FoodSheikh

24/08/2026

September, 2034

Dear Kids,

Remember when you were young, and Mummy and Daddy used to go out for “business meetings” at night? Well, I have a confession to make. They weren’t meetings. They were our date nights.

(A word of advice, my little unlicensed life coaches: meetings belong in office hours. After that, you should be doing something considerably more interesting.)

Mummy and Daddy went on date nights because long-term love needs space, a dose of realism, and - every now and then - a little razzmatazz.

What follows are some of our favourite date nights across the city.

One of our favourite date nights was itadaku , a little restaurant in Vita Wasl serving Japanese food so good the hambagu deserves its own star. But beyond the food, Itadaku gives you somewhere to escape to. There is something about the culture, the rituals, the precision and the care put into every little touchpoint that resets you. It slows you down. It makes you feel like an adult again.

You’ll learn, kids, that home eventually fills up with everything you love and everything currently annoying you - school bags, unpaid bills, a broken iPad, an exploded squishy, somebody else’s shoes or incessant demands for cotton candy ice cream.

There’s real value in sitting, occasionally, in a room where none of the problems belong to you. Itadaku whisks you away from all of it with their comforting calls of Irasshaimase! Masaru san and team settle you into ritual and calm and leave you oddly grateful for everything waiting for you at home.

Because, my little brainrot merchants, sometimes love means getting out of the house, and protecting the relationship from domestic logistics, if only for one evening.

Another great place is Rare in City Walk. Everyone thinks it’s a steakhouse but it’s not. It takes everything good about eating out and makes it easy - the antidote to mundane routine.

A neighbourhood restaurant that feels like a local favourite. It is not pretentious, or over the top. There is a lovely social ease to the place, enough sophistication to make the evening feel like an occasion, but never so much that you have to perform for it. 

Like a Tik Tok dance, for exa

20/08/2026

Status: A Welcome at Scale

The “status” category of Dubai’s dining landscape answers a different and very human need. A city that had built itself from almost nothing in a single generation, and that outsiders were quick to dismiss as artificial, had every reason to want the world to take it seriously.

Once Dubai became a regional business centre and a global visitor city, restaurants became one of the ways it asked to be seen clearly. They signalled abundance, safety, cosmopolitan fluency and the confidence to stage hospitality at scale.

This is the register most visitors mistake for the whole of Dubai, because it is the most photographed, reviewed and architecturally legible. It is also, read generously, the register of a city that deserved to belong to the world and set about earning its place.

The imported restaurant brand is the status register in its most concentrated form. A name that earned its reputation in London, New York, Istanbul, Milan or Tokyo arrives in Dubai already carrying a history.

In inviting these names in, the city did something more open than simply buy a menu. It offered itself as a place worth their while, and asked to be counted among the cities that matter. The exchange runs both ways: the home city of the brand benefits too, because culinary prestige travels outward with the franchise, the chef, the design language and the story of origin.

Dubai was learning the international language of dining by hosting its finest speakers.

If you want to read more, The Assembled Table, my essay on Dubai’s restaurant landscape, head over to foodsheikh.com or click the link in the Bio.

15/08/2026

What do LPM, Zuma, Novikov, Cipriani and Em Sherif all have in common? No, it’s not the same private equity guy.

They are all diversifying into different versions of themselves. The Marvel people would call it the Multiverse.

LPM and Em Sherif are creating café versions of themselves, while Novikov, Zuma and Cipriani are swapping polished loafers and high heels for flip-flops and thongs.

Call it evolutionary biology, if you’re feeling generous. The flagship restaurant, having achieved apex-predator status in its ecosystem of bottle service, birthday sparklers and the occasional DJ-saxophone combination, begins to produce gentler subspecies.

Part of the value of the flagship is its scarcity. Open too many and you risk eating your own lunch. So the clever move is not to clone the restaurant, but to invent a new occasion for the same brand.

Academically speaking, this is brand extension. But watch it happen several times in one summer and you start to suspect Dubai has invented a new food group: the Casual-Adjacent Luxury Offshoot.

Maybe it’s changing consumer behaviour. Maybe operators have simply learnt not to keep all their eggs in one brunch.

The Ivy understood this years ago. It took the mythology of its Covent Garden original and stretched it into Ivy Cafés and brasseries across Britain. The name remained prestigious even as the occasions multiplied.

What is more interesting is that this movement usually travels in one direction.

