FoodSheikh, Dubai (2026)

04/10/2026

Well - this is awkward.

04/10/2026

Over the last twenty years of mushroom chopping, I’ve managed to slice every finger.

And I’ve come to the conclusion that a cut to the middle finger causes the least impact to my quality of life. The thumb is the worst, by the way, followed by the index.

Which is precisely why if an awesome gang or club ever demanded I sacrifice a digit for membership, I’d offer the middle finger without hesitation.

*image for illustrative purposes only.

01/10/2026

The Assembled Table is here.

My gastro-essay exploring how Dubai assembled (rather than inherited) its restaurant culture. Through provisioning, service, status, and identity, it traces the city’s food story from the Creek forward.

500 copies are now in print. I’m placing them free at independent cafés and bookshops across Dubai. Grab a copy, order a coffee or croissant, and support the venue.

If you run a café or bookshop and want to stock a few copies, DM or comment below. Let’s build this together.

Thanks!

FS

27/09/2026

Somewhere in the Cookie Haul rulebook, written in capitals and then repeated in case anyone was pretending not to have read it, is the instruction that the lid of your tin is not a cookie storage area.

Rules like that are never written in advance. Somebody, at an earlier haul, filled their tin, flipped the lid, built a second storey on top and walked towards the exit with the careful gait of a waiter carrying soup. I would very much like to have met them. I suspect they have done a brunch or two.

The premise is almost insultingly simple. You buy a tin, you fill it, you leave. In between is a long table of three thousand cookies from over a hundred bakers, each announced beforehand on Instagram like fighters at a weigh-in: Sea Salted Nutella, Sesame Noir, and something called Thai Me a Cookie.

Chef Sahar started it during the war, when the obvious move would have been another industry night of chefs telling each other it will all be fine. She built something for everyone else instead. Home bakers, who in Dubai have no route into a dining room beyond an oven and a delivery app, get an audience and their own sticker, which guests slap on their tins like supporters’ scarves.

Even the venue is picked because it could use the help: a café that a few hundred people will leave knowing, some of them staying on for a coffee.

Guests circle the table with the frowning concentration of someone repacking a suitcase at check-in, working out whether one more Thai thing will fit sideways. It feels older than a restaurant, closer to a bake sale or an Eid table.

Five hauls in, it has its own rules, its own heroes, and at least one notorious regular who knows exactly how much a lid can hold.

I love it!

Cookie Haul AE
Sahar Parham Al Awadhi

25/09/2026

Last night at Gymkhana I ate a dhal that was so delicious I wanted to pepper it with questions. Where are you from? What’s that smoky thing you’re doing and how much of you is butter?

But there was nobody to ask. I could have asked our waiter, but was still recovering from our ordering process, and The Serb’s entire knowledge of Indian food comes down to one question, which we’d already asked him forty times. (See previous post for context)

W**e gets a sommelier, someone in a waistcoat and a vocabulary that includes “quaffable”, who will happily talk you through a bottle for as long as you can stand it.

Food, some of the most complicated stuff humans have ever made, gets a waiter passing on a message from the chef who suggests you eat it in one bite, which is more of a dare than an explanation.

So how about this - a culinary sommelier. Someone who sits with you through a tasting menu and tells you what’s actually going on, from the technique and textures to the history and why that spice rather than the other one.

A very well-read dinner guest who really knows their stuff and doesn’t try your dessert.

Would I pay for this? Maybe. I’m also aware that paying a stranger to explain my dinner is how a food writer goes from “one of us” to “unfollow” in under 200 words.

Is this a brilliant idea, or have I reached peak pretentious?

25/09/2026

DIFC really needs a “you are here” map. We did two laps of the same courtyard, following a man in a gilet who looked like he knew where he was going. He didn’t.

Gymkhana, when we finally found it, is the latest import to land in DIFC. Inviting The Serb was a risk. She is known for many things, but a love of spicy food is not one of them.
Our ordering process was pointing at dishes and asking if they were spicy. Which proved unreliable, because our waiter’s idea of spicy was clearly different from ours and I could sense his anxiety.

