What to eat in Dubai, and where

The city is roughly nine-tenths people who came from somewhere else, and they brought their food with them and cook it for each other rather than for visitors. Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Sindh, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, the Philippines, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Egypt. Within a mile of the creek you can eat all of it, properly made, for six to fifteen dollars a head.

This is what we book for clients, and the part of the trip we get the most messages about afterwards.

Emirati food, and where to actually find it

Start with the honest bit. Emirati food is a small cuisine in its own city. It is cooked at home, it is served at a modest number of restaurants, and if you do nothing deliberate you will not eat any of it in a week here.

It is worth seeking out. The flavours run through the Gulf and India in both directions: rice, dried limes, turmeric, cinnamon and cardamom, saffron, slow-cooked meat, fish from the Gulf, dates in everything.

Machboos. The dish to order. Spiced rice cooked with chicken, lamb or fish, with dried lime (loomi) giving it a sour, almost smoky depth that is unlike anything in Indian or Levantine cooking. Sometimes spelt majboos or kabsa across the border. If you eat one Emirati thing, this.

Harees. Wheat and meat cooked for hours to a smooth, savoury porridge. Plain, warming, and much better than the description makes it sound. Traditionally a Ramadan dish.

Thareed. Slow-cooked meat and vegetable stew poured over thin bread that softens into it. The closest thing to a national comfort dish.

Balaleet. Sweet vermicelli with cardamom, saffron and rosewater, topped with a thin savoury omelette. Breakfast. Odd on paper, excellent in practice.

Luqaimat. Small yeasted dough balls, deep fried until crisp, soaked in date syrup and sesame. The best sweet thing in the Gulf and it is not close. Eat them hot.

Camel. Available as meat, as milk and, in a couple of places, as ice cream. The meat is lean and slightly sweet. The ice cream is a novelty and a perfectly good one.

Karak chai. Not Emirati in origin, entirely Emirati in practice. Strong black tea boiled with evaporated milk, sugar and cardamom, sold from windows and roadside cafeterias for well under a dollar. It is the actual national drink and drinking it in a plastic cup on a kerb at eleven at night is one of the more honest things you can do in this city.

Where. The cultural centre in Al Fahidi serves Emirati breakfast and lunch communally with a talk, which sounds like a set piece and is genuinely one of the better hours in the old city. There are a small number of family-run Emirati restaurants in Jumeirah and near the creek that serve the real thing. We book one of them on every trip, because walking in without a reservation is unreliable and because the good ones are not where you would look.

Deira, Karama and the subcontinent

This is the reason to eat in Dubai and it costs almost nothing.

Keralan. Fish curry with coconut and tamarind, appam, parotta, beef fry. The Keralan places around Al Karama and the back streets of Bur Dubai are cooking for a homesick community that would notice immediately if the standard dropped. Six to ten dollars a head.

Pakistani. Deira and Al Rigga. Charcoal-grilled seekh and boti, karahi cooked to order in the pan it is named after, nihari in the morning, fresh naan out of a tandoor in the wall. This is the food we send people to first. Eight to fifteen dollars a head, and it will be the best value meal of your trip.

North Indian and Punjabi. Al Karama again, in volume. Dal makhani, tandoori, biryani.

Sri Lankan, Afghan, Bangladeshi. All present, all in Deira, all cooking for their own.

The rule for this whole category: the plainer the room, the better the food. Fluorescent lights, laminate tables, a photocopied menu on the wall, families eating. That is the signal.

Filipino. Satwa and parts of Deira. Sisig, adobo, grilled fish, halo-halo. A large and mostly invisible food culture in this city.

Iranian. Some of the oldest restaurants in Dubai are Iranian, and the ones near the creek have been there for decades. Grilled meats, saffron rice, flatbread from a wood oven, and a completely different register from everything around them.

Levantine

Lebanese and Syrian food is the everyday middle-class food of the Gulf, and Dubai does it very well at every price point.

At the bottom, a shawarma from a window with garlic sauce and pickles, sold for two dollars and eaten standing up. At the middle, a long table of mezze, fattoush, hummus, muhammara, moutabal, grilled halloumi, then mixed grill, in a room full of families staying until midnight. At the top, several serious modern Levantine restaurants that are among the best places to eat in the city at any price.

If you order one thing you would not otherwise: manakish for breakfast, flatbread baked with za’atar and olive oil, from a bakery rather than a hotel.

The fine dining scene, honestly

Dubai has spent fifteen years buying restaurants. Branches of Michelin-starred rooms from Paris, London, Tokyo, New York and Lima, opened by their chefs, staffed properly and funded well. Since the local guide arrived, a domestic scene has grown alongside them, including several restaurants that are genuinely inventive rather than imported.

The honest assessment is in two parts.

The good part. The technical standard at the top end is very high, the service is excellent, the ingredients are flown in from everywhere and the rooms are spectacular. A serious dinner here is genuinely a serious dinner, and the Emirati and pan-Gulf fine dining that has emerged in the last few years is the most interesting thing happening in the city’s food.

The other part. A significant number of these places are trading on a name and a view. You can pay $200 a head for competent food in a room with an excellent skyline and no point of view of its own. Our filter is simple: if the restaurant is famous for the room, we do not book it. If it is famous for the cooking, we do.

We book two serious dinners into a five day trip and let the other three evenings be $12 and better. On boutique Dubai and Abu Dhabi in 5 days we book three.

Friday brunch, described honestly

Dubai’s most famous eating institution is a hotel buffet with unlimited drinks, held on a weekend afternoon, and it has become a genuine social ritual for the expatriate population. It runs for three or four hours. There are stations. There is usually a DJ.

What it is: an enormous amount of food of variable quality, a great deal of alcohol, a party atmosphere that peaks somewhere in hour three, and a price of $90 to $250 a head depending on the hotel and the drinks package.

What it is not: a meal. Nobody eats well at a brunch. The seafood station is the point, the rest is volume, and by the time the cooking would matter most people have stopped assessing it.

Our position: it is genuinely fun once, if you are a group, if you go in wanting the afternoon rather than the food, and if you write off the evening afterwards, which you should. It is a poor use of a Friday if you have four days in the city. We would not put it in a five day itinerary and we would happily put it in a ten day one. Note also that the weekend moved: the working week now runs Monday to Friday, so the brunch is now split between Friday and Saturday depending on the venue.

What a week of eating looks like

Eating this way across five days costs less than two hotel dinners and it is the part of the trip people describe first when they get home.

Related

• Old Dubai in two days
• Old Dubai, Sharjah and Abu Dhabi in 6 days
• What a trip to Dubai costs
• Dubai and the Gulf: the complete guide
• All our Gulf trips

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