Luxury can become casual or lifestyle fairly easily. Prestige comes with it. A famous restaurant can open a café, beach club or little sister concept and some of the parent brand’s desirability rubs off automatically.

Try going the other way and things get awkward.

Starbucks tried it with Reserve Roasteries (but spent this year closing some of them). Taco Bell has occasionally run a luxe tasting-menu pop-up - but it’s just that, a pop-up.

Value brands carry their existing meaning with them too, and that meaning is harder to shake. Prestige, it turns out, speciates quite happily into a sun lounger and an oat flat white.

Cheap or casual doesn’t concentrate upwards so easily - Ravi, stop looking at me.

14/08/2026

This is my Kaikado tea caddy. Founded in Kyoto in 1875, Kaikado has handcrafted tea canisters through six generations, each one taking over 130 steps and a month to complete.

Mine is in brass, though it also comes in tin and copper. Every caddy ages differently, the oils in your hands slowly change the metal’s patina, so no two ever look the same over time. I use mine for coffee and I won’t apologise.

Its soft, self-closing lid is said to have fascinated Steve Jobs, who spent time at the Kaikado factory. You can still see that influence in Apple’s packaging today.

There is an absolute joy in beautiful things.

14/08/2026

The Assembled Table -

I’ve written an essay on my views of Dubai’s restaurant culture. Over 25 years of thought and observation into a long read essay.

This essay argues that Dubai’s modern restaurant culture was assembled rather than inherited.

The Emirates and wider Gulf have long possessed rich foodways, ritual hospitality, and domestic culinary traditions. The Majlis, gahwa, harees, rice dishes, seafood, dates, even the moral obligation to feed the guest - it all anchors Emirati food culture.

What Dubai did not inherit in the manner of older restaurant cities was a long-settled public dining institution through which a resident urban public had literally eaten itself into civic habit over generations.

Read The Assembled Table - link in the bio - or head over to foodsheikh.com - to read the whole thing. Desktop viewing better. :-)

11/08/2026

08/08/2026

The Share Shed is a place where, for a few pounds a week, you can borrow the specific tool required to discover you were never going to do the job anyway.

The Share Shed only works for a very specific breed of human. The person of monastic foresight, the one who knew, last Tuesday, that this Tuesday they would require a rotating leather punch, and calmly reserved it.

Their belt-hole needs do not sneak up on them. They live at such a serene remove from chaos that an emergency involving leather is simply not on their menu.

However, I find out at 11pm and in a fury heat up a screwdriver and go at the belt like a neanderthal, ruining the belt, ruining the screwdriver, and convincing myself throughout that if only I had the right tool I would conquer the world.

But, and more importantly, the Shed can lend you the punch, but it cannot lend you the discipline to bring the punch back. That part you have to supply yourself.

It can lend you the drill, but not the version of you who was ever actually going to put up that shelf. It can lend you the tool but never the competence. And it cannot lend you the reason.

It has a hedge trimmer, but it does not have a hedge, and it certainly does not have the life in which trimming hedges is a thing that you, personally, do.

You always told yourself the tool was the thing standing between you and the finished job. Now you have the tool and the job is still not finished. Hmmm.

(Check out the town’s wish list on the next slide - and my favourite wishes!)

In my local Shareshed, there is even a wish list! - this is my town’s collective subconscious, laid bare.

The roof slate cutter, the telescopic ladder, and the nail gun are all on this list, and I refuse to believe they’re for separate occasions. Somewhere in this town a man has a plan and it is not a good plan.

Then there’s the pizza oven, and note it’s not just a pizza oven - it’s specifically the Ooni Karu. This is a man who has done the research. He has watched the videos and he’s looking to launch a pop-up pizza place before embarking on his high street bricks and mortar dream.

But the one that worries me is the tarpaulin. Ten metres by ten metres. A hu

07/08/2026

The Share Shed is a place where, for a few pounds a week, you can borrow the specific tool required to discover you were never going to do the job anyway.

The Share Shed only works for a very specific breed of human being. The person of monastic foresight, the one who knew, last Tuesday, that this Tuesday they would require a rotating leather punch, and calmly reserved it. Their belt-hole needs do not ambush them. They live at such a serene remove from chaos that an emergency involving leather is simply not on their menu.

I however, find out at 11pm and in a fury heat up a screwdriver and go at the belt like a neanderthal, ruining the belt, ruining the screwdriver, and convincing myself throughout that if only I had the right tool I would conquer the world.

