Fact B: According to the 2009 Report on Economic & Social Dimensions in the UAE, there are over half a million Filipinos* working in the UAE
(*the recession may have lowered that figure a tad bit.)

Appalling Fact C: I had never…I repeat, N-E-V-E-R, tried Filipino food until…this past Sunday.

It’s shameful. It’s damning. It’s so horrific that I deserve to be stripped off of my food blogger badge and flung to the dogs (little hoity-toity poodles…because who wants to hang out with them anyway.)

But I’m not alone in this disgraceful state. I’m surrounded by friends and family who’ve actually never tried Filipino food, despite the city being flooded with potential places to try it at. In fact, let’s face it, you too (all my non-Filipino readers) may be one of Them.

The realization hit a couple of decades too late. But it hit nevertheless, and I got super lucky that fellow Filipina blogger, Didi, came to my rescue and offered to teach me a thing or two about Filipino food over lunch at Kabalen in Karama. That said, I think it’s going to take me WAY more than one lunch and a hasty google session later to really get to the puso of Filipino food.

The lunch was eye-opening. It totally annihilated certain preconceptions I had, or revealed traits of Filipino fare that I’d never have guessed. For instance…

Filipino food can be way more wholesome than I’d thought. Put differently, it goes beyond the fried chicken that we see our Filipino fellow-residents indulge in with gusto all across the city.

Now Didi did confirm that Filipinos love their fried chicken. In fact, Korean fried chicken is trending back in the Philippines even now as we speak. BUT, there’s a lot more to Filipino cuisine than hens thrown in a deep fryer. In fact, I don’t even think fried chicken would be looked up to as traditional food by the old-school Filipina chef. I bet it was one of those edible aberrations introduced to the local fare by the Americans in their quest to KFCize the world. When in doubt, blame it on the Americans.

The complimentary bowl of clear egg drop soup that we started our meal out with was full of clear hearty broth (most likely chicken), egg, scallions, a storm of fresh pepper and a pungent mound of ginger up top. This was soup at its most heart-warming, soul-healing best, and exactly the kind of detox you’d need after a weeklong binge on…fried chicken.

~ Egg Drop Soup ~

None of the dishes that made it to our table during lunch were deep-fried. They weren’t solely focused on big chunks of meat or pork, which is what I’d been expecting. There were a ton of hearty vegetables in the food, from leafy shoots of kankong that I’ll describe a little later to Chinese-influenced lumpia parcels sauced with a terribly addictive, sweetish peanutty gravy. While the translucent peanut gravy was probably not what the doctor ordered, the innards of the lumpia seemed healthier: minced meat, a giant leaf of iceberg lettuce, and a slew of julienned carrots and some puzzling cream-colored vegetable that our server labeled as sweet potato, but that Didi and I are suspecting could have been ubod, or heart of palm.

~ Lumpia Sariwa ~

Even dessert had its own surprising mix of healthful ingredients. Boiled kidney beans and chickpeas had planted themselves at the base of our bowl of halo halo, alongside sweetened nata de coco (colorful jelly-like cubes of fermented coconut water) and green Gulaman chunks of agar-agar jelly. While Kabalen’s version was quite basic, it’s not uncommon for jackfruit, ube (purple yam), sweet potato, bananas and even tapioca to be tossed in, making halo halo one of those sneaky ways of loading unsuspecting kiddies with their fruits and veggies disguised as dessert.

~ Halo Halo…or ‘Mix Mix’ ~

The high sugar content of the sweetened milk, shaved ice, and vanilla ice cream that topped this dessert – aptly named mix-mix in Tagalog because you’re meant to mix up the layers before you dip in – probably wouldn’t win halo halo a mention in a diabetic’s diet plan. But it is dessert after all, and on the brighter side, protein-rich beans in my dessert makes it a far wiser option than the buttercream cupcakes or stacks of macaroons that have colonized Dubai.

Not all Filipino food is smelly. Nope, I’m not going to mince my words. I know a bunch of us thought this too. Some of us because we’ve caught a whiff of tuyo (preserved fermented fish) that Filipinos adore with rice, some because we’ve heard about it being smelly from others who’ve caught that whiff, and some because we’ve read it in the recent press. For every plate of odorous tuyo or other exotic fermented Filipino specialty that sneaks its way into Dubai, I can assure you that there’s a not-smelly, and even pleasant-smelling plate of Filipino food that can make it to the table. Nothing at lunch left me smelling of sulphur – not the mild slivers of coconut-infused Beef Bicol Express nor even the more complex, fish-based saucey Pansit (noodles). Almost every culture has some form of nasty smelling food, including us Indians with our potent onion-based curries and even the delicate French with their stinky cheeses. At the end of the day, it boils down to a question of what you choose to order off of the menu.

Filipino food has prominent Spanish flavours. Pretty obvious if you look back to over 300 years of Spanish imperialism, but just something I never actively considered from a culinary standpoint. Words like adobo or empanadas or flan (though flan dates back to ancient Rome, even before it wobbled its way into Spain) were scattered across the menu, and made it to our table in two dishes:

Adobong Kankong, which presented itself as leafy shoots of swamp cabbage (kankong) and red onions, steeped in garlic, salt, vinegar and soy sauce (adobo). Leave off the soy sauce, throw in some paprika and oregano, and you’ve got traditional Spanish adobo.

~ Adobong Kankong ~

Now if you’re a saltysour fanatic like I am – one who’ll prey on her fingertips to get those last vinegary crumbs after she’s emptied a bag of Lays Salt & Vinegar – you’d love this. It’s got the sour tart flavors all pulverized into a thin runny sauce, but with the chips replaced with braised, slightly crunchy greens that somehow, make it okay to indulge in the adobo sodium pool that this dish is bathing in. I just tipped the plate over onto my rice – because why have plain steamed rice when you can have flavour-busting salty vinegary rice?

Another dish that the Spaniards provided a pivotal ingredient for was the Pansit Palabok: angelic vermicelli strands topped with calamari rings, hard boiled eggs, crunchy scallions and a gloopy orange-red sauce that’d been infused with smoked fish.

~ Pancit Palabok ~

The fiery colour of the sauce was brought on by the use of what Filipinos refer to achuete, also called achiote by the Spanish who had introduced annatto seed-based colouring to the South-East Asian region in the 17^th century. The smoky essence from the use of fish in the sauce made it the dish with the most complex flavour profile on the table – deep, heavy, not really fishy…and a notch more interesting with an acidic squish of lemon juice on top. It’s the sort of sauce that’d make you sit there, taste, smack the sauce about your tongue, and ponder…and taste some more, and ponder some more. It’s one of the more thought-provoking plates of vermicelli I’ve come across.

There’s obviously a big time Chinese influence on the food as well – lumpia, toyo (soy sauce), patis (fish sauce) for instance …but somehow, given the geographical proximity, even an ignoramus like myself would expect that to begin with.

~ Chinese-influenced Lumpia Sariwa ~

Filipino food is far more minimalistic than what I’d thought. You’d think that being in the same South-East Asian neighbourhood as India, Thailand, Malaysia, Korea, spice-laden parts of the Szechuan province in China, that Filipino food would be immersed in spices and complex curries. I think the smelly-food-scare tends to reinforce that thinking.

Didi’s take on Filipino food was that it’s usually not spicy or overly bold at all. The dishes I sampled at Kabalen were simple homestyle fare, with a few recurring flavours like salt, pepper, vinegar, ginger, coconut and spring onions. The egg drop soup pioneered our meal with clear-broth simplicity, and the Beef Bicol Express, while reminiscent of coconut-based Thai beef curry, was far lighter and milder than a typical Massaman or Panang curry would be. The Pansit was as complex as it got, and even in that case, the complexity was less because of multiple flavours trying to gain the limelight, and more because of the deep smokiness of the fish used in the sauce.