So we ordered the most Caucasian items possible: the popadoms, a naan basket with cucumber raita, dhal, aloo chaat with masala yoghurt, a kasoori chicken kebab and, ahem, a plain white rice. The biggest spice risk we took was the mango and ginger soda. They should put the lot on as a tasting menu and call it A Mild Passage to India.

I was appointed royal taster, the canary in the mine, trying everything before declaring it safe for The Serb. Gymkhana roughly means sporting club, and although no sport was being played, a few guests were sweating. Should have ordered the raita, my over-zealous spice-loving friends.

The manager stopped by for a chat. The Dubai menu, he said, is closer to the London original than the other branches, and they’ve been doing over 200 covers a night since. Despite London having two Michelin stars, he said the brand’s success was down to a no-frills approach to good quality Indian food. Your approach to pricing is pretty frilly though, I thought, as I eyed a butter chicken for 155 dirhams. I’m at the stage in life where I need glasses to read the menu, but not yet a flashlight. It’s a weird purgatory, depressing in some ways, hopeful in others.

The food was great. I’d forgotten how alive your mouth feels when it’s set off by such complex and layered flavours and textures, even from the timid end of the menu. Indian cuisine is the master at this, and Gymkhana sets a very high bar.

Service was slick and polished, eager to please, humble yet proud of their new restaurant, a combination that made the room feel convivial and intimate.

We both lived. Which is really all you can ask from date night.

22/09/2026

What tomorrow’s communities need.

The way we live has changed. The way we move, share space and use our neighbourhoods has shifted fundamentally, but most of our built environment hasn’t caught up.

I notice it every day walking (I’ve been known to break into a jog every now and then) around my own community. Footpaths now have to serve walkers, runners, cyclists and electric scooters, all moving at different speeds, on infrastructure barely designed for just one of them.

Whatever you think about scooters and electrical vehicles, I believe the solution is not to ban them, but to plan for them. We need solutions to support the many ways we as humans move around our communities.
And we need proper parking bays for all of these vehicles, not bikes chained to railings and scooters abandoned on kerbs. (Yes, I’m looking at my kids too)

We also need real tree canopy and shade structures over these pathways, with a genuine reduction in our reliance on asphalt. A community that’s too hot to walk through for most of the year isn’t a community. I recently did a ground breaking experiment where the ground temperature in the shade was 20 degrees C cooler than in the sun. Who would have thought it. I measured three times, because I’m nothing if not thorough.

And we need to plan for maintenance. My neighbourhood has about 700 different landscaping companies, that look like they are about to launch a new Cricket league. They all require landscaping equipment, (mainly a rake, scooter and leaf blower.) But almost none of them have dedicated space for it. So, it gets hidden in empty villa garages and stuffed behind bushes. We wouldn’t build a restaurant without a kitchen. We shouldn’t build communities without back-of-house.

We need to start designing for what we call the infrastructure of coexistence.

What else do you think tomorrow’s communities need?

17/09/2026

Every cuisine seems to get its moment.

Peruvian had one, Korean is having a spectacular one. Japanese cuisine has somehow managed to have about six simultaneously.

So, I went looking at Iraq.

In Dubai, “Arabic food” gets so broad, entire countries can disappear into a bowl of hummus.

What I found at Miran Arbel was a room built for families and friends: big groups, marble, a kitchen on display and a fire pit in the corner. Eating here is inherently collective, so the restaurant scales with the occasion. The tables are large and the room is designed around openness, family and abundance.

A cramped Iraqi restaurant can feel inhospitable in a way a ramen counter somehow never would.

The bright lighting isn’t trying to flatter you; it tells you there’s nothing to hide. Then there are the waiters, lots of them, replacing bread and clearing plates. The army of waiters is part of what you’re buying, because hospitality here is visible and physical.

And I counted 202 dishes on the menu because apparently this is what I do with my life now.

To contemporary restaurant thinking, menus are supposed to be edited, rooms moodily lit, staffing ruthlessly efficient and dinner preferably served to twelve people at a counter by somebody explaining where the beetroot grew.