But, and more importantly, the Shed can lend you the punch, but it cannot lend you the discipline to bring the punch back. That part you have to supply yourself.

It can lend you the drill, but not the version of you who was ever actually going to put up that shelf. It can lend you the tool but never the competence. And it cannot lend you the reason.

It has a hedge trimmer, but it does not have a hedge, and it certainly does not have the life in which trimming hedges is a thing that you, personally, do.

You always told yourself the tool was the thing standing between you and the finished job. Now you have the tool. The job is still not finished. So it was never the tool.

In my local Shareshed, there is even a wish list! - this is my town’s collective subconscious, laid bare.

The roof slate cutter, the telescopic ladder, and the nail gun are all on this list, and I refuse to believe they’re for separate occasions. Somewhere in this town a man has a plan. It is not a good plan.

Then there’s the pizza oven, and note it’s not just a pizza oven - it’s specifically the Ooni Karu. This is a man who has done the research. He has watched the videos and he’s looking to launch a pop-up pizza place before embarking on his high street bricks and mortar dream.

But the one that worries me is the tarpaulin. Ten metres by ten metres. A hundred square metres of tarpaulin. What in God’s name is being covere

05/08/2026

WatchHouse is all the rage in the UK at the moment. It describes what it does as ‘Modern Coffee’, which, as far as I can tell, means reconsidering a few things we had come to accept as simply how coffee shops work.

Drink in and your coffee costs more than if you take it away. Order at the counter, but someone brings it to your table.
You are neither having table service nor carrying your own tray around like you’re in an airport. It’s a hybrid, and articles are now being written about this thrilling new frontier in seated hospitality.

Of course, none of this is new. Italians have charged you differently for standing at the bar or sitting at a table forever. Coffee houses were places of prolonged sitting, conversation and service long before they became queues of people waiting to hear someone shout “oat flat white” accompanied by a mis-pronounced name.

(I always like to give a super hero’s alter ego as my name – Bruce Banner, Tony Stark or Diana Prince are my favourites - Alec Holland if I’m feeling particularly pretentious and self important.)

But that’s what I find interesting. Innovation in hospitality is often just a tiny adjustment to whatever we have recently decided is normal. WatchHouse hasn’t reinvented the coffee shop. It has taken a few old ideas, reintroduced them into the current specialty-coffee format, wrapped the whole thing in lovely design and called it Modern Coffee.

And you know what? It does feel modern.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” – Alec Holland.

04/08/2026

Marguerite Patten’s International Recipe Cards.

This summer, I came across a set of recipe cards that my grandmother collected in 1968. They are a time capsule. Look deeper and they become a glimpse into post-war Britain through the culinary lens of the recipe - a reflection of what Britain was, and perhaps what she wanted to become.

Understanding who Marguerite Patten was is important, because the authority behind the cards explains their instincts. She was the Ministry of Food’s broadcaster during the war, the woman who taught rationed Britain to stretch a cheese ration and make dried egg palatable.

What you’re reading is wartime thrift laundered into peacetime sophistication. Full rationing had only ended in 1954. The affluence was new, the anxiety about waste was old, and the recipes aim to resolve that tension.

Take the Money Saving Dishes set, which is almost entirely offal and preserved cuts - kidney, liver, heart, corned beef, bacon, beans - but which lists them under German names, so that a plate of savoury heart arrives as Kalbsherz auf Wildart and kidney rolls as Feine Nieren Brötchen.

A heart is a hard sell to a housewife who remembers eating it through the war. Perhaps a Bavarian heart is a more seductive dinner. This is wartime thrift laundered into peacetime sophistication.

Take the Meals Without Meat set, comprising scallops, fish salad, trout, cod and crab. Meatless here does not mean vegetarian in the way we would now understand it, as an identity or an ethic; it means fish — the Friday-observant, thrift-and-variety sense of a meal without meat that comes long before vegetarianism became a way of living.

Thankfully, vegan and gluten-free requests were still decades from the dinner table.

Then look at which foreignness she reaches for, because we have been trained by the last forty years to assume that international means the Mediterranean and the East - olive oil, garlic, chilli, soy, the Elizabeth David and then the Ken Hom axis - and that world is almost entirely absent here.

What dominates instead is northern: German, Dutch, and above all Scandinavian, so that the herring alone turns up in a dozen guises across the sets, pic