Foodle

Two of our faves, go to @somedaysbakery this Friday at 1pm to get one of their excellent croissants stuffed with a @fillings.nyc ice cream bar. It’s satisfying breaking the ice cream bar in there, but don’t fight over it with your sister.
#[instagram]👶🏽🥐 👌🏽👌🏽👌🏽👌🏽
#foodbabylovessomedaysbakery #foodbabylovesfillings #somedaysbakery #fillingsnyc Less

This is another Sound Bite. No music. No voiceover. Just a few moments exactly as they happened.

This evening came from the collaboration between the three Michelin-starred Trèsind Studio and local hero 1004 Gourmet in Dubai. One of the things I enjoyed most wasn’t simply the food, but watching one of the world’s most accomplished Indian restaurants step outside its usual format.

Korean ingredients, familiar techniques, a room full of chefs and industry people and a kitchen that looked like it was genuinely enjoying the freedom to experiment.

And the kitchen wasn’t the only one enjoying it. This dinner reminded me of season four of Trèsind Studio back when they introduced a fun-filled menu in the wake of the Covid pandemic. You could feel the shackles of formality being loosened, allowing the team to just have fun, but in that way that fine dining chefs allow themselves.

Sound can capture things photographs never quite manage. Conversations fading into the background. It puts you back in the room.

I wrote about why I think Trèsind Studio should do more evenings like this in Amused Bouche. Checkout my Substack for more. Less

Dubai froths over the splashy new openings. A table perched on the 60, 70, 80-something floor overlooking other glass edifices once prized as the shiny new thing. Inside there is low lighting as a superfluous DJ presses play on a pre-recorded innocuous dance track while diners are presented with dry ice-frothing towers laden with fish that come from the same part of Turkey where these beautiful people got their teeth and fillers. Smile. Get a picture.

These restaurants, fuelled by private equity, whether by capital or patronage, come and they go. And so much of the conversation about Dubai’s dining scene, its awards, its (paid for) “power lists” orbits this world.

Praise and enthusiasm for those understated places, bastions of community still trading five, ten, fifteen years later, rarely rise above a whisper, if they get a mention at all.

Yet they exist miles beyond the reach of those towers, in a part of the city their shadows never reach.

This dining scene feeds a community that forged it over years of repeated custom. And it’s not less competitive or accomplished. Here, three generations of families mill, chatter and order the same plates, as if by ritual.

A crimson vindaloo of beef, not pork, its heat knocking and making clear it intends to come in. A meaty, cricket-ball-sized mutton potato chop, soft enough to eat with a spoon. There’s an assertive sol kadi and a thirst-quenching lime soda, sweet or salty, as you prefer.

There’s more: momos and seekh kebabs, butter chicken and paneer jalfrezi, a pivot away from a solely Goan menu, reflecting the palate of the community it now feeds.

Eric’s, a lacy, sea blue restaurant in Al Karama, is homely, almost grandmotherly in its design and pacing. And while I see my beard regrow in the time between dishes leaving the kitchen during a relaxed Saturday lunch, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

There’s a sincerity here that captivates me more than any sparkler-clad matcha fondant ever could. Eric’s is a capsule of Goa that belongs entirely to Karama, and should still belong to it in twenty years’ time.

Read more on Substack or EatGoSee. Link in my bio.
Have you been to Eric’s? Less

I knew almost nothing about Afghan food beyond what you see on television. I assumed it would run close to Pakistani cooking. How wrong I was.

Afghan Kabab Village sits on Al Maktoum Road in Deira behind a gold sign the length of the building. It boasts five hundred covers, so our waiter tells me, running about seventy per cent on a Friday afternoon. It has been open over a year and I cannot find a single person who has written about it. Something is filling that room, and it is not the press.

I suspect it is this: ten or so of the hundred-plus dishes here are actually Afghan. The rest runs to Yemeni mandi, Hejazi bukhari rice, Punjabi korma and dum pukht, Levantine hummus and a page dedicated to Gulf seafood. The receipt is headed Afghan Kabab Al Mandi and Al Bukhari Restaurant L.L.C. Three cuisines in the licensed name versus Afghan alone.

That is not a criticism and I suspect it is the whole answer. The Afghan name gets you noticed on a street of restaurants. The rest of the menu is what the street actually eats, so the street will come.

Upstairs you leave your shoes at the step and eat barefoot and cross-legged on carpets. On a Friday after prayers it was almost entirely men, in groups, ordering the same plates. I did not know how to be there. Whether to fold my legs or stretch them, whether looking around registered as curiosity or intrusion.

The uncertainty was mine and, hundreds of reviews later, it was welcomed.

The mutton pulao is better than anything that comes out of my kitchen, the grains separate and fine, a sweetness rolling in from carrot and dark raisins. Every other karahi I have eaten arrives eye-swellingly hot; the charsi karahi here leaves a thick, hearty gravy and mutton you gnaw off the knuckle. The palak is greener and more pungent than any spinach I know.

Lunch for two, wildly over-ordered, came to 211 dirhams.

Full review live on Substack and EatGoSee, including the two Afghan dishes the menu files under Desserts and the enormous screen playing footage of people walking around Copenhagen, which nobody could explain to me. Link in bio.

Have you eaten Afghan food before? Tell me where to go. Less