~ Egg Drop Soup ~

~ Beef Bicol Express ~

Filipino food has some surprisingly refreshing treats that are perfect for a scorching summer. Of course it would. The Philippines has a tropical climate, so hot and humid is something they’ve learned to cook around. The dough-encased lumpia and our halo halo finale scored high on my refreshing, S.O.S-it’s-summer scale. But what I really feel bad about missing out, summer after scorching summer in this city, was this ridiculously refreshing glass of cool milk, pandan-infused gulaman jelly and buco (tender strips of baby coconut flesh). I wasn’t shy about shoving my fork into the glass to scoop up every last piece of cool gulaman and buco, while simultaneously reeling under the extreme shock that this drink has never taken this city by storm and ousted whatever frivolous food fad the PR companies import into the city each year.

~ Buco Pandan Drink ~

The fact that I had any conceptions about a cuisine I’ve never tasted in my life sounds ludicrous. But I have an inkling that there are others out there in the city who may believe some of these things too, and in the extreme, have even completely written off Filipino food before sampling it. The simple moral of the story is that Filipino cuisine, like any other cuisine of the world, comprises a range of dishes, some of which are specific to certain regions/cities and others of which comprise mainstream Filipino cooking. You can’t generalize, you can’t over-simplify, and you definitely can’t base your judgments on the packed lunches your Filipino colleagues reheat at work. You’ve got to know what to order, and give each dish – which itself can be prepared in a range of different ways depending on where you are in the Philippines – its own verdict.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

If my frighteningly eloquent discourse on Filipino food has piqued your curiosity, I’d recommend you check out these other helpful resources to arm yourself before you trek down to Karama for some adobo:

• Didi’s blog D for Delicious – this Filipina blogger knows her stuff even though she’s really modest about it. Leave her an inquisitive, even politically ignorant comment about Filipino food, and I’m sure she’ll humour you with a response.
• Nappytales, a talented Filipina chef who introduced me to the ube cupcakes that have put a shotgun to every other cupcake that’s met my palette in this city.
• Daisy Carrington’s review in 2008 of Kabalen – I read her review after writing my own, and wasn’t surprised to see that she dealt with the issue of reluctance to try Filipino food head-on in her article. Her description of the food possessing a certain sense of vibrancy is spot-on. That said, I’m somewhat miffed that she didn’t adore the lumpia sariwa as much as I did.
• Of course, Wikipedia…what would I do without you? [It’s disgraceful how much I rely on the Internet for research. One of these days I’m going to botch up so badly on my facts that I’ll offend a wise reader who will shut the browser in disgust and never return.]
• The travelling blogger from The Longest Way Home who’s got an array of informative posts describing Filipino food.

Kabalen Restaurant
If you drive from Spinneys towards Bur Juman, you will see Pizza Hut on your right. Take the right at Pizza Hut and drive down the road till you hit a T-junction. Take a right at the T-junction and drive down the right until you see Kabalen on your right. (It is right next to Urban Tadka)
Phone: +971 (4) 397-8839

Probably not too many times. Cause most of the time, we don’t even notice the little Keralite mole right around the corner that’s been serving chai and anda (eggs) for the last decade. If we live in the older parts of the city, we’re programmed to walk right past them. Or we’ve packed up and shifted away from them. We’ve trotted off to the more polished side of Sheikh Zayed, where a squeaky tea stall dare not erect its canopy next to the likes of a milk & HONEY…or…shudder…our beloved Jones.

I’m not suggesting that the food at such places won’t curdle your tummy. Or that something they serve is so extraordinary that by God, you’re a fool for not getting, com’on, at least a takeout? Or that the ambience is one that’d inspire you to pop the question to that drop-dead gorgeous woman you’ve been trailing like a puppy for the past 18 months.

All I’m saying is: Don’t write ‘em off before you’ve tried them. That’s like someone looking at the icky blotch of a chocolate cake you’ve laboured over all day and…silently picking the store-bought cookies instead. And if you’re too afraid to try cause your stomach might implode with the egg sandwich their kitchen whips up, then…then commission someone else to try it first. There’s always a willing tester.

There’s always ME.

For the people who’ve lived on Rigga/Muraggabbat in Deira and driven past Al Diqdaqa Tea Stall, right behind the mosque, this review’s for you. I’ll admit I’d never really noticed this place myself, not over the span of its twelve year existence, not until last Friday morning, when I woke up slammed with a massive craving for eggs and parathas à la Kerala, or parotta. (remember, not all parathas are born equal. The concentric discs of a white flour and oil-rich parotta, stretched, twirled and rolled, are far softer, chewier, and more pliable than its North Indian forefather, the equally oil-laden, often veggie-stuffed, whole wheat paratha.) Mom suggested this place cause she’d heard of it from others…‘but darling, it’s super tiny, for bachelors, you can’t really sit and eat there…’

Hell yeah. Totally my kind of place.

Somehow, the thought of a closet-sized kitchen tucked away in some Godforsaken alley of Dubai really turns me on. It kicks up the Adventurer in me. The Hunter, the Experimenter, the Mad Scientist in me.

And believe it or not, the thought of such a place kicks up even the Nervous Nelly in me. Especially when I’m the only woman wielding a Canon monster-camera in a testosterone-cramped cafeteria whose anda parotta have never been stress tested on a lily-livered constitution. But regardless,

I am The Willing Tester.

Slave to my stomach, now concave with hunger, I ordered the eggs wrapped in a parotta, with the chef’s selection of a few token veggies thrown in. A simple 2.50 dirham breakfast, with another 1.00 dirham thrown in for a cup of chai poured from a golden-brownish kettle with such personality that it packed me off on a whole other train of thought…how many cups of chai has it poured over the past 12 years? how many droopy-eyed workers has it propped awake at 3pm in the afternoon, ensuring that they don’t jackhammer their foot in the midst of a hot afternoon nod-off?

I was alone on this mission. My friends, startled that I’d walk into a dive like this one, scuttled down the road to Breakfast to Breakfast [which incidentally, won a whole new level of respect with me last week with their sujuk manousheh, cheese sambousek, and Dallmayr milk coffee. I wish I’d sampled these when I’d waxed eloquent about BtoB’s manakish here.] The big question for me, sitting there small and alone and testosterone-deficient on table #1 of 2, with the owner shoveling biryani into his face on table #2 of 2, was: Should I just order a takeout and flee from here? Or should I stay here, eat my anda paratha steaming hot…and go down in history as the first woman to eat her breakfast at Al Diqdaqa Tea Stall in Dubai?

The shy little coward that I am, I copped out. I’d order and flee. Ek anda paratha please, for takeout.

As I sat there waiting for my order, I attempted to sweep together the last few shards of my courage and begged the owner to let me take photographs. I’m an online food writer, khana kay baray mein likthee hoon, I offered in broken hindi…could I take photograph please?

Oh, you want me to write the name of my site down for you? Acha…sure, I can write it down for you.

w…w…w…iliveinafryingpan…dot….com.

[Right. Like he’s ever gonna go check that out.]…[tra la la la la]…[unveil Canon]…[click click]…[snappity snap]…

…huh? No way. You…you pulled up my site on your blackberry?! [My blog was now smiling back at me from the Diqdaqa Tea Stall owner’s blackberry screen. Moral of the story – never underestimate the Tea Stall Owner. NEVER. I’ve learned this time and again from Tea Stall Owner rags-to-riches success stories in India, but I still pass judgments like an ignoramus when perched on a rickety tea stall chair.]

My anda parotta was ready. I sat there for a few minutes, just staring at it, paralyzed with indecision. This should really be eaten hot shouldn’t it? It DOES deserve a fair chance, not soggy takeout treatment. But it feels like a man-only zone! And won’t it look stupid if I now ask them to unwrap it and serve it on a plate?

I should have gotten over looking stupid 20 years ago.

The window of time within which an anda parotta roll will stay warm for you is SUPER slim. By the time I was done fumbling around with the dang thing, eat here, not eat here, LET’S UNWRAP THIS BABY RIGHT HERE ALREADY!, my fickle roll had gone cold. So while I’d love to give you this glowing image of the piping hot anda parotta roll served by the underdog Tea Stall, I can’t. It was an ordinary egg-in-parotta roll, one that could have had a fair chance had Vacillating Vanessa not possessed me at the last, most excruciatingly inconvenient moment.

