AFGHAN KABAB VILLAGE Dubai

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