Why Abu Dhabi residents queue despite delivery culture

Abu Dhabi: Almost every evening, a line forms outside Marmellata at Mina Zayed Port, and I kept walking past it with the same question: why?

This is a city where dinner comes to you. You open an app, a rider is assigned, a little dot crawls across a map toward your sofa. Nobody has to stand anywhere. And yet here were people standing on the waterfront, waiting for pizza.

Marmellata is open five days a week, closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Father and son Raj and Sebastian Dagstani run it from a waterfront spot with seating indoors and out, and the homemade pizzas have been coming out of the kitchen since 2019. There is no delivery button to fall back on.

So, I joined the line to understand why.

"It is not unusual"

I started with the simplest question I had: what brings you here?

Renelvie 29, Orlane 51 and Rovane 25 were standing in the line together and had only been waiting for a couple of minutes, and their answers were as unceremonious as the question.

For Renelvie it was the marketing on social media. Rovane had simply been before. “I know that it is good and worth the wait, and I do not mind being in the queue for a little while.”

A place proven once is a place worth returning to, even if returning means standing still for a while.

And standing in line is not something unusual for them.

"Usually, I would say maybe 40% of the time, when we go out to eat," Renelvie said.

But it was the next answer that went to the heart of what I had come to the port to understand. In a city where the same pizza can be ordered to your door, why queue at all?

“If you want the dining-in experience, which is what we wanted, then it is worthwhile to sit in the queue, especially because the ambiance is really nice and the staff are really friendly.” Renelvie said.

The line, as they described it, is not an obstacle between you and dinner but the way into the evening itself. And when I asked whether we have moved past the era of standing in line, the reply was short and certain: “I would not say so.”

Only if it is worth it

Barbara Yamshchikova 21, was standing a bit further down the line, well away from the front. She explained why this particular line, out of all the lines in the city, was the one she had chosen.

“I know the owner and his son. I was studying together with him, so we were planning to visit this place quite a long time ago, and we are finally here.” For her, the wait was simply the last stretch of a plan that had been a long time coming.

She has rules of her own, though. Does she stand in line for food as a rule? “If I know it is worth it, definitely. Otherwise, not really.”

What makes it worth it?

“It depends. For food, it is the food itself, and if it is viral.” Beyond that, she said, she will queue only for a place that has been recommended to her, or one she already knows.

Alaadin J. from Morrocco was also standing in the line with his son and wife. Just like me, he has seen the line multiple times and it is the reason why he is standing in it now.

"The queue here is the reason why we are now standing here waiting to try the pizza," he said.

We are human, we need human connection

Raj Dagstani founded Marmellata and runs it with his son. For seven years he has watched a line form outside his restaurant. I put to him the question I had asked everyone standing in it: what makes people queue up here almost every evening? He started with the food, and then set it aside.

“Consistency, I think, genuine spirit. The food is quite good, but the food lives in the background. Like we are a beautiful location. We are the last slice of old Abu Dhabi, so there’s no filter of luxury," he said.

What he wanted to talk about instead was the people in the line, and who they are. The way he described it, the queue puts everyone in the same place, whatever they arrived in.

“In the line sometimes there very, very famous people or very, very wealthy people. You have a guy who got out of his Rolls Royce, and you have a guy who got off his bicycle, and they are in the same line together. So, it is a great neutralizer, and it becomes a filter, right? So, it is a self-selecting audience: people who come and they are willing to wait for something, and so they end up becoming friends.”

That friendship, he said, does not end when the evening does. The line is where people find each other, and over the years it has become something larger than a wait for pizza.

In an era when dinner can be ordered with a single tap, why do people keep coming here at all?

“I think to avoid that. I think there is a human connection, and the further you move away from it, the more people want it. You know what I mean. And we are very human, and very analog, we don’t have QR codes.

And most importantly: "There is no skipping the line.”

Standing in line for coffee

Marmellata is not the only place where I see people choosing to wait.

At Modern Coffee by WatchHouse - The Arcades, I always see a long line for coffee. Coffee is about as easy to have delivered as anything in this city. It is the simplest thing you can have brought to your door: one tap, a rider, a cup in your hand without ever leaving the sofa. A pizza at least takes time to make. A coffee is the kind of purchase the apps were built for, and still people were standing there talking waiting to be seated to have their coffee.

That is what made it interesting. A dinner out can be explained by the occasion, the table and the evening. A cup of coffee is smaller than that. If people will stand in a line for something this easy to order, then the queue is not only about the food or the drink.

In an era when almost everything can be skipped, waiting has become a choice, and choosing to do it says something.