…and contrary to what I was expecting, that parotta was not really greasy at all. (I personally think greasy would have been more exciting and newsworthy, but in the grand scheme of things, with a ton of bachelor dudes looking to this tea stall as their daily breakfast deal rather than a whimsical little tasting experiment, not greasy is probably a good thing.)

With the number of Rainbow milk cans on display in the store, you just know they have a history in making creamy, karak chai. This ain’t the place to order an earl grey, or maybe a jasmine tea, with a drop of honey if you please? Nope. What you get is what that Godfather of a kettle will pour out for you – a good solid concoction that’ll shoot right through your body, bada-bing.

Oh FYI, a week later, my tummy is still alive, well, and happily lapping up other experimental eats I choose to throw its way.

Now while Diqdaqa’s luke warm anda parotta wasn’t life-changing, I think their biryani and plate of fried chicken looked like it had a ton of potential. Especially that chicken. It looks like it has a serious non-nonsense fiery crisp about it.

Yep, you guessed it…I’ll go back. But till that happens, I’d be curious…any of you walked into a tiny Keralite cafeteria in some part of Dubai? Ordered something there that rocked your world? Or do you have one around the corner that you haven’t tried? And you’re looking for a brave tester to go forth before you?

Confide in me. I am your Taster, coming soon to that inconspicuous little corner stall…yep, that one there stooped ‘round the corner, the one that’s stuck it out resiliently year after year, recession after boom, parotta after parotta…

I’m coming right there, to that corner stall near you.

Al Diqdaqa Tea Stall
Approximate directions on this google map, with Clock Tower as your starting point

Delirium is what happens when you go to a fairground like Global Village with a group of foodies. All of whom have obviously come there specifically to eat.

Fellow bloggers from Fooderati Arabia — Didi, Dee and Mishti — plus my two buddies, Rads and Bellay (an endearingly nicknamed foodie soul mate whose trip to Dubai was well-timed for this binging excursion) all ganged up together to cover as much ground as we could…tasting, smelling, drinking, digesting (but miserably failing to digest anything because we’d always see some other TreatWeMustTry the second we’d attempt to stop eating.) A special mention to Nausheen, the Dubai Bites blogger who was there with us in spirit. Her post on the Top 10 Eats at Global Village was printed out by Dee and followed by us like the gospel. I think Dee may have gone on to laminate her (now grease-stained?) printed copy of that post.

Here’s a little round-up of most of the things we sampled or saw being devoured at Global Village. I say ‘most’ because my photo of the minced meat Turkish lahmacun looked like it had been shot in a dust storm and was incredibly unusable, even by my barely-existent standards. And because I never got around to snapping a photo of the addictive home-baked Butterscotch cake that Mishti had graciously brought for us to sample. I crammed the last butterscotch chunk into my mouth on my drive home — because clearly, all the eating at Global Village and delirium thereafter had not triggered the “I’m FREAKING FULL” signal to my brain yet.

Hit your left and right arrow keys to circle through the round-up.
[psst. don't miss the captions at the bottom,  I've put my heart, soul and a crapload of brain cells into keeping, contrary to my usual rambles, the captions concise.]

Other foodalicious posts on Global Village:

• Didi’s hilarious post on the insights she gained about foodies after our Global Village excursion
• …and her 10 Power Tips should you plan to go there (which you should, at least once, before the 3rd of March.)
• Dubai Bites’ Top 10 Eats at Global Village
• Dee’s recap of our gluttonous escapade, The One Where Food Bloggers Descended on Global Village

I.e. Pay Me to Eat Somebody.

So I’ve been playing around with a number of ideas, and at some point or another, some poor soul has gotten slammed with a passionately detailed description of how I could possibly make a living out of being a foodie…and then said poor soul would nod sympathetically at my inane idea(s), agreeing that I could indeed make money (because clearly, in a recession, people are SO eager to part with their hard-earned money on discretionary whimsical things)…said soul would agree vehemently that, indeed! you could make a fortune!, so that I could shut up about the idea already and move on to test it with the next unsuspecting victim who hobbles across my path.

So my latest idea is: Food Tours. Food tours of old Dubai…getting people to experience some of the oldest, or most ethnically unique, food experiences that make Dubai the cultural melting pot that it is.

I don’t know whether the idea will work or whether anyone would even be interested in signing up for a three hour tasting marathon around some crazy old part of Dubai…and I’m well aware that during summer, no sane person would drag their feet from one restaurant to the next in the blithering heat, which leaves me only six months of the year to make money on an idea that’d probably not even earn enough to pay my metro fare over to the tour starting point in the first place…but heck, I’m having a BLAST doing the market research for it. It feels pretty awesome to come back home after a long day of poking my face into multiple restaurants and speaking to the owners or sampling food like I’m on a mission – and then punch the productive-sounding ‘Market Research’ stamp all over it. Job satisfaction to the max.

One of my first ‘market research’ stops has been to Rangoli in Meena Bazaar, an age-old Indian – more specifically, from the state of Gujarat – occupant of those tiny cramped alleys next to Cosmos Lane. What excites me about places like Rangoli is that it’s a place with history, with culture…without sounding too over-the-top, with family love gushing out through the walls and into your food. These are typically places that have been nurtured by an expat who started off with humble ambitions – like the two farmers who left Porbandar, Gujarat in the 50’s and migrated to Dubai to start one of the first Indian restaurants in town, Maaraj. Soon, Maaraj gave way to Manoranjan, and then later, after Manoranjan shut down, Rangoli followed through in the early 90’s. These are places with family members that have grown up closely involved with the food that reaches your table, and you can sense the…near patriotism…about the dishes that are being recreated to represent their home away from home. They’ve seen Dubai tourism and trade transform over the last two decades, they understand who the regulars are and what they want…how to make an authentic dhokla or stir up a sweet Gujarati kadhi or why there would be civil unrest if they wiped paani puris off the Rangoli menu.

Dhoklas at Rangoli – a Gujarati savoury made of fermented and steamed gram flour batter

After a super-informative restaurant and Meena Bazaar history chat with the owners, I wandered off by myself to try Rangoli’s two most prized menu items – paani puri and the Gujarati buffet. Mind you, the entire menu here is totally vegetarian, reflecting the typical Gujarati diet…but honestly, I DARE you to miss meat during a meal at this restaurant.

Paani puri is one of those snacky things that totally distracts you from the fact that no chunky piece of steak or chilli chicken is going to grace your all-veggie table. It’s one of those interesting experiences that’s more fun to indulge standing up, right near the chaat (aka Indian snacks) counter, looking over the guy who uses the tip of his thumb to deftly crack open a little hole in the deep-fried hollow flour spheres (the ‘puri’), plonks in a mix of moong lentils, chickpeas and boondi (fried baby balls of chickpea flour), spoons in a spicy green watery mix of coriander, mint, tamarind, chilies and the house blend of spices, and then ladles on a final flourish of sweet-sour tamarind chutney.

All that, that entire globe of watery crunchy snack’ums, to be stuffed in your mouth all at once. We’re talking about a mega feat that’s a double whammy, partly cause it’s so explosively yummy, and partly because, it’s quite the accomplishment to race the wet-unstable thing to your mouth and shove it all in at once without it splattering all over you somewhere in between.

[On a separate note, I believe that Tea Junction held a paani puri eating competition in town when I was away. Let the winner present him/herself in front of me for a true battle of the ultimate paani-puri face-stuffing lords. Unveil yourself, O Pani Puri Heavyweight Who Won When I Was Not In Town Who Shalt Soon Be Dethroned.]

