FOOD FOR THOUGHT

In Dubai, ambitious chefs are fusing their personal stories with regional influences, forging a new vision for fine dining in their city

- Samantha Wood

Inside Boca, a breezy, biophilic tapas restaurant in the heart of Dubai's Financial District, the after-work crowd is drinking at the bar. Downstairs, I've joined friends for dinner in the private dining room located in the restaurant's wine cellar. Many bottles in the collection are from Morocco, Lebanon, and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa. We start with oysters harvested from Dibba Bay in Fujairah, the easternmost of the United Arab Emirates, on the Gulf of Oman. Opened a decade ago, Boca has become a pioneer in using ingredients sourced from across all seven emirates. The oysters share a menu with only-in-the-Emirates ingredients like khansour, a mountain plant often used in salads, and kingfish from the Arabian Gulf, served ceviche-style. Technically, Boca is a Spanish restaurant, but its Dubai roots and commitment to local ingredients make it uniquely Emirati.

Not long ago Boca's approach was atypical for Dubai. Since 2001, when Gordon Ramsay flew in to raise the curtain on Verre, inside the Hilton Dubai Creek, the city's culinary circuit has been dominated by celebrity chefs opening glitzy restaurants inside equally glitzy hotels. In the years to follow, Michel Rostang, Nobu Matsuhisa, and Massimo Bottura all lent their names to restaurants in the UAE, creating a food scene with an international reputation for glamour, excess, and exorbitant prices. Certainly the restaurants were buzzy-Ramsay's caramelized apple tarte Tatin, served straight from the oven in a copper pan, would sell out each night. But the names and concepts were all imports, detached from anything truly local. For years this meant that Dubai's only real dining options were big-name, white-tablecloth restaurants or unassuming eateries in neighborhoods without skyscraper hotels, which served shawarmas, pani puri, and cheese-laden manakeesh.