Al Naqa Lao Kebab House opened in Neighbourhood Food Hall around June 2024. Tiffany and I went as she knew “AJ”, and I only ever heard of him. I trust Tiffany emphatically on matters of the stomach.

Al Naqa would not work in lesser hands. It teeters between worlds that are disparate and almost estranged from each other but with AJ as a thoughtful guide, he is able to stand back 35,000 ft to see the broader strokes that unite Laotian, Persian and wider Middle Eastern cuisine and then slide into the details that serve each other almost naturally, like they were always meant together, like fingers that find the grooves of a glove.

Al Naqa is a brave, but AJ has ability and humility is spades.

To be clear, this is street food. This is budget dining in a food hall I’ve once described as a gentrified abattoir. (It’s honesty great, go! I make it sound terrible but it’s easily one of my favourite places and I’m fortunate to live close to it.)

It is the kind of eating people want not only because it’s delicious, but it’s recognisable. It’s the kind of stuff I would cook myself if I had the time, and abilities.

It’s what Dubai’s Michelin Guide is missing—a publication so bent on fanning tourists towards Dubai’s next shiniest thing that it blithely overlooks what it needs.

We don’t need another mortgage-threatening opening. We need to celebrate the diaspora of those that make this city better than great; they make it delicious.

Al Naqa sits among them and, if Michelin won’t send you here, I will.

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