My paani puris at Rangoli got progressively better…by the time I reached the fourth one on the plate, the paani-puri guy and I had this secret understanding that I preferred more of the tamarind chutney and less of the spicy water. For 7 minutes of my lunch time, we had become a secret team – he was my just-in-time paani puri designer, getting another one ready every time I’d scarfed one down, and I was the patron, showering my love on his work by letting my mouth be the gleeful repository of his watery balloon creations.

With Rangoli’s much loved paani puri’s done and devoured, my next stop was their buffet table.

Can you imagine getting an entire meal for 17 bucks…an entire meal with three curries of your choice and fresh hot rotis and papad and rice and some snacky thing and pickles and dips and dessert and a steel tumbler of cool chaas (similar to lassi, though more watery and with most of the butterfat taken out)…an entire meal of ALL THAT that’s ‘refillable’?! That’s insane…I have no clue how they make this work and still have money left over to pay the electricity bill. [Makes you wonder why I’d go all the way to the U.S. to study economics when Meena Bazaar was a live lesson waiting to enlighten me just steps away from home. That, with the added perks of way more awesome food than anything I could’ve ever found on my greasypizzaloving college campus.]

Those of you who fear the exacting trek over from your lunch table to the buffet line…and God who enjoys waiting behind that old crotchety lady who’s counting every carrot in the salad before she scoops some into her plate at the rate of one carrot per minute?…I hear that Rangoli is planning to switch from the buffet to a thaali system. Which means that the next time I’m here, I won’t have to trudge over to the buffet line to refill my plate. Instead, a server would walk over to my table to do the refilling for me. The ultimate in lazy refillable excesses. The thaali may cost a few more dirhams…but seriously, even a five dirham hike would really still be a pittance for a fully-served, all-you-can-eat meal.

One of the unique characteristics of Gujarati food is that they’re masterminds of how to mix sweet and salty. They’ve got a real knack for doing this in their fried snacks, in daals, in veggies…in the traditional Gujarati kadhi which typically features on Rangoli’s daily buffet. Kadhi is this gloriously smooth soupy mix of simmered yogurt and gram flour, kicked up a notch with a sweet-salty mix of tempered spices and jaggery swirled in.

That modest looking whitish soup is so perfect…perfect little yogurty lake to dip your rotis into, perfect little daal-like waterfall all over your rice (which incidentally, doesn’t feature on my plate, but is also very much a part of the buffet), and a perfect little river from which to slurp on endlessly all by itself, well after your tummy has objected to another carbo-loaded bite of rice or roti.

…see that deep-fried potato disc on my plate?

Said disc is no ordinary deep-fried potato fritter. Nope, here we have yet another brilliantly simple sweet-salty creation, one with a sweet golden brown deep-fried fenugreek crust, and doused with a liberal spoon of sweet tamarind chutney from the buffet by yours truly. It was like the dessert of the salty savories I chose from the buffet…and sadly, probably not one that they repeat every day. But then again, the Gujaratis are kings of deep-fried masterpieces and I’m sure that a buffet-patron would receive their crunchy due of Gujarati hospitality no matter what day they decide to drop in at Rangoli.

I saw a couple of tourists, not from India, lingering outside the door toward the end of my meal…they had this look of ‘should we try, should we not try’ on their faces. It’s exactly those sorts of helpless innocent tourist tummies that I’d love to educate when they make their way to the streets of old Dubai. Meena Bazaar is Dubai’s Little India, full of places that will max out flavor for every buck…you’ve just got to know which places to step into, and what to order when you’re there. And I’d love to play that honest-to-goodness Florence Nightingale of helplessly hungry tourists. [<- this right here is the philanthropic angle of my foodie tour idea, the one that’ll make hearts melt and sign up for the tour. Is it working?]

Rangoli Restaurant
Cosmos Lane, Opp. ITL Bldg, Meena Bazaar, Bur Dubai
Phone: +971 (4) 351 5873 / 355 4462 / 352 3554
[pssst...they also have a smaller branch in Oud Metha called Rangoli Lite. It's not healthier food per se, it's the same offering, just a tinier place.
Phone: + 971 (4) 357 6701 / 357 6702]

…then you know you’re having deep-rooted blog withdrawal symptoms.

I did, I had those symptoms…and boy, did I miss this blog. The big fat Indian wedding was a dream over the last few weeks – one that involved so much food and dancing and after-party karaoking that it totally wiped me off the blogging planet for nearly a month. But I’ve missed you guys. And I’ve missed all those little corners of Dubai that serve me my curries and kababs and my hot fresh breads straight out the tandoor. All those little places that keep Dubai real warm and tasty for me.

…like this little place in Hor Al Anz, Khoury Special Kabab.

The last couple of times I was in the area, I’d watched in fascination as three-foot long pimpled breads were being hauled out of a dome-like oven in a room beside the main restaurant. The image has been rolling restlessly in that part of my brain that tortures me with images of doughnuts or haleem or thick juicy kababs every time I’m sick and hungry and miles away from the source of the image. It’s a sort of strange mental masochistic tendency – when my brain knows that my tummy has gone for a toss, it’ll twist the knife in my tortured wounds by flashing past images of seen-but-not-tried foods in front of my face. The last time that happened, I started googling for food photos on my tiny blackberry screen, desperate for a glimpse of something that was miles away in Dubai, all the while squirming with tummy cramps in some little town during my travels to India. Desperate, desperate foodie that I am.

Thank God for global data plans.

Khoury brings to Dubai one of the most traditional types of Irani bread – sangak bread, which basically translates to ‘stone bread.’ I’d never seen an oven filled with red hot burning pebbles like the one they had at Khoury. Bread fanatic that I am, I just stood and stared as the sangak-guys tore off a clump of elasticky leavened dough, slapped it on a peel, stretched it out and sort of played ‘piano’ all along the length of it, perforating it with little craters that were sprinkled all over with white sesame seeds.

Now there’s some step in between where that one-foot bread baby gets pulled out into a three-foot mammoth, a step that I’ve stupidly missed in all my gawking at those long cratered landscapes of bread that were being hung up on the wall.

Now in addition to the live open-to-public bread-making, Khoury has their grill laid out in an adjoining little section of the restaurant. We’re talking kababs and tomatoes and hot flaming charcoal…all those elements that make you feel closer to your kababs cause you can watch it being made, feel the heat on your sweaty palms as you bend down close to get a whiff of grilled meat. THIS is what I wanted on my plate, with that hot ogre of a sangak by my side.

With a name like Khoury Special Kababs, you’re setting the bar of tender grilled meat super high. I didn’t know which of the list of kababs on the menu was special per se…was it the exotic-sounding lamb shishlik? Or maybe it was the chicken tekkah? Or maybe I was overthinking it and the Khoury peeps just threw in the word ‘special’ without realizing that I’d be paralysed by the potential implication of such a word? Yeah, probably.

When faced with gross indecision about which kabab to order, a mixed platter of meat will be your lone lantern in the dark.

I started spearing my fork through the plate, starting with the cubes of mutton kabab and the long meat tikkas. Heavy meaty flavor, check. Juiciness, check. Tenderness…chewchewchew…chewsomemore…chewohno….bitsoffat…whyfatwhyyyyy….chewy. Overall decent kababs, but not the best I’ve had in town. The chicken kababs fared better on the tenderness scale – light, moist, tender…but again, nothing that would have me googling for kabab photos on my crackberry in those restlessly hungry moments that ascend on me when I’m miles away from edible salvation.

Just then, just as I’d nearly written off the s-word, I found it. I found the special kabab. The kabab koobideh. This log of minced meat was glistening with a thin sheen of oil and was laying quietly right at the extreme edge of my plate. The koobideh was so outrageously moist and well-seasoned [was it parsley? or cumin in the seasoning? or both? whatever it was, it was pretty magical...] that it obliterated every other previous bite of less-awesome kabab from that plate.

Let me also draw your attention to the sangak bread under the bed of kababs. On its own, the bread has this rustic sesame-tinged feel to it – I could imagine pulling bits of it, slathered with some butter, slightly stretchy bits, slightly crispy bits, eating through it on some mountain village somewhere, with a steaming hot cup of chai. And maybe surrounded by Yaks.

