Inside Boca, a breezy, biophilic tapas restaurant in the heart of Dubai‘s Financial District, the after-work crowd is drinking at the bar. Downstairs, I’ve joined friends for dinner in the private dining room located in the restaurant’s wine cellar. Many bottles in the collection are from Morocco, Lebanon, and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa. We start with oysters harvested from Dibba Bay in Fujairah, the easternmost of the United Arab Emirates, on the Gulf of Oman. Opened a decade ago, Boca has become a pioneer in using ingredients sourced from across all seven emirates. The oysters share a menu with only-in-the-Emirates ingredients like khansour, a mountain plant often used in salads, and kingfish from the Arabian Gulf, served ceviche-style. Technically, Boca is a Spanish restaurant, but its Dubai roots and commitment to local ingredients make it uniquely Emirati.
Not long ago Boca’s approach was atypical for Dubai. Since 2001, when Gordon Ramsay flew in to raise the curtain on Verre, inside the Hilton Dubai Creek, the city’s culinary circuit has been dominated by celebrity chefs opening glitzy restaurants inside equally glitzy hotels. In the years to follow, Michel Rostang, Nobu Matsuhisa, and Massimo Bottura all lent their names to restaurants in the UAE, creating a food scene with an international reputation for glamor, excess, and exorbitant prices. Certainly the restaurants were buzzy—Ramsay’s caramelized apple tarte Tatin, served straight from the oven in a copper pan, would sell out each night. But the names and concepts were all imports, detached from anything truly local. For years this meant that Dubai’s only real dining options were big-name, white-tablecloth restaurants or unassuming eateries in neighborhoods without skyscraper hotels, which served shawarmas, pani puri, and cheese-laden manakeesh.
Now there is a third way. Chefs and restaurateurs from the UAE and around the world recognized a gap in the market that would allow them to showcase regional ingredients while pursuing their own culinary ambitions. With the COVID pandemic prompting a desire to support local restaurants, the last few years have seen the rapid growth of a high-quality homegrown restaurant scene.
Take Boca. It’s the brainchild of Omar Shihab, a Dubai-born-and-bred Jordanian national who has become one of the UAE’s leading sustainability champions, working with local and international government bodies. “It didn’t matter what cuisine we served,” he says. “We wanted to feature quality ingredients we could get locally.” This mindset is shared by Shaw Lash, a jovial Texan with a background in Mexican cooking who moved to Dubai eight years ago. At the end of 2022, she and her Dutch Syrian husband, Tarek Islam, opened Lila Taqueria on Jumeirah Beach Road, right next to a small shop serving more local dishes like shawarma. They followed with Lila Molino + Café in trendy Alserkal Avenue, a warehouse complex. “Homegrown, chef-driven wasn’t nearly what it is now, so I always thought Dubai had potential for the Mexican food that I made,” Lash says. She and her team grow most of their ingredients and work with local farmers to source the tomatoes, tomatillos, chiles, squash, and more that brighten up her plates. She and her team also make their own tortillas fresh every morning. Lila Taqueria’s pièce de resistance is a local red snapper, served in two butterflied halves with guajillo chile paste and coriander.
Further inland, among the unassuming maze of Jumeirah Lakes Towers, or JLT, a stack of skyscrapers rising from a series of artificial lakes, a panoply of global cuisines can now be found, including the Peruvian hole-in-the-wall Fusión Ceviche and the Greek taverna Mythos Kouzina & Grill. This is also where, in 2017, Palestinian chef Salam Daqqaq opened her casual Levantine restaurant Bait Maryam, which is Arabic for “the home of her mama, Maryam.” International accolades from the Michelin Guide and the World’s 50 Best Restaurants prompted her to expand next door. This past summer she opened the more upmarket restaurant Sufret Maryam across town in the plush Jumeirah complex of Wasl 51. Its centerpiece is a sufretna—a communal dining table—that seats 20. The star of the menu is habra niyeh, a dish of minced raw beef mixed with spices with a silky pâté-like texture that is perfect for spreading on freshly baked saj flatbread. These are the kinds of places—rather than swanky hotel restaurants—that many of us Dubai locals began seeking out during the pandemic. They don’t all have liquor licenses like the big-ticket spots do, but they’re sure to have a heap of soul.
