The Man Who Ate the World (14 page)

Few luxury services are like this. You can hire a limo for an hour or two but you will never have the ease, or sense of entitlement, that owning those wheels brings. You can spend three months’ salary on a designer
outfit, but every time you look at it you will be reminded only that all your other clothes are cheap and tatty by comparison.

Expensive restaurants are different. They operate a deformed kind of democracy. In Moscow the point had been made most acutely as we left Turandot. Inside we had been the same as everybody else: big-ticket diners, with a leasehold on prime, eating real estate. Outside we were scum. Turning right from the front door, we walked past a sleek £300,000 Maybach idling at the curb in wait for its owner. There was no shiny Merc or BMW for us, let alone a Maybach. This being Moscow, we couldn’t even telephone for an ordinary taxi; they don’t do licensed taxis in Moscow. Instead we went to the corner, stuck out our hand, and hailed a gypsy cab, a romantic name for a sooty, clapped-out private car, whose driver just happened to be passing and thought he’d make himself an extra couple of quid. It smelt of old dog. We had gone from first to cattle class in minutes.

Now, of course, I was back in first class, or meant to be. I watched the line of diners continue to build, with a grim fascination. I knew why the queue was there. Al Mahara is reached by a submarine simulator designed to suggest that your table is not really on the ground floor of the hotel in which it is located, but ninety meters out across the seabed. It is the simulator—in truth just a lift that travels down one floor—which everybody is waiting for.

Apart from me. I refuse to queue. I look up. The 180-meter-high atrium of the Burj al Arab Hotel towers away from me, pinpricks of light glinting in the boldly colored ceilings of each open floor. The sail-shaped Burj al Arab, the tallest hotel in the world, is built on its own man-made island 100 meters out to sea as if it is about to float away on the breeze. It is also reputed to be the most luxurious in the world.

Shortly after it opened in 1999, a British journalist declared it the only seven-star hotel on the planet. There is no such thing as a seven-star hotel, because the ratings stop at five; it was a tidy bit of journalistic hyperbole, but the label stuck and, having been given the tour that afternoon, I could see why. The hotel employs 1,700 staff for a maximum of 500 guests. One hundred and sixty of those staff are butlers, so there are
at least fifty on duty at any one time. There aren’t mere rooms at the Burj, only 202 double-floored suites ranging in price from £1,000 ($2,000) a night for a basic one-bedroom, to more than £6,500 ($13,350) a night for the 780-square-meter Royal Suite (breakfast not included).

The décor follows the “Soon to be deposed murderous dictator” school: too much 24-karat gold leaf, too much thick blue velvet, more gold, a bit of shiny black stuff, marble, tassels, curtains, gold, chandeliers like giant crystal tits, gold, glass-topped coffee tables, and leather armchairs upholstered in human skin. All right. I made up the armchairs, but not the gold. There really is a lot of gold. At the very top of the hotel, just above the bar with its view out over the city, is a circular helipad (where, famously, Andre Agassi and Roger Federer once played tennis).

At the bottom is the fish and seafood restaurant, Al Mahara, which I have been told is the best in the city, and if it’s the best in the city, obviously I have to eat there. And I will do, just as soon as the bloody queue subsides.

Eventually I am loaded onto the submarine with a crowd of Japanese tourists who only stop photographing one another when the Indian captain insists they sit down and strap themselves in. Then off we go: The cabin, with its electronic display up front and bucket seats in the back, vibrates and rolls as we apparently set off into the shallows of the Persian Gulf. Through the “windows” we see the “seabed.” Fish swim by. Seaweed waves. The captain maintains a listless commentary that clearly he has performed a dozen times already this evening: “Oh, here’s a turtle come to say hello, and there’s where I crashed yesterday . . .” Finally, with a judder, we are there and the video images fade. To celebrate, my companions photograph one another.

I am led into the dining room and have to stop to scoop my jaw up off the thickly carpeted floor. Al Mahara is to good taste what Adolf Hitler was to world peace. The entrance is through a gold-leaf, multiridged opening that reminds me of nothing less than a giant vulva (an image not helped by the fact that, behind it, is a womb of an antechamber in crushed red velvet). The dining room is one long curve with, on the ceiling, huge
mirrored panels so you can watch yourself gawp. In the middle, dominating the space, filling your field of vision, is a backlit 80,000-gallon aquarium, complete with moray eels and leopard sharks and flamboyantly colored parrot fish, the it-girls of this neighborhood, loitering by the glass as if aware of their good looks.

The fish have been forced onto a reverse-sleep schedule, so they are asleep during the day but raring to go at night, when people like me are staring at them. What is it about expensive fish restaurants that they feel the need to show you your dinner while it still has a pulse? At Sirena it was under-floor sturgeon. Here, it’s everything else. At Sirena, I had imagined the sudden sound of cracking, snapping glass as the floor gave way beneath me; here, all I can think is that I am now on the set of a seventies disaster movie, before the interesting stuff happens and Jason Robards dies an heroic death.

I am waiting for one pair of spring-loaded lobster crackers to go flying across the room, smash the glass, and send out the sharks, ideally in pursuit of the party of aging Canadians from Montreal who are talking in loud voices about the luxury cruise they are on from Istanbul to Singapore, and how their hometown has just been recognized by
Gourmet
magazine as one of the great food cities of the world. I quickly decide I’d pay good money to see them eaten by sharks.