Definitely surrounded by Yaks.

But under the kababs, the bread had sucked up all the kabab juices and forgotten that it had been born a bread to begin with. It had morphed into this rich chewy blanket of meaty drippings. An identity crisis at its delicious best.

[On a separate note, I actually took the rest of the dry, unkabab-ed bread home and the parents toasted it up for dinner. So damn good, both that night, and the next night. The next time we have a soup and bread day, sangak is going to be the bread star of the table.]

What was also very special was the bowl of lentil soup that the kababs came with…

…into which I also dipped pieces of my sangak [I was mixing and matching the bread with everything on the table by this point...in my soup, in my yogurt, with my kababs...I almost thought of sprinkling some salt on a morsel and layering it up with some of the green leaves from the salad...but that idea died somewhere in between the utterly addictive kabab koobideh and the lentil soup.] I’m sure that making the soup in a kitchen close to the kabab grill had something to do with the taste – I’m convinced that the meat juices vaporize into the air and then condense back down over the lentils and baby noodles swirling around in the soup cauldron. Sort of like a cross-pollination of awesome flavours in the kitchen…

I’m glad that I started my blogging year with discovering what’s so special about Khoury. No…I’m not just glad, in fact, I’m relieved that I have my blogger-foodie-explorer cape back after it’d been sitting at the laundry for nearly a month. I finally have my first blog post of 2012 [hallelujah.] And a Kabab-happy tummy. And a new sesame-studded bread discovery. I can feel it in my bones…t’is gonna be a good, good year.

Khoury Special Kabab Restaurant
Opposite Emirates NBD Bank, after Canadian Hospital, behind Ramada Continental Hotel, Deira
Phone: +971 (4) 2666322 / (50) 3179721

But I hadn’t forgotten about the list, not for a minute. I promise that I’ve always thought about it after I written a post…more often than not after I’ve already published it…but I’ve thought about it nevertheless and it stands strong at where it stands today. If there have been no new entries since September, it’s not because of my crapfaced memory, but because the bar was hardass high (set by yours truly). Going back to the time I laid down my seemingly ludicrous but actually, admittedly awesome criteria, this is what went down back in January:

…‘best’ is not a term that I’ll throw on any random fritter that crosses my path and happens to taste ‘yummy.’  Best is a title only conferred on those foods that result in

(a) a EUREKA! moment = they make me stop mid-way between a sentence or a thought when I take the first bite, and go, OMG/GASP/some incoherent version thereof of OMG or GASP.

(b) HYPNOSIS = they leave me significantly enchanted for the rest of the meal…all I’d be thinking about is, ‘how the heck did whoever make this, make this? And can they make bottomless mounds of it so that I can endlessly cram my face with it?’

(c) PROLONGED HIGH PULSE RATE = they leave me all jittery with excitement like an overcaffeinated junkie, just waiting to tell someone, anyone, about what I just ate.

–inafryingpan, Jan 19, 2011.

So this is where the list stands people:

Sundry eats from Boulevard Cafe, Sugarbox [sadly I hear the white chocolate oreo truffle is no longer in production. whose not-so-brilliant idea was that?], Choco’a, Mango Tree, Aapa Kadai, Eric’s, Shikidim, Singapore Deli, Sabah Lebanon, Shiraz, and Daily. In some cases, it was everything that made it to my table that bowled me over…and in other cases, it was just a few, or even just one specific thing that hit the spot. I’m not rehashing what it was for each of those places here, I’ve labored over an entire post for every one of them – so be a sweet muffin and…READ IT.

I’ve also shoved up a slideshow [...the horrors of being a consultant. I'd be paralyzed without my slides - the essential tool to saying so much when you have nothing much to say at all.]

Hit your left and right arrow keys to circle through this baby.

2011 has been a crazy year of food, fun, frolick and all the other f-words thrown in…and 2012 will ring in with a big fat bang in…

…in February.

Before you jump to conclusions, no, I’m not slacking off in the first month of the year. It’s just that January is sorta gonna be this amazing month when my sister gets married and my food blog gets…GASP…shoved on the back burner and will simmer away silently until the water boils away and the bottom of the pan becomes kinda nasty and black and corroded and so lonely without my incessant rambling.

God I love drama.

But January is gonna be great, even though my blog will miss being scribbled all over for a bit. In the meantime, what I’d LOVE is for everyone to dish out a little bit of fryingpan love right back at me…tell me your favorite hole-in-the-wall hidden eats anywhere in the UAE, in a comment, on my facebook page, over twitter, in an email…over anything BUT the phone because social media has robbed me of the ability to have a human untyped spontaneous conversation that exceeds 140 characters.

Party it up people – turn up the music, surround yourself with your favourite peeps, and whatever you do, make sure it’s downright yummy cause you know you deserve it.

Rock on in 2012.

Logic is sometimes a starved notion with the restaurants in this city.

One has 3 options in this bleak, unpredictable, the end may be tomorrow…or at the chef’s discretion world:
Option 1) Call before you go. And hope that the person who picks up can understand what you’re asking, because often, restaurants don’t feel compelled to invest in survival communications training. Be wary of any information you get when the conversation remotely starts resembling the following:

Hi, where is your restaurant?
Yes.
Do I take a left after the traffic signal, or a right?
Yes.

Option 2) Keep backup options in the same neighborhood. With one down, have at least two other yummy places around the corner that you can jump ship to. And pray with all your might that Murphy hasn’t enforced a law that has shut all three of them down within seconds of your arrival.

Option 3) Stay home and cook. If you’re gifted with the same level of culinary talent as myself, the world gets REALLY dark from this point on.

The last time the restaurant world sprung a fast one on me, I executed option 2 and landed up at Al Haj Bundu Khan, a famous age-old Karachi transplant that I’d read about in some online press release.

A special thank you to all my understanding friends – Vineet, Chef Tom, an Eternally Zesty lady blogger, and the Naihar ringleader – who after driving up to a shut-on-mondays restaurant, were then rerouted to this kabab joint around the corner…with the wrong directions. Uncanny how one missing right turn can turn your super simple phone directions to meaningless schmuck + multiple frantic corrective phone calls. Sorry guys, but for the record, I’m crap at directions.

According to the menu, this place had history, a legendary Bundu Khan who was the Pakistani Colonel Sanders of kababs and chicken tikkas. And true enough, the kababs that hit our table had been grilled with the authentic hand of history. We ordered Behari Mutton kababs that equalled the likes of what I’d eaten at Dubai’s famed Daily restaurant.

What makes the Bihari kabab so special is that it’s not just tender chunks of beef – but beef that’s morphed into buttery paste, using what was probably a mix of papaya and yogurt as tenderizers, and with just those mellow, earthy masalas that pay due respect to the kabab, without detracting from its uber macho beefiness. This is one kabab that you can actually sort of…lap up, beef chunks, marinade, et al. [psst. I'm going to inscribe this in my kitchen one day when I walk in to try something more adventurous than a turkey and cheese sammy: Behind every successful kabab is a brilliant marinade.]

Here we have a plate of more meat: logs of Chicken Reshmi Kabab and crusty charred cubes of Chicken Boti Malai (cream). Both kababs were silky soft on the inside, mildly flavored, and perfect when tucked into quarters of naan or plopped atop this impossibly crunchy paratha-puri, aka Bundu Khan’s Paratha if you’re hunting it out on the menu.

A paratha is a fried flat disc of wheat bread, alternately crispy and soft, depending on which parts of the disc hit the hottest parts of the tawa (griddle). A puri is a poofy little sphere of air, trapped in with a sheer skin of deep fried dough. Both carb concoctions are well-respected in India and across much of the curry-loving world as bread stalwarts in their own right. But imagine if you were to…combine the two??…*NEWTON APPLE THUD* Golden brown flat disc with mini crunchy deep-fried craters and poofy bubbles all along the surface. More bready surface area. More poofy. More crispy. More crunchy. MORE YUMMAY.