Soul is what the Serbian restaurateur Stasha Toncev brings to the table. She relocated to Dubai in 2010 to work for Armani Ristorante and later Hakkasan, but found her path in 2018, when she launched 21grams. The tiny 25-seat Balkan bistro’s original location was in the residential Umm Suqeim neighborhood, steps away from a popular public beach in the shadow of the iconic sail-shaped Burj Al Arab hotel. After 21grams opened, I would often wrap up my weekends with a sunset beach stroll and a laid-back dinner there. Four years later, when lockdown restrictions were lifted, Toncev transplanted the venue to a larger space nearby. She and head chef Milan Jurkovic serve what she describes as “honest, wholesome soul food, inspired by the mountains, pastures, and seas of the Balkan peninsula, with centuries-old recipes, modern cuisine, and seasonal ingredients.” Weekends are busy, so the no-reservations policy means lines for a table and all-day breakfast dishes like scrambled eggs in a tomato, pepper, and onion relish with beef chorizo and a soft cow’s cheese, a favorite of Emiratis and expats alike.
For a taste of breakfast from someone who knows a thing or two about brunch and coffee, go see Tom Arnel. The Aussie native, who formerly worked at various Michelin-starred hot spots like Arzak, is a master of growing local businesses in Dubai. Over a dozen years he has opened 12 only-in-Dubai restaurant brands, with 22 total locations. At his first Australian café, Tom & Serg, in Al Quoz, a neighborhood best known for its warehouses, the immediate daily queues proved that a great menu will be popular no matter what the location. “Australia has an amazing café culture that comes with gourmet food for breakfast and lunch,” he says, “and I thought I would bring that to the UAE because the place at the time was full of franchises and international food brands that were spitting out very mechanical food that I didn’t like.” The expat community lapped it up. My multicultural foodie friends and I were more than happy to line up for Arnel’s pop-up Rule the Roast deal—150-day Angus rib-eye beef and Western Australian lamb leg, complete with all the trimmings. The boisterous vibe only added to the fun.
But no conversation about the wave of new homegrown global cuisine in Dubai would be complete without a mention of Filipino food, which until recently was underrepresented in the city despite the large local population. That changed in 2022 when JP Anglo, a globe-trotting chef and social media star who moved to Dubai four years ago, opened Kooya Filipino Eatery after a string of successful pop-up dinners during the pandemic. The menu at his charming bistro is centered around the Philippines‘ signature stews and deep-fried dishes, always served with a dipping sauce. He makes generous use of vinegars and souring agents like calamansi, a lime native to the country. A bestseller at Kooya is the chicken inasal, a dish that originated in Anglo’s hometown of Bacolod. Grilled and marinated in coconut vinegar, lemongrass, and garlic, it is served with sides of papaya salad and garlic rice. For a sweet ending, order the pistachio-coated buttercream “sandwich.” “I’d like to be one of the Filipino chefs to help elevate our cuisine,” Anglo says, “and to hopefully one day bring it to the level of other cuisines like Chinese, Thai, and Indian.”
One cuisine does remain chronically underrepresented in Dubai: Emirati food. Few visitors to Dubai would seek out dishes like machboos, a signature concoction of spiced chicken rice, because Emirati cuisine outside the home remains relatively uncommon. Sahar Parham Al Awadhi is seeking to change that. The poster child for Emirati cooks, she won best pastry chef at the inaugural World’s 50 Best Middle East & North Africa awards in 2022, and became the first Emirati chef to work at the Burj Al Arab. She’s a consultant for Gerbou, which opened in November as one of the year’s most important new places to eat in Dubai. The restaurant, whose name translates to “welcome to our humble abode,” is a modern Emirati restaurant housed in a renovated 1987 building. Located in Nad Al Sheba, near the city’s famous race course, it is surrounded by historic ghaf trees, a symbol of Emirati culture. The menu includes machboos with local chicken and tomato pickles and other Emirati dishes interwoven with the Indian, Levantine, and Mediterranean flavors that Sahar experienced growing up in this relatively young nation.
“There’s always a misconception that only Emiratis should be cooking and pioneering Emirati food,” she says. “I disagree. Especially when we see Indians cooking Japanese and Singaporeans cooking Italian. Everyone should be cooking what they are passionate about.”
