The setting is a Palestinian-Jordanian restaurant in Dubai (Qwaider Al Nabulsi, Al Muraqabat Street; +971 4227 5559), the tourists are refugees from the city’s culinary mainstream, and the woman is Arva Ahmedunderground food guide extraordinaire.
Ahmed is talking about the history and variety of Middle Eastern cooking.
She rat-a-tat-tats to the assembled crowd about the spartan dishes of the Yemeni Bedouin and moves on to the love of vegetables in the fertile crescent through Turkey, Lebanon and Syria.
Then she pauses as waiters appear from the restaurant to satisfy the food cravings Ahmed has stirred up.
Onion and chili paste-stuffed falafel is the reward: like the restaurant it looks ordinary, but the dish is phenomenally tasty.
The gooey, cheesy, sweet kunafa pastry served up afterward is likewise delicious.
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Food-tourism pioneer
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Already she’s having to turn people away to keep the small group ethos.
When tourists hate tourists
She seems to have discovered an important and potentially lucrative truth: tourists often don’t like other tourists.
“They get wildly excited when they see a restaurant with no one like them in it,” she says.
Like at Abshar (Al Maktoum Road, +971 4233 0555) an Iranian restaurant on the first floor of a non-descript mini-mall.
It’s one of Ahmed’s favorites — for its freshly made eggplant dip, bread sliding out of a roaring oven on wooden paddles and its rich fesenjoon stew of chicken, pomegranate and walnut.
Manousheh fans, get in touch.
See Frying Pan Adventures for tour dates and to book.