If it weren’t obvious already, Bundu Khan is a meat eaters lair. Of the four veggie options on the menu, only one was available – the Dal Tadka. Bundo Khan’s dal tadka was just a humble bowl of yellow lentils tempered with cumin and coriander and the other usual indian spices…but done in a way that transports you back to a tiny Indian village with a little mud and brick home, a tiny, tiny kitchen, a small motherish woman bent over the chakki rolling out rotis, and a pot of daal and spices slow cooking on the stove, sending its earthy rustic aroma winding through the entire house. [I've never actually lived in a tiny Indian village...but for such vivid, colourful scenes of Indian life that I've experienced vicariously in the comforts of my air-conditioned apartment miles away in Dubai, I thank you Bollywood.]

If I were confined to daal and paratha-puri at Bundu Khan, I’d be a happy camper. Unless the table next to me was plundering a plate of behari kababs…or one of these Special Bun Kababs.

I’ve professed my love for these egg-coated minced meat patties shoved in a bun before, and I’ll do it again. They’re hard not to love, unless you shove something ghastly in it like…like…I don’t know really. These are just hard to NOT like. The patties are super mushy on the inside (which for a shami kabab first timer, could catch you off guard. But remember, a shami is not a burger. It falls into a different, mushier and more succulent category.), held in with this intricate crackly web of fried egg wash on the outside, and topped off with some raw crunchy purple onions.

One dip of kabab-in-bun into Bundu Khan’s tamarind water, a thick swig of buttery salted lassi, and a quick side nibble of a leftover behari kabab, and suddenly…the earth-shattering disappointment brought on an hour earlier by the restaurant that shut itself on Monday…was history. Nothing that came on the table was something I hadn’t tasted before, these were all familiar Indo-Pak flavours. But the key is in execution, and I can safely say that Bundo Khan had fried, grilled, mixed and did whatever they were doing in their kitchen in that perfect, homestyle lovin’ way.

We were also fed with this screechingly sweet halwa on the table…

…that might have been a result of my whining relentlessly to the servers about not having the Chicken Karahi (wok) or Karahi Keema (minced meat) or Bagaray Baingan or a host of other dishes that sat teasingly on the menu.  This was one of those rare times I asserted that I was a food writer who’d come all the way to try their entire range of cooking – and while assertion cannot a bowl of keema magically make, it can lure out a complimentary bowl of pre-made halwa. They were trying to please, and the food that came out on the table made up for the dishes that didn’t…but going back to Option 1: CALL before you go and check on everything, including any dishes you’d be heartbroken if you had to leave without trying.

I’ll be back to the neighborhood over the weekend to try the restaurant that was shut on Monday. And if for some godforsaken reason it’s all boarded up or the chef decides he’d rather be at the park that Friday, then Bundu Khan’s little corridor of a restaurant, with its melty behari kababs and village-evoking daal, will be right there to rescue me.

Al Haj Bundu Khan
Phone: +971 (4) 370-9881, (50) 761-1364
Directions: Available on their facebook page here

Mom has blamed me in the past for boring people to bits with my kabab and curry chatter – but it wasn’t me mamma, I’m telling you, IT WASN’T ME. I land up at places, and somehow, it’s the other people who trap me into a food conversation. And before you know it, the entire evening has whizzed past in this heated discussion of how to get your hands on the best kaati rolls in the city or personal shawarma joint picks.*

*both instances are based on real-life incidents. The first was at a family get-together where I walked in determined to NOT talk about food – until a generous friend debuted my food blog on our dinner table. I responded to restaurant questions in total fear that mommy on the other table would catch me in the midst of a sundry chatter–>food obsessing crime that I hadn’t committed. The second instance happened with a bunch of friends at a rooftop bar – drunk friends who were clearly not drunk enough to discuss shawarmas, but too drunk to remember the conversation the morning after. I don’t know who started the shawarma conversation, but I’m sure it was their fault.

Now that I’ve announced to the world that I am capable of conversing in complete coherent sentences without ‘crispy’ or ‘buns’ or ‘cheese’ shoved somewhere in the middle…let me tell you about this Sri Lankan restaurant in Ghusais called Redbox, that our corporate banker tipped me off about when he was down at our offices….yeah don’t say it…I know.

Sri Lankan food tends to have flavours that echo the ones in South Indian food – peppery spices, coconut, tons of rice flour…but it’s waaay spicier. My past experiences have brought me to tears, and this time, I decided that I’d be equipped with a backup plan…an exit mechanism…an ASS [Anti-Spice Strategy]. I called the restaurant to confirm whether they had yogurt in house to rescue me if needed, the mouth-foaming ear-smoking eye-tearing spice wimp that I am. They didn’t. And so, to avoid becoming the crying pan (™ vineetpabreja), I brought my own little yogurt cup from home. Laugh people, laugh. But when you have some of this stuff and wake up the next morning with a flaming tummy, come back to my blog and read this:

BURN Busta, BURRRRNNNN.

For the rest of you wise ‘uns, walk in with a mini tub of yogurt and this list of what to order…and what to skip.

ORDER: The Hoppers. 3 plain ones, 1 egg one. Served with a chutney-like side of red hot chilly katta sambol.

I’d suggest that you barbarically rip through one of these delicate little rice flour cups, just so you can feel how the crackly outer rim suddenly gets mushier and mushier until it becomes this baby soft coconutty-milky-sweet centre, so subtly milky soft that it inspires you – the once shameless hopper barbarian – to return to the table with newfound civility. With the violent act now a thing of the past, discreetly tug away little hopper pieces and dip into the closest curry or chutney-like thing you can find on the table.

Now every hopper order comes with 3 plain hoppers and 1 egg hopper. The coveted egg one was neatly divided between the six of us on the table. By the time I tasted it, and realized what it needed to go from good to great, my smidgen of the egg hopper was gone. DON’T LET THAT HAPPEN TO YOU. If you’re forced to go 1/6ths with friends on an egg hopper, salt and pepper the damn thing before you scarf it down. All eggs are born wanting a sprinkling of salt and pepper, and the one on an hopper will be no different.

SKIP: The Devilled Kingfish. A bunch of kingfish chunks dunked in a sweet and sour sauce, with red hot chilli flakes glistening through the orange saucey sheen. I’d ordinarily love this sauce at a Chinese restaurant, but when matched with the other classic Sri Lankan flavours on the table (coconut, chilli, cumin, coriander, black pepper…), it jangled my taste buds.

Also SKIP: The fried Prawns in Hot Garlic Sauce…in aforementioned sweet-sour sauce. Read above for why I’d do this sauce in China, but not in Sri Lanka.

ORDER: The Dhal Curry. Definitely got a big fat thumbs up from all the six on the table – and four of the thumbs were one with discerning Indian roots, ones who really know their details when it comes to daal. Redbox did this so well, keeping the spice on the down-low, amping up the earthiness, and tinging it with a background sweetness (coconut milk – amen.) that I will include in my daals someday…when I cook…something other than a turkey and lettuce sandwich…in some future state of my adulthood…lightyears away.

SKIP: The String Hoppers. Not because there’s something wrong with steamed strings of rice flour, but…but let’s put it this way: if I had a wall of rice flour fame and just one spot left on it, it’d go to the more texturally complex and coconutty hopper.

SKIP: An order of Godamba Roti, doughy elastic parcels of wheat that I’d much rather eat when they’re all shredded up and thrown together with chicken, beef, veggies, whatever you choose, as…

…ORDER: Kotthu Roti. This peppery mountain of shredded elasticky gothamba roti tangled up with meat and veggies is something that sort of grows on you…*chomp*…hmmm interesting…*chomp chomp*…mmm pretty decent…*chomp chomp chomp*…one more spoon mmmmmm….*chomp chomp chomp chomp*…acccck I CANTSTOPthisthinghascrackinit!! I don’t know why I kept eating it, I just don’t know why, but I continued picking at the plate and swirling the roti shreds in dollops of my home-brought yogurt…until the server finally snatched the few desolate roti strings away from me because it was dessert time. I may have to go back to put my finger on precisely what was so addictive.