The lentil soup arrived free, too humble to make a fuss about and too important to leave out. I’m not sure Britain has an equivalent, except perhaps tea, although we have managed to turn that into a £6.50 transaction.

And then the food. So much food. At some point the waiter might have warned me my order had reached ridiculous levels. Instead, he wrote down all three pages without blinking.

A small caliphate of dolma piled together, lamb surrendering from the bone beside multiple rice styles, and Iraqi kebabs with crisp, charred edges and interiors so delicate they barely survive contact with a fork.

Miran Arbel has no manifesto or tableside theatrics, just a restaurant completely secure in what it is, practising generosity as an operating standard.

If cuisines have moments, Iraqi food deserves one.

13/09/2026

Smiling BKK opened in 2006, which made it the original Dubai IYKYK restaurant, back when the only algorithm recommending dinner was a friend saying, “There’s this Thai place behind a petrol station in Jumeriah…”

It was inexpensive, independent and completely uninterested in behaving itself.

The walls were dark, the lighting questionable, and the menu contained dishes called F**k Mi and F**k Yu, which sent a certain kind of Dubai expatriate into paroxysms of country-club delight.

“They can’t call it that!”

They bloody could. They did. For years.

Smiling BKK always seemed one complaint away from censorship, closure or diplomatic intervention. This was part of the fun.

Nobody quite knew who owned it either. One story said an Emirates pilot was behind it, hence BKK, Bangkok’s airport code. Another involved a former bar owner from Soi Cowboy. In those pre-social-media days there was no LinkedIn founder story to ruin a perfectly good rumour.

The Garhoud branch became an unofficial Emirates crew canteen, which in mid-2000s Dubai was about as powerful a piece of restaurant positioning as you could wish for.

And Smiling BKK mattered. It arrived four years before Instagram and a year before the iPhone. Facebook barely existed here. If you wanted somebody to know about a restaurant, you had to perform the now largely extinct act of actually telling them.

You could, of course, get out your separate camera and show them a photograph of your dinner. Although in 2006 this would have made your friends deeply suspicious of you.

While the city was beginning its long romance with imported restaurant brands, Smiling BKK went the other way. It proved a Dubai restaurant could be inexpensive, mysterious, irreverent and deeply loved without becoming anything other than itself.

Smiling BKK fed us for more than a decade. Civilisation, despite repeated exposure to F**k Mi, somehow held.

12/09/2026

Back in the fifties, the clever people at General Mills had a problem. Their cake mix needed nothing but water. It was the perfect product, but nobody wanted it.

So they hired a psychologist, who delivered the sort of insight men get paid fortunes for. The insight was about guilt and ownership. The cake was fine for the housewives, (Don’t come at me, this was the 1950’s) but it wasn’t theirs.

Too little effort meant there was no claim to the compliment when it was served at the Mall-athon end of season cake bake.

So, they took the powdered egg out and made them crack their own egg in. Sales soared. Say one thing for the human animal, say it’s desperate to feel useful.

Which brings me, inevitably, to the image above - a mixing bowl full of mugs at ten o’clock at night.

New mugs from M’s Living | Japanese Home Decor & Tableware and the care card instructs an overnight soak before first use. There’s a proper ceramic reason for this. The clay is porous and saturating it first stops your coffee moving in permanently, but I suspect the ritual is doing double duty.

By the time you’ve filled a basin at ten o’clock at night and arranged your mugs like sleeping cats, you’re no longer someone who just bought crockery from Ripe Market at City Walk.

No Sir. You’re practically an artisan. Handmade in Japan. Crooked in all the right places.

So when a guest says, “Oh, I love these cups,” I give a small, modest nod of a man who has suffered for his craft.

“Thank you,” I say. “I soaked them. Overnight.”

FoodSheikh

04/10/2026

04/10/2026

01/10/2026

27/09/2026

25/09/2026

25/09/2026

22/09/2026

17/09/2026

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12/09/2026

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