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Where The Dubai Food Scene Should Go: Part 2
Written by Liam Collens // You can read more articles here.
The Highs
The Lows
The Highs
The Lows
Where The Dubai Food Scene Should Go, Part One received some generous feedback in my social media DMs. Table water, BYOB, more plant-based options and offcuts struck a chord with most people. I am heartened to see I am not the only one.
This tranche pivots in the other direction. Part One sought to fill a void with recommendations to edge Dubai’s Food Scene further from good to great.
Part Two reaches into the Dubai Food Scene to shine a light on things that ought to stop. I call time on ruinous practices and dishes.
This tranche pivots in the other direction. Part One sought to fill a void with recommendations to edge Dubai’s Food Scene further from good to great.
Part Two reaches into the Dubai Food Scene to shine a light on things that ought to stop. I call time on ruinous practices and dishes.
Dubai’s Food Scene: Burn the Following with Fire and the Bury the Ashes
The Plague of Instagram
Instagram has a lot to answer for when it comes to Dubai’s Food Scene. It can be a force for good. Still, I regularly find myself furrowing eyebrows, watching as some hyper-engineered dish passes by destined for another table. Worse, I sit against an absurd flower wall embossed with a vacuous quote in neon with the naked intention to create “an Instagrammable moment”.
Restaurants better known for their swings than their mains need a tough talk with themselves.
Why Start With Instagram?
I start Part Two with The Plague of Instagram on the Dubai Food Scene because Instagram’s influence is pervasive. Instagram’s crawly algorithm manifests itself as drivers for the points below.
Yet, there is a tipping point. Restaurants are developing dishes and decor with a heavy thumb on the scale towards ‘viral social media moments’ in the hope for hype in Instagram stories and posts. The relentless focus on food speaking for itself with word of mouth utter enjoyment is passé, so it seems. I am not a caveman. I know social media plays an important role in a restaurant’s marketing. I also know that some of the best restaurants in Dubai are not filled to the rafters because their IG TikTok game is poppin.
Restaurants are not only to blame. The culture is propelled by something worse. Cafes lay the bait snaring “food bloggers” clambering like Gollum to compete with each other for “the shot” of Their Precious. I see them. I see “Zomato food reviewers” getting “invites” to “review” an overly engineered doughnut or milkshake that tastes like cheap ingredients, E numbers and heart disease.
We know the places. We know the dishes. Stop. Curating these Instagram wonderlands is short-sighted, especially when the food is like a cheap Easter egg: beautiful on the outside but vacuous and devoid of substance within. To the ‘food bloggers’ who flock to these restaurants stoking the habit then migrating like locusts: do better. Hold yourself and these places accounts to deliver quality, not fads. Your Instagram is not the only thing that deserves a decent feed.
Chocolate melting orbs
This is the sugary, creatively-barren equivalent of a nuclear entombment. It only serves two purposes. The first purpose is to mask inferior desserts made with apathy. Never have I eaten a great chocolate fondant – or any good dessert for that matter – where I am left wanting a deluge of distinctly average molten chocolate. It improves nothing.
I will be all too glad to never see these again.
The second reason for these tragic chocolate floods is – and let’s say it together – Instagram. I struggle to understand why anyone is still filming this in 2021, yet alone why kitchens insist on churning them out. Decanting bland chocolate is the height of laziness and the wow factor long expired.
If you bring this feral melting chocolate orb nonsense to my table, please spare the brownie and, instead, pour the molten chocolate directly into my eyes so I may never have to bear witness to this again.
Gold
This is Dubai at its most frivolous, nurturing unhelpful stereotypes that Dubai is an exclusive playground for the YOLO crowd of WAGS, oligarchs, footballers and their mistresses. Hashtag boss life, hashtag eye roll.
Gold with food only serves two purposes from my perspective. Neither of which contributes towards the central proposition of outsourcing dinner to a skilled tradesman to produce something superior to my own cooking (a low bar I should say).
Firstly, gold tastes of nothing but gross margin. Lacing my meal with gold leaf is an act of disdain from kitchens hell-bent on grabbing me by the wallet. I never ate a dish where the feedback was: gold would really turn this from good to great. Gold: the third seasoning.