ORDER: The Chicken Lamprais. Order it, because I damn well couldn’t. This banana-leaf wrapped bundle of steamed rice and fish cutlets that I’d fallen in love with when I first tried Sri Lankan food (ironically, in New York.) is a weekend special only – and Saturday is not a Redbox weekend. I left lamprais-less, and it broke my heart.  I can’t write it loud enough, if you go here, GO ON A FRIDAY because I can bet this lamprais ROCKS. And if it doesn’t, just pleasure yourself with a pile of kottu roti and all will be well.

ORDER: The Woodapple drink. Just because it’s a great dinner topic and a post-dinner facebook wall discussion debate. Didi was adventurous enough to order it, and generous enough to let everyone have a sampler taste. Reactions:Tastes like eggnog, sans alcohol…interesting, wonder what woodapple looks like……ACK, peptobismol…I sorta like it …*WRETCH* waaattt—errr! (that last one would be me).

SKIP: The exotic-sounding, suspense-inducing Wattalappam, which was really just a pseudonym for grayish-brownish flan. What a tease.

ORDER [only if you must have something sweet to extinguish the fire. Else SKIP.]: The Bibikkan coconut cake. Moist, fruity, coconutty…not the most spectacular of desserts, but I do like a slice of sweet-soaked fruit cake on occasion, so why not. Plus, it sort of jived well with the skippy Abba music they had playing the background.

With five Orders, five Skips, 1 Order…else Skip, and an empty cup of yogurt, I’m divided on whether I’d go back to Redbox. I’d almost HAVE to, just for the traditional Sri Lankan chicken lamprais that I’ve hoisted high on this shining pedestal at the centre of my food loving brain. Redbox also had these store-baked buns and pastries and crazy crocodile bread that sadly hadn’t lasted through till dinner time, so I still need to go back and do some carb-sampling. Plus Vineet admitted lusting after the kottu roti and daal two days later. Methinks I’ll be back at Redbox at some point, with an ambition to try the untested dishes on the menu, with insider knowledge on the hoppers and kottu roti and daal…and with my trusty tub of yogurt.

[psssst...thanks to my dining partners in crime: Vineet, Amin, Angela, Didi and Kat!]

Redbox
Phone: +971 (4) 258 3318
Directions:  Drive to Dubai Grand Hotel on Damascus Street in Ghusais (directions here). Dubai Grand Hotel should be on your left. Continue driving to the next main traffic light, cross the light and take the first right into the service road. As you drive into the service lane, you will see a Dominos, and then Redbox.

I tell you about tiny little restaurants hidden away in some Godforsaken corner of Dubai. Places that don’t have great access to parking. Places that don’t have glittering silverware or white linens. Places that don’t necessarily have English-speaking servers. Places that…get ready, here’s the dirty little secret…

Places that sometimes, don’t give a rat’s derriere about service.

It’s true. I’ve often told you about my love for a restaurant, raving about the creamy fish fillets or serenading the hot floofay buns. Yet, I rarely whisper a thing about how the server forgot our order of fried calamari…or how he grunted in our faces with disbelief at our ever having ordered calamari in the first place. Sure I’ll tell you if the calamari was bad…that when it came out, it looked like the poor soggy creature had died twice before it reached the basket – once at the hands of the fisherman who caught it, and twice at the hands of the chef who’d drowned it in his Canola oil spill. But I just don’t dwell on service. Because if I did, I should really be walking up to the poshy big-name places in Dubai first – and we know, hell we know, even those places often don’t get it right. So I’m willing to cut the small fish some slack….small fish like this tiny Kanafa café in Hor Al Anz that I dragged Sheban into after our little Moroccan tagine feast.

The slogan of Bait Al Kanafa (The House of Kanafa) should be:

Kanafa from the heart.
Service from the ___*
*fill in the blank with your least favorite body part or rhyming bodily action.

But kudos to the restaurant, they had done justice to this famed Lebanese dessert. It was good, so good, that I’d become numb to the atrocities the servers were inflicting on us. And watching me go numb made Sheban [once my dinner compadre. now a quivering furiously boiling kettle.] realize that the crappy service wouldn’t get more than a side mention on this blog. The thought of it was killing him.

SO, in a little departure from my self-obsessed blogging norms, I’m going to give him some space to vent, and to augment my review with his own personal rant point of view of the place. So that you, my fabulous reader, will be fully aware of what you’re walking into when you go in to order that deadly yummy plate of cream kanafa.

Here goes: the good, the bad, and the…dayaaam that kanafa was GOOD.

Kanafa from the Heart. By Me.

The last time I wrote about Kanafa, I referred to the cheese-filled one. It inspired me to the point where I came up with a shockingly brilliant idea of revolutionizing Mickey D’s menu with kanafa. I always thought that I preferred the cheese-filled kanafa over the cream one, until the cream kanafa at Bait al Kanafa converted me. Actually, they don’t keep the cheese version at all. All you can order is this full moon of cream, covered with a crispy skin of toasted semolina noodles.

If I were Goldilocks, there’d be three types of cream Kanafa on the table. Too thick: overpowering blanket of cream that threatens to suffocate you. Too ick: watery, milky, icky layer of cream that spills out and violates the notion of a well-assembled dessert. And then this one, the Bait al Kanafa one. Thin layer of cream, super dense, yet impossibly light, crowned with a crispy sheet of golden semolina noodles – and not drowned in this sea of cloyingly sweet sugary syrup that often tends to mute out everything else in the dessert. This was juuuuust right. (On a side educational note, I’d recommend all kindergarten teachers to switch the Goldilocks story from blah porridge to crispy-creamy Kanafa. Let the kiddies live a little.)

Also worth mentioning was our beverage choice: a styrofoam glass of warm saffron milk, which was really supposed to be saffron and cardamom tea, but the server messed it up. And I’m glad, cause saffron milk with creamy Kanafa deserves to become the new oreos and milk of midnight snacking.

Service from the ___. By Sheban.

Here’s my review of the Kanafas: They’re brilliant, squishy and delicious – and you must try one before you kick the bucket…also, they’re really rich, so you may kick the bucket because you had one.

And…now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, what follows is my opinion on The Bait‘s service, which was really, really bad. How bad you ask? Well, for starters – we took more than a minute to order, so our server came up to me and in Clint Eastwood style went “You going to order??…(punk…) Ouch. That set the tone for the rest of the experience.

Before ordering, we asked if they were made with Cheese, the guy frowned on us – and a whole bunch of them chimed in together “NO cheese, Only cream”. Okay, Choir boys – we’ll have the Cream ones then – with a Zafrani Chai. After confirming our orders twice, the Choir boys slinked away to aggressively discuss our order. Yes, they spent about five minutes talking about kunafas in an Indian sub-dialect I couldn’t put a finger on – and I’m Indian. I sensed a disturbance in The Force…we noticed the choir boys didn’t really seem to get along very well, it was a bit like watching  Indian MP’s in parliament. Thankfully our Kanafa arrived before the chair-throwing started, with what looked like…milk. I didn’t feel like arguing with Clint Eastwood over the milk-tea mix up, lest he shoot me with his .44 Magnum, so I decided I was going to have the milk, and I was going to like it, dammit.

One bite of the Kanafa, however,and everything started to seem better. This place wasn’t really that bad… maybe I was just being cranky because I was hungry. I cheered up, wolfed down my Kunafa, decided I was going to like this place, and asked for the bill in the customary “Write in Air” fashion. Clint Eastwood looked at me, nodded, and promptly came back with a…paper and pen. Realizing that war was imminent, the very tactful Fryingpan stepped in and asked Clint Eastwood for the bill, in her voice – in hindi.

