FoodSheikh, Dubai (2026)

28/05/2026

Whenever I tell my friends back home I’m taking the kids to the mall, I get the impression they think I’m raising them in a casino. But Dubai doesn’t really have town squares or piazzas. It has air conditioning.

The mall here does the job the park does everywhere else — it’s where teenagers in Lyon meet, loiter, share fries - and other things? Probably - ignore each other, fall out, make up.

Where mine are concerned, it’s mostly running about and demanding things. My daughter loves it. My son, on the other hand, claims he can’t go because he gets “mall sick.” Like carsick, but for retail.

I’m not sure the mall is worse than a park, just different. I do wonder what they’ll be nostalgic about in twenty years, though.

The smell of Cinnabon, probably.

26/05/2026

I have not, in my adult life, had cause to apply sine or cosine. Tangent has come up once, possibly, in a conversation about something else, I forget what.

They sit unused in my brain alongside the periodic table and the precise year of the Battle of Hastings, which I do still remember, oddly. 1815.

Hours of my childhood went into balancing chemical equations, making the coefficients match on both sides of the arrow, and I remember the slight panic of getting it wrong, and the teacher’s promise that this would matter one day. It has not. Not once.

What has mattered every day is food. The pleasure of it first, the sitting down, the cooking for people. Then the health side of it, which I came to late and the hard way, working out which foods make you feel good and which ones don’t. And then the cultures. You can’t really understand a place until you’ve eaten it. A bowl of pho can you as much about Vietnam as most of the history books. Ask Bourdain.

Nobody taught me any of this. I wasn’t even shown how to scramble an egg. I learned that from my mate, on his parents’ Aga, aged nineteen.

Same with philosophy. Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, which seems like quite a big sentence to leave off the curriculum. At no point in eleven years of school did anyone suggest I might sit quietly with my own thoughts.

They did make sure I could recite the quadratic formula under duress. And then there’s all the practical stuff. How to change a tyre, although in fairness my method for that is to drive to ENOC and let someone else do it, which I think counts. How to hang a painting straight. How to spackle a wall or change a plug. None of that came from school either. Although I suppose that was always sort of dad’s job, wasn’t it.

The food and the philosophy though, nobody picked up. I’m not anti-maths. I’m sure a structural engineer somewhere is profoundly grateful for trigonometry. Good for them.

The rest of us left school knowing the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but not really knowing how to feed ourselves, or how to think about why we were here.

It’s an odd set of priorities, when you think about it.

25/05/2026

I couldn’t tell you the distance from my house to… anywhere really. Isn’t that strange? I have no idea how many kilometres it is from my house to my office. Or the airport. Or Itadaku.

And this isn’t a metric/imperial issue – I couldn’t tell you in miles or yards either.

But I don’t think it’s specifically a ‘me’ problem. I don’t think the Serb would know. I don’t think you would know either. But I can tell you with pretty high accuracy how long it will take me to get to those places.

Ask how far somewhere is, and you’ll get a glance at a watch then a time. It’s about twenty minutes. From where? Doesn’t matter.

And by that definition, the distance between two places in Dubai changes hour by hour and day by day. DIFC on a Friday night is much further away than it is on a Sunday morning. The airport is thirty minutes from my house, except when it’s an hour. Both are correct. Both are true.

And this Eid, however you measure the distance to the people you love - in minutes, in hours, in flights, in time zones, in years since you last saw them - I hope you find a way to close it, even for a little while.

24/05/2026

A developer told me recently that a tenant should never rely on the landlord for foot traffic. I found myself disagreeing.

Surely the whole pitch of a destination is that the destination does some of the lifting, otherwise what exactly are we paying the rent for?

But a restaurateur friend of mine, who has outlived more landlords than seems statistically reasonable, agreed before I’d even finished the objection.

To rely on someone else’s marketing calendar, someone else’s vision, someone else’s appetite for the long game, is to mortgage your survival to a story you don’t get to write.

Charlie Wardle put it better than I’m going to. “A bird on a branch doesn’t trust the branch. It trusts its wings.”

The branch sways, the branch snaps, the branch gets cut down by something nobody saw coming. The bird flies anyway, because the flying was never the branch’s to give.

That’s the whole thing, really. Real freedom, real success, begins the moment we believe the strength is already ours.

21/05/2026

At the risk of sounding like ChatGPT, really is more than just an airline. It is a national carrier. The Nation’s carrier.

It is as much a part of Dubai as the Burj and the brunch. Arguably, the Burj and the brunch exist because of Emirates. Without the planes there is no city to fill, no Sunday roast to book, no skyline to point at. Almost all of us got here because of a red tail somewhere.

Emirates has inspired an entire generation of curious explorers across the planet to keep discovering. To fly better.

Its crew have stood on podiums, in winners’ circles and on grand slam courts the world over, and back home they’ve shaped and filled the city with international flair, youth and personality.

It’s the boarding jingle that lives deep in the memories of anyone who’s lived here. It’s the little cabin stars overhead somewhere over the Mediterranean at three in the morning.

Emirates is always either taking you on an adventure or bringing you home.

And it has just kept flying. Through the credit crunch, when half the cars at the airport were abandoned and through Covid, when the skies emptied and the world stopped. Those planes kept moving people home.

