person.

The dishes arrive together, in the style the Levant calls mezze, and everyone reaches across for what they want. A plate becomes a conversation, and a meal becomes an afternoon. As a child, Barza simply sat inside it. Years later, he understood that this was what he wanted to give people.

From the table to the world

That feeling enrolled him at The Hotel School of Arts in Lebanon at a time when cooking schools had almost no money and learned to make a great deal out of a little.

From there he moved into hotel kitchens, spending 15 years with Hilton, where he helped open more than ten restaurants around the world and later became the group's brand ambassador for the Gulf and Africa.

In 2009 he opened Joe Barza Culinary Consultancy in Beirut, helping hospitality developers with menus, kitchen design and training. The international Master Chef designation followed in 2010, and in 2011 he co-hosted the Middle Eastern edition of Top Chef, before teaching at Le Cordon Bleu. Along the way he has taken Lebanese cooking to 27 countries.

"My identity is Lebanese cuisine," he said. "This is my work for more than 44 years, and in Sweden, in France, in India, I try to understand what is in the head of the customer."

Coming home

He lives in Beirut now and speaks of it with a devotion that is hard to miss.

"I am from Tyre, but I live in Beirut, and every piece of Lebanon means something to me," he said.

Abu Dhabi, as he tells it, is the third corner of that life, and the one that has stayed with him longest, and is reason why he keeps coming back to the city. It is an experience he sums up in four words

"I consider it coming home."

So, when he was asked to rework the menu at LiBeirut in the Conrad hotel in Abu Dhabi, he knew what he was cooking for. The brief fitted into a single sentence: a typically Lebanese menu, the kind of food guests ate twenty years ago, presented with care. And this took him back to the childhood table in Tyre.

"Going back to the roots means my mom, your mom, our traditional way of cooking," he said. "Because we miss it."

Back to the roots

It took him five days to work on the menu, and he began where a Lebanese meal begins, with the dishes meant to be shared.

The tabbouleh is dressed with the sour juice of unripe grapes. The fattoush comes with the bread it is meant to have, toasted in the oven with sumac.

The green beans are cooked in olive oil, as they were in his mother's kitchen. There is kibbeh, and there are sujuk and makanek, which he said bring Beirut back the moment they hit the pan.

For the main courses he went into the provincial kitchens, to the dishes people once travelled to an old Lebanese restaurant to eat. Potatoes with garlic and coriander, grilled lamb in the right balance, and seafood on moghrabiyeh with saffron and coriander.

"We usually eat it with meat and chicken," he said. "I wanted to do it with this."

The desserts are the ones he grew up on, rice pudding with milk, the way his mother made it, custard with chocolate, meghli, and several versions of mhallabiyeh.

Give the product its value

A guest might take some details for novelty, such as the cherries with the kebab fatteh, or the pomegranate molasses and jelly on the mutabbal. Barza will not have the word.

"This is not fusion. We are trying to give the product its value. Some people look at moghrabiyeh and see moghrabiyeh. I see a diamond."

Giving a product its value, in his telling, begins with leaving it alone.

"If I want to make hummus, I start with the hummus first, and then, if I want to add spice, I add it. So I have the base first," he said.

He explains it with the dish everyone knows.

"Hummus with shawarma, for example, adds to its value. That is how you give the hummus its value."

The same patience runs through the rest. He keeps the sugar to 12 per cent so that nothing feels heavy, and he keeps the plates simple.

"I don't want to complicate things," he said. "The eye sees. This is very important." And then the line he comes back to: "We have to give attention to everything, even the green beans, even the bread. I got too much into details, and this is a big part of my success."

None of it, he said, is really about technique. It is about what the food does once it is on the table.

"Food is a soul reflection," he said.

It is the joy he first saw in Tyre, when a family stayed from noon until evening because the food gave them a reason to. He wants to give it to whoever sits down. "

We cannot export anything but our culture and our food," he said.

"I like to raise our own food wherever I go. I am always proud. As simple as that."

In Abu Dhabi, a city he has returned to for 27 years, he is still setting that table.