And then the bill arrived (it was 17 AED btw). I paid, but before we could scramble we were informed that we’d paid only part of the bill. I guess The Bait does its bills in installments, you pay once before you leave the table, you pay the rest before you’re out the door. I proceeded to tell Clint that a bill usually entails ALL the items you’ve asked for, fished out more money, paid my debt…and not feeling particularly generous, waited for my change. Clint got me change – which was more than I was entitled to. I could’ve corrected him, but the thought of being 6 AED richer was just too good to pass up.

So there. This time, you have BOTH sides. Sometimes restaurants with hidden yummy gems just have shiaatty service. All you need is a big spoonful of thick, sweet noodle-studded cream to swallow the crappy service down.

Bait Al Kanafa Restaurant
Phone: +971 (4) 2689900
Abu Hail, Deira. Behind Ramada Hotel, close to Emirates NBD Bank. I’ve tried to shove the general location on a google map, though you may need to ask someone once you’re on 24th street, or just walk down the road a bit, cause my directions are far from scientific.

Trip #1: Single minded purpose to hunt out Al Ammor for koshari and feteer. Hor Al Anz was a maze – I don’t remember any of the streets, or even how we eventually landed up on the doorstep of Al Ammor. But that mad hunt was SO worth it. Almost inspired me to author a book: Koshari for the Konflicted Soul.
Almost.

Trip #2: Not food-related at all. Tagged along with Sheban [remember that B&W photographer genius I’d been outrageously jealous of a few months ago? I’m not jealous anymore – I just couldn’t be. One doesn’t compare local satellite TV to Hollywood. And guess who’s the local satellite channel in this metaphor?] who had to run an errand in the area. As I sat around waiting in the car for him to get back, I gazed out of the window. My eyes landed on a string of ethnic, hole-in-the-wall joints. Hmmm…intriguing.

Trip #3: Once again with Sheban, in search of a place called Phili cafe for afternoon chai after we’d noshed on truckloads of sugar at Bakefest. We never found it, but winding through the roads, I suddenly realized the sheer number of ethnic places. Yemeni. Ethiopian. Lebanese. Egyptian. Iranian. Iraqi. Moroccan.

We never found Phili cafe and left chailess…but with three words reverberating in my head. Must. Come. Back.

Trip #4: Dragged Sheban to drive me back there to EAT.

In places like Hor Al Anz that are teeming with scores and scores of unassuming little eateries, I regress into a child at an amusement park. That hyperactive child who starts bouncing about and suffers temporary A.D.D. because it can’t figure out whether to go on the rollercoasterorthesupermanslideorhauntedcastleorcandyflossIwantmammanownowNOW!

We trekked down the one main road of stores and restaurants, road 13b, and peeped into all the little alleyways that stealthily branched off to give homes to more tiny stores and restaurants…it was like one big maze of awesomeness just waiting to be eaten. The place we finally settled on (thanks to this schmanzy restaurant finder application that Sheban had on his fancypants smartphone) was this one right here:

Wajda Morrocain Restaurant.

It had all the markings that an authentic ethnic cheap eat should have…tiny, barely conspicuous façade, location on some tiny street behind the main Hor Al Anz strip [there’s a map on the menu – but it’s in Arabic – I’m working on the translation for ya.], a kitchen that was 40% the size of my tiny New York-sized studio apartment [tah-hiiinnnny], a traditional four-burner gas stove, and an elderly lady in her abaya, with her one hand stirring the pot on the stove, and her other hand clutching her handbag because this was her final stir before she headed out for the night, leaving everything in the trusty hands of her son? grandson? nephew? who knows…but the kitchen had been left in the hands of this 20-some year old boy with a popped collar, a hands-free plugged into one ear, and a mouth that occasionally spewed out irritated curses every time his eyes flitted to the man speaking on the little TV screen above our heads.

Seconds after we’d snagged one of the three tables in the little dining space facing the kitchen, a pretty lady, maybe in her early 30’s – also part of the Wajda family perhaps? – walked up to our table and kindly offered to help us order in English before she left. This is what she helped us settle on:

Zaalouk. A dip made of tomatoes and cooked eggplant whose smokiness and intense tomatoey flavor I could imagine even though I’d never tasted it before…I just knew it would be amazing.

…why is something with tomatoes and eggplant green you ask? Because popped-collar boy manning the kitchen had one ear clogged with his hands-free…so our Zaalouk order conveniently morphed into a Bakoula one instead – something that tasted of boiled mashed spinach leaves (which on googling, I’ve learned are actually mallow leaves.), a twinge of lemon, and a generous sprinkling of disappointment because really, all I wanted was tomato pulpiness in my mouth. The saving grace was this fresh crusty Morrocain khobz that they were pulling right out of their ovens.

Perfect ratio of Fluff : Crunch.

The outsides of the khobz had been strategically dusted with semolina grains, leaving grainy baby granules studded on the crust to crunch up under a fierce blasting of oven heat. The insides were full of white pillowy fluff, perfect for sponging up dips and gravies and sauces and the chickeny juices from this super traditional lemon and olives chicken tagine…

I love tagines. And Wajda Moroccain has a crazy nine types of tagine – including a sardine kofta one and a beef tagine camoon* that I’ve got to go back and try.
*someone tell me what camoon is, please? Google has deserted me on this one.

The tagines I’ve had in the past have usually been slightly sweet, slow-cooked meats with prunes and apricots and nuts and soft simmering spices that seep deep into the meaty smithereens. The key is to morph the meat into butter, by braising it in the traditional conical earthenware. And true to tradition, the chicken in Wajda’s tagine had broken down into tender bunches of flesh – no harsh forks and knifes needed, just a simple tug is all it took for the plump leg to glide off the thigh.

Now don’t expect there to be a whole lot of flavour within the white insides of the chicken – it all sort of streams out and accumulates into a pool of comforting chickeny broth on the bed of the tagine. SO, if you want the full flavourful experience, take my very profound eating suggestions and:  (a) reintegrate the elements, the chicken and the broth, ideally with a nice hefty swab of khobz, before you plant it in your mouth, (b) dunk crispy fries into more lemony chicken broth, (c) alternate bites of chicken bits encased in brothy khobz with bites of brothy fries, and (d) sigh.

Thanks to Sheban, who demanded that real meat (aka. sausages or kababs) be bought to the table, we called for a plate of Moroccon merguez. Maybe traditional merguez is an acquired taste…that, or the chicken tagine had already closed my tummy for business, because these just didn’t wow me. For all the obnoxious orange popsicle stains these sausages left all over my hand and mouth (and as dribble if you squirt a sausage down your shirt. which of course, I did.), they actually didn’t taste of much. Unless I sprinkled them with tons of salt and used them as edible logs of salty granules just so I could eat…salt. (If it weren’t obvious already, I love salt.)

And that’s it. We got a grand total of three dishes, doing a terrible injustice to a menu that included muffin-like semolina Harcha, paratha-like Melaui, pancake-like Beghrir and Reefa [no, I didn’t know any Moroccan bread jargon till I read it on the menu. And yes, I googled it. Moroccanfood.about.com is a godsend.], pastry-encased chicken pastille, sweet couscous, and this calamari sandwich that I stupidly spotted on the paper menu pamphlet only now, while writing this post. To our credit, they had run out of chicken pastille, and we were also saving space for this tiny chai joint and a knafeh place that we’d spotted on our walk over to this restaurant. I promise to serve you crisp-creamy knafeh in my next post.

With our limited ordering, I’d probably have to go back and eat my way through more of the menu before I decide whether this restaurant’s a keeper. And returning to Hor Al Anz is actually a very heartwarming thought. The entire area is like an overlooked oilfield, and I’m waiting on one toe to rope in more explorers who’d be willing to plonk themselves down at a rickety wooden table and try some ethnic grub with me.

I’m telling you people, Hor Al Anz is my new Karama.

Wajda Morrocain Restaurant
Phone: +971 (4) 2666 4772 / (50) 2177065
I’m a space cadet when it comes to directions, but I spent a crapload of time on google maps figuring out the location for ya.