How Chef Nabhan Al Ali is preserving Emirati flavours and memories in Dubai

Dubai: The warmth of your mother's hands as she kneads the dough. The aroma of bread baking before sunrise. The crackle of spices blooming in hot Emirati ghee. Long before recipes are written down or traditions are spoken about, this is where a cuisine truly begins.

For Chef Nabhan Al Ali, Executive Chef of ATHAR by Qlab, these are not simply childhood memories. They are the foundation of everything he cooks today.

The all-day Emirati dining and specialty coffee destination recently opened at City Centre Mirdif as part of the Chef's Society section. Its philosophy stems from the meaning of leaving a lasting imprint on every diner with its food, beverages, ambience and heartfelt hospitality rooted in instinctive Emirati generosity.

"My mum always had an answer for everyone," he says. "I still remember waking up early in the morning and smelling the bread my grandmother was baking. That aroma made me love the kitchen."

It is a memory that has stayed with him for more than four decades, quietly shaping a career that has become about creating dishes and preserving something far more fragile: the identity of a nation's cuisine.

Ironically, it all started with failure.

"If you don't understand the kitchen," he says, "you don't understand the business."

Long before Chef Nabhan understood the language of a professional kitchen, he understood what it felt like to lose one.

In 2009, still in his twenties, he invested in opening his first restaurant. He loved food. He loved discovering new restaurants and knew what made a memorable meal. What he did not know was how a professional kitchen worked.

"I couldn't ask the right questions."

When the business failed, it took more than his investment with it. It taught him a lesson that would define the rest of his career. Many entrepreneurs would have walked away.

Instead, he decided he would become the person he wished he had hired.

"I had to understand the kitchen myself. I didn't ever want to lose like that again. I am a very competitive sportsman at heart," explained the former boxer.

In 2014, he enrolled at the SCAFA Culinary Institute Dubai, where he met Chilean Chef Francisco, the mentor who introduced him to the discipline, precision and relentless standards of a professional kitchen.

For the first time, he wasn't simply learning recipes. He was learning how kitchens think.

More importantly, he learnt that running a successful kitchen required as much leadership as culinary skill.

"I understand the personality needed to work in the kitchen," he says. "I'm a boxer. I have that mindset. When something is wrong, you must address it immediately. You must be firm. Not every businessman understands that."

The training transformed him. "I understand the kitchen now," he says. "I can ask my staff the right questions because I've done the work myself."

That knowledge would soon prove invaluable.

By 2016, he had opened a healthy food concept built around his passion for fitness and nutrition. What began as a single restaurant grew into a successful chain of health-focused outlets across Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and Ajman.

Eventually, he sold parts of the business. For many entrepreneurs, that might have been the destination. For Chef Nabhan, it became the beginning of something far more meaningful.

As he travelled across the Emirates, another question had quietly begun to occupy his thoughts. Where was Emirati food?

Every Friday became an opportunity to search for it. He visited hotels and restaurants across the country, expecting to find the dishes that had shaped his childhood and reflected the country's culinary identity.

Instead, he found international buffets with only the faintest nod to local cuisine.

"There was a gap," he says simply. "You would find every cuisine, but very little Emirati food."

For a country celebrated for its hospitality, global outlook and culinary diversity, he found remarkably few places dedicated to showcasing Emirati cuisine with the same confidence afforded to other world cuisines.

Food, to him, carries memory. It tells the story of families gathered around one table and of centuries of trade that brought spices across the Indian Ocean and connected the Emirates with India, East Africa and the wider Arab world. It is history preserved through flavour.

For him, the absence represented something much larger than a missing menu. It reflected the quiet disappearance of recipes that had once formed the centre of every Emirati home.

"If people stop cooking the food," he says quietly, "history disappears with it." Rather than accept that reality, he decided to document it.

He travelled across the Emirates, from Abu Dhabi to Fujairah, meeting elderly Emirati women who had spent decades preserving family recipes. He sat beside them in their kitchens, watching every movement, listening to the stories behind every dish, asking why one spice was added before another, why certain ingredients could never be substituted, why recipes differed from one family to the next.