No lies detected, Gold Member would know
I recently came to learn of Nusr-Et’s gold steak menu. It is hard for me to describe (in writing) my strong feelings about this restaurant at the best of times, but I will let you read the tea leaves. The already outrageously priced goldless Ottoman Steak will set you back AED1000 (US$272, EUR223, £198). You can enjoy the same steak (plus 700g) wrapped in gold for twice the value of most monthly mortgage payments at AED4500 (US$1225, EUR1006, £893). I would love feedback from anyone that can tell me why, specifically, the gold Ottoman is 4.5x better. Nusr-Et, if you are reading, you are welcome to send me both steaks where we can do a blind taste. But you won’t, and we know why.
If Dubai offered more restaurants where customers only pay what they believe the dish is worth, you’ll never see gold again.
Second, adding a flavourless gold gossamer on everything from fried chicken to burrata (we will return to you) is as close as Dubai’s food scene gets to rolling a turd in glitter.
Gold serves as a red flag. What are you hiding? A delicious, well-sourced, beautifully prepared dish does not need gold. It is a superficial decoy nutritious to thirsty Instagram gremlins starved of content. That’s all. To take a line from my last Dubai Food Scene article, if you need gold on anything to eat, you need more than a blood test at your next Emirates ID renewal.
This is the sugary, creatively-barren equivalent of a nuclear entombment
Dubai’s Food Scene: Less is more on the following
Buffet Brunches
I start here with some contrition. I regularly frequented buffet brunches when I first moved to Dubai. The cornucopia of everything from crab legs to dim sum laid before you. I rampaged brattishly like Veruca Salt bounding through Wonka’s chocolate factory wanting the whole world, acquiring what was mine. The shine quickly wears off.
Today, there is not a single buffet brunch that inspires me to return to the restaurant for an a la carte menu. None in the last four years. In fact, there are restaurants I do not want to go back to because the brunch was somewhere between dire and meh.
Now I concede that I am a man of a certain age. In the my early 20s, no one really came to buffet brunches for the food. The game is to party, enjoy “the grape” and hopefully leave it more than what they came with if you know what I mean. To that end, brunch “vibes” will survive for a long time. If the food is incidental window dressing, why put on so much of it? Why not go a la carte or picnic brunches?
Firstly, the food wastage strikes me as staggering. I do not know this to be a fact but buffet brunches, especially at hotels, resemble organised food stock liquidation events. Like pigs to a trough, we line up wielding irrationally small plates to stack everything like a leaning tower of munch. Yet there is always a tremendous amount of food left behind at the end of the brunch.
I am inviting Dubai to call time on the mega buffet brunches. The food is seldom impressive, the cost is often extortionate, party people don’t care and food wastage is unthinkable. Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.
Burrata and truffle, everywhere
Why pick a fight with a sack of shredded mozzarella curd and a fungus? I will desert many at this point if I have not done so already.
Kitchens need to give people the food they want in order to survive and stay open. It is just good business. Restaurants serving unpopular food tend to shutter their doors quickly.
Burrata with figs and beetroot at Koko Bay
Yet menus start to look the same, uniqueness is in short supply and going out loses its thrill. A balance must be struck. These two ingredients are emblematic for me of where Dubai’s Food Scene goes overboard, gets it wrong and needs to pull back.
Dubai loves burrata so much you would think it originated here. Few Dubai menus are complete without burrata including some Japanese, American, British and Indian restaurants. I want to know which part of India, Britain or Japan burrata comes from. Someone, please show me on a map. The words “sell-out” shout from my inner monologue when I am sat in a restaurant with no Italian connection whatsoever featuring a burrata starter. Unprompted, even Mrs EatGoSee said to me this week that burrata is “way overdone” on menus. I never loved her more.
It can work: Chingon (RIP) featured a burrata with tomatillos that won me over.
The trinity of Dubai food sits between burrata, gold and also, truffle. These musky earthy silvers hit the plate on just about everything. Truffle has its role in cooking and I admire how some restaurants incorporate it in unexpected places with magnificent effect. I am looking at a certain wagyu beef korma dish.
However, black truffle is becoming Dubai’s new gold, driving my cynicism gland into overdrive. I cannot think of a time when I moreishly feasted on truffle fries (yet it is everywhere). There is a certain restaurant in Downtown that serves a scrambled egg shingled with truffle that adds precisely nothing.
Why add truffle to French fries and scrambled eggs? The truffle serves to efficiently extract well over AED100 from me for eggs on toast and kicks French fries well north of AED30. Why pay a reasonable price for breakfast when a restaurant can commit close to daylight robbery?
To be clear, I am not asking for truffle evisceration. I am asking restaurants to really think carefully as to whether truffle adds anything to their dishes other than a money-grab opportunity.
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