By Layla Al Suwaidi ~
Dubai — Cuisine here is cuisine but something more — a story — a legend of heritage, of hospitality, of multicultural melange on the plate.
Whereas UAE today is a world center of glory for minarets and technology, UAE in the past had inverted three centuries’ chronology in a food culture. Emirati cuisine is sweet-sour fusion of three centuries’ sea-faring spice route and sea-faring trade with Bedouin heritage and cross-culture loanings from Persia, India, East Africa, and Levant. Sea-faring spice route and sea-faring trade reverberates to the dinner plate across the country.
A Taste of Heritage
Plain and blessed broken wheat and meat stew boil-scalding hot hotly for hours upon hours in terra cotta pot fire in oven heat’s hot flames to become rich and extravagant, Al Harees is ancient Emirati virtue of hospitality and generosity — an openheartedness to indulge as the meal. To find out more about Al Harees, click here.
Machboos is second-home night evening dinner, whose rich meat and rice, and sweetly scented mix of spices such as cardamom, cloves, and loomi (dried lime) is topped with. Of most authentically of UAE desert hospitality in the real sense, traditionally eaten off gargantuan platters, and serving oneself. It varies, emirate-by-emirate, from sea-salted Sharjah coast to farm-style ones in Al Ain. “Machboos is really a dish — it’s a tale of spices,” says Dubai chef Mariam Al Mazrouei.
Street to Souk
Tourists taste the UAE cosmopolitanism in Emirati street food. Shawarma, falafel, and charcoal kebab grills are UAE globalizers all with a UAE palate. Whether an ajay-hind-Shawarma from a mad street corner stall vendor in Ajman or one that is an arm-and-leg walk past Burj Khalifa, they are wonderful but modest ways to indulge in the excessiveness of food here.
“Spice trade was at the center of the UAE’s cultural contribution to its identity,” states Dr. Huda Al Khamis, cultural historian at Zayed University. “These are aromas that merge home and away, past and present.”
Fusion, Remade
Although centuries old, buried in the ages, chefs today are cresting newer and higher horizons of imagination. Al Fanar restaurant, LOGMA, and Emirates’ 3Fils are spearheading new age Emirati cuisine — ancient legacy re-packaged in new beauty and world chic. Cuisine for thought: Luqaimat, deconstructed sweet dumpling, or whatever, set down as a work of art, a painting on a plate, or harees croquettes haute.
No longer imposed tradition. But blended into it. For though UAE chefs Michelin Guide-deduplicated at last are reinventing Emirati classics, expat and local both, culinary excellence in the process to breakthrough — are discovering, in proportion measure, country palate richness and country.
Food as a Cultural Bridge
And lastly, UAE food is not just flavor. It’s a past — of trade and immigration and tolerance and anger, yesterday and tomorrow. Each forkful an open doorway through which to step and sit and stay and be with other human beings no matter whatever is constructed out of one’s yesterday or tomorrow.
The more who taste Flavors of the Emirates, the more who leave with far more than the superficial memory of an unfilled plate. They leave having breathed air from an one-ness culture of flavor and welcome — served plate after plate.