Later, many of those women came to cook with him in his own kitchen.

"They weren't just teaching me recipes," he says. "They were teaching me our history."

Every conversation became part of a much larger archive. Every recipe revealed something about the country's past, its people and the generations who had shaped its identity long before recipes appeared in books.

His ambition was never simply to recreate traditional food. It was to preserve it for the next generation.

"I wanted it to be there for the UAE," he says. "For our children. For the next generation."

The work grew into a personal mission to document Emirati cuisine in its truest form, recording recipes before they were lost and preserving techniques that had largely been passed down through memory rather than measurement.

For centuries, the Emirates stood at the crossroads of global trade. Long before skyscrapers defined Dubai's skyline, merchants travelled the Spice Route carrying spices, textiles, coffee and ideas between India, East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and beyond. Those journeys left their mark not only on commerce but on the Emirati table itself.

"We have richness in our spices," he explains. "You can see the connection through the Spice Route. We traded together for centuries, and that influenced our food."

That influence remains visible today in the layers of flavour found throughout Emirati cooking.

"There is something about Emirati food," he says. "People experience new flavours, but they also recognise something comforting."

That understanding and journey became the foundation of the restaurant's menu.

Rather than reinvent Emirati cuisine, he wanted to present it in a way that felt modern while remaining completely faithful to its origins.

"The recipes don't change," he says firmly.

The Emirati ghee remains. The dried, fragrant Lumi or lemon remains. The traditional Emirati Bezaar or spice mix remains.

"The ingredients stay the same," he adds. What changes is the presentation.

His ambition is not to modernise Emirati food by changing its identity, but by allowing it to stand confidently alongside the world's great cuisines while remaining unmistakably itself.

For him, evolution should never come at the expense of authenticity.

"We stay with our flavours," he says. "We make it relevant today, but we don't lose who we are."

Every plate reflects that philosophy, honouring the past while inviting a new generation to discover it for themselves.

Traditional Emirati food was never designed to be eaten in isolation. It was created around generosity, conversation and community. Meals were placed at the centre of the table, shared between family, neighbours and guests, each dish carrying as much meaning as flavour.

Modern dining has changed that. Individual plates have replaced communal platters. Meals have become quicker, quieter and often more solitary.

He wanted to reclaim something that had quietly slipped away. That philosophy inspired the restaurant's sharing plates.

"We want people to come here and think about their grandmother's kitchen," he says. "To remember home. To sit together with family, neighbours and friends, sharing food, conversation and joy."

For him, the experience is as important as the dishes themselves. Every plate is intended to bring people back around the same table, just as generations of Emirati families have done before them. Some dishes, however, demand reverence.

Ask him what every guest should try, and the answer comes without hesitation.

"Majboos (chicken or meat cooked with aromatic rice)," he says. "Or Madrooba (a meat and vegetable dish with porridge-like consistency)."

They are not simply signature dishes. "They are a journey through time."

He smiles before adding, "When people eat them, I want them to taste history."

For Chef Nabhan, authenticity has never meant remaining frozen in time. It means allowing tradition to evolve without forgetting where it came from.

He believes Emirati cuisine deserves the same international recognition afforded to the world's most celebrated culinary traditions.

"The UAE has so many wonderful restaurants," he says. "But I don't think there is another place like ATHAR." He sees it becoming a destination where visitors experience not only Emirati cooking, but Emirati culture itself. A restaurant capable of elevating the country's cuisine into the world of fine dining while remaining deeply rooted in its traditions.

"I think it will become something different," he says. "In three or four years, I want people to see Emirati cuisine at another level."

Today, at 45, after building businesses, studying professional cooking, documenting recipes across the Emirates and introducing Emirati cuisine to audiences overseas, he finds himself pursuing the same feeling that first drew him into his mother's kitchen.

The sense of belonging. Because, for Chef Nabhan, food has never been simply about nourishment. It is how a nation remembers.

And every dish that leaves his kitchen is another small promise that those memories will continue to be shared, around one table, across one conversation, and from one generation to the next.