And now through this, when we’ve all been staring up at the sky and feeling rather small. Still warm towels and dimmed lights for landing. Still ‘good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Dubai, where the local time is….’

Emirates is Dubai. Glamorous, resilient, and always asking where will tomorrow take you?

And I can’t tell you how happy I feel these days, when I see one climbing up into the clouds.

17/05/2026

The Serb and I enjoy the occasional wellness session – sound healing in Qudra desert, 9D Breathwork at TODA, full moon meditation at the House of Wellness, chakra alignment at Sohum, Qi Gong with Master Can. It’s a guilty pleasure.

So, when I saw an advert for “The Way of The breath – discover the ancient Japanese art of Shakuhachi” I was sold. Stick “The Way of” and “Ancient Japanese Art” into anything, and you’ve got me hook, line and sinker.

So there we were, Saturday night in an intimate apartment in Arjan with two other strangers, all nervously fi*****ng japanese bamboo flutes.

The shakuhachi for most of its history it was not really a musical instrument at all. The wandering monks of the Edo period saw it as a religious tool, and what they practised with it was suizen — blowing Zen — where the goal was never a tune but a single sound fully inhabited. It was more the process than the output.

Kyle Chomei, who led the session, has been playing for 25 years, and who I’ve had the pleasure of hearing perform in the past. He gave us an hour of his time and shared his knowledge with a generosity sincerity.

However, two things became apparent within ten minutes. Well, three things.

The first was that the instrument refuses effort. Blow harder and the note collapses into air; relax the jaw, slow the exhale, surrender the wish to produce something, and a tone emerges that you did not consciously make. Every instinct that modern living has trained into you - push, optimise, deliver, perform - turns out to be precisely the wrong one.

The second was that no two notes are ever the same, because the bamboo is irregular and life is like that, and these are not flaws to be engineered out but the entire reason the thing is worth playing.

So, not a lesson in flute playing at all, but an understanding of practice over performance, a suggestion that imperfection is not a defect and effort doesn’t always guarantee results. A Saturday evening well spent.

Oh – and the third point was that The Serb was clearly better at it than me. But luckily the output is not the priority, it’s about the journey.

16/05/2026

I’ve been thinking about opening a small boutique bookshop. Stationery, a bit of coffee, somewhere people can come and find themselves for an hour.

The feedback has been kind. Lovely idea, everyone says. Won’t make any money, everyone also says.

The two sentences arrive together, as if the second cancels the first. It struck me how strange that is. That the barometer of whether something is worth doing is whether it will make money.

Not whether it will be loved, used, needed, missed if it disappeared. Just the bottom line. What if it washed its own face? What if the staff were paid, the rent was covered, the lights stayed on, and the point was simply to give the neighbourhood somewhere quiet to sit with a book. Is that not a successful business.

Or have we agreed, somewhere along the way, that breaking even is a kind of failure.

15/05/2026

The customer is always right. Except, increasingly, in restaurant ‘concepts’. Restaurants have rules now. Not health and safety rules, but aesthetic ones.

The flat white that can’t be hotter because 65 degrees is the optimal tasting temperature. Same with the hand roll place that won’t cut their hand rolls in half for you. We hope you understand. House policy. It’s the concept.

And look, I respect the craft. I wouldn’t tell a tailor how to cut a suit. But I’d want to choose the colour.

I always wonder where the line is - there is clearly a line, I get that, I can’t be asking a chef to deep-fry the tiramisu. But by the same notion, surely there is some flexibility.

At what point does dedication to the concept becoming annoying to the guest?

I don’t know the answer, but I do know that conviction is admirable and rigidity less so.

14/05/2026

30-ish days of Daily Observations. Day 4.

My kids got excited last week when a new bridge opened nearby.

Properly excited, the way you are when you’re young enough to find civil engineering thrilling or old enough to appreciate traffic easing.

Now they’ve spotted another construction site just outside our community and they’re guessing what it’ll be.

A foot bridge across the road, they’ve decided, linking us to their friends and the big Spinneys on the other side. They’ve already planned the walk and the new world of possibilities it offers.

And luckily the community Facebook group has been super helpful in confirming what it is.

It is for sure not a foot bridge. It is, with absolute certainty, the foundation for a billboard. It is also, definitively, a drainage project. Someone else has confirmed, from a reliable source, that it’s a DEWA substation. But it could also actually be a foot bridge.

I haven’t told the kids any of this. I’m not sure when I will. There’s a version of this conversation that can wait.

13/05/2026

30 Days of Daily Observation - Day 3

I’m driving a Tesla at the moment (no, not moonlighting as an uber driver) and the key is my iPhone.

I pulled up to a hotel valet recently and realised, halfway through handing over nothing, that I had no key to give him. He stood there with his hand out. I stood there with my phone, which was the key, which I obviously wasn’t handing over.

I have no protocol for this yet. I don’t even know how to open the glovebox.

So I did the only thing I could think of - pretended to receive a very important and life-changing phone call, mouthed an apology, and drove off in great haste.

But the Tesla can’t perform the dramatic exit - it’s hard to look urgent in a car that makes no noise.

Obviously, I can never return to that hotel again.

FoodSheikh

28/05/2026

26/05/2026

25/05/2026

24/05/2026

21/05/2026

17/05/2026

16/05/2026

15/05/2026

14/05/2026

13/05/2026

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