As I am led to my table a harpist strikes up. “Yesterday” floats across the room, followed by George Michael’s “Careless Whisper” and, because it is now only a few weeks until Christmas, “Walking in a Winter Wonderland,” a natural choice of song for a restaurant in a city perched on the eastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. I am handed the obligatory water menu and notice that here, water from Wales is half the price it is in Moscow, which almost makes it a bargain. They compensate for this outbreak of sanity by the inclusion of Chateldon, a mineral water that costs £12.50 ($26) a bottle. Apparently it was big with Louis XIV and “is also a curative for nerve and skin problems.” I consider my complexion in the bowl of a spoon and decide I am not yet in need of Louis XIV’s favorite water.

By now, unsteadied by my submarine ride and baffled by the décor, I am expecting heroically bad food and the first dish I order doesn’t disappoint. The menu is divided into “classics” and “modern” and, being an idiot, I order a starter from the latter. It is listed as soya mud crab ravioli with truffle mango mayonnaise. What arrives is two piles of crabmeat, beneath not pasta, but a flap of amber jelly, which reminds me of something you would put on a burn victim’s wounds to soothe the pain. The sweet, sickly mayo doesn’t help matters. I stare at the aquarium and wonder whether the sharks will forgive me for the waste of such prime seafood when those lobster crackers go flying and the waters break.

After that I start eating from the classics menu and things improve greatly. There is a rich, lobster bisque heavy with brandy (because in Muslim Dubai, alcohol is legal in five-star hotels and private clubs), which is spooned from a silver tureen at my table. There is a piece of John Dory, with a light sage sauce and then a solid piece of turbot in a ripe, gratinated seafood sauce full of mushrooms and prawns. Even allowing for the model of the Burg al Arab hotel realized in puff pastry that arrives with it, this dish is a wonderfully old-fashioned piece of work; the sort of thing that would have appeared in the dining rooms of Paris before nouvelle cuisine took hold in the 1970s and creamy cheese sauces like this went through the culinary equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

There’s something sweet about it. They have a state-of-the-art simulator, a fish tank that is a wonder of engineering, and a modern menu full of foams and jellies and weird flavor combinations. But here, where summer temperatures often reach 45 degrees Centigrade (113 degrees Fahrenheit) or higher and rarely drop below 21 degrees Centigrade (70 degrees Fahrenheit) even in winter, what they do really well is soups full of brandy and cream, and white fish in cheesy, flour-based sauces.

D
riving around Dubai I keep recalling an old Frank Zappa song called “Cocaine Decisions.” It’s about fat-wallet businessmen spinning mega deals while speeding on the white stuff, and if that was how this city
had come into being, it would make sense. It feels like a giant game of SimCity made real, created by someone who’s been up for a month bingeing on chemical stimulants. Except that Dubai is madder than that, because the decisions that have shaped this place were made by Sheikh Mohammed, a good Muslim boy who doesn’t drink let alone bury his face in piles of cocaine like Al Pacino did at the end of
Scarface
.

Presumably the head of the Dubai ruling family was unmedicated when he decided that his kingdom needed an entirely new downtown area of fifteen skyscrapers, all to be built at exactly the same time, including the Burg Dubai, which will eventually be the tallest building in the world (though nobody would say how tall; they didn’t want anyone else to build something taller before they had finished).

He must have been in control of his senses when he chose to build the Jumeirah Palm, the man-made island in the shape of a palm tree measuring five kilometers by five kilometers (3.10 miles by 3.10 miles) with room for 1,500 villas, where they are putting up the Kempinski Hotel that I saw the model of while I was in Moscow. And another palm double the size with more fronds. And a third, complete with an island in the shape of Arabic script that spells out a line of the poetry he likes to write: “Take wisdom from the wise—not everyone who rides is a jockey.” They are the only words in any language that can be read from space.

Plus there are the developments still to be completed: Falcon City of Wonders, with its full-sized replicas of the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, and the leaning Tower of Pisa; or the Dubai waterfront, which will help extend the coastline from a mere 70 kilometers (44 miles) to over 1,500 kilometers (932 miles); or The World, another set of man-made islands in the shape of the globe, so that you could buy Australia or France or Germany and build your dream house on it (though not Israel; there is no Israel in the Dubai world).

Before arriving I had looked at the place on Google Maps, and from fifty miles up it had a twisted kind of logic. Now, on the ground, there is no logic at all. It is a chaos of cranes and car-clogged motorways and
construction workers in blue and orange jumpsuits working night and day. The population of Dubai is now around 1.5 million and only 15 percent of that is native Emeratis. The rest are immigrants, here to build the dream.

I am aware that the same friends who were appalled by the notion of me going to Las Vegas to eat would be equally dismayed by the thought of coming to this massive building site for dinner. I, however, have decided to be optimistic. After all, great restaurants are an invention of cities. Conventional wisdom has it that they were born in Paris after the Revolution when the chefs to the newly beheaded aristocracy found themselves in want of employment. Recent scholarship, most notably by Rebecca Spang, author of
The Invention of the Restaurant
, has argued that this was just another example of the legend-making in which the world of gastronomy so easily indulges, creating kitchen heroes from lowly cooks and imbuing humble ingredients—the mushroom, the oyster—with quasi-mystical significance.

Spang traces the word “restaurant” back to a restorative medicinal dish rather than a physical institution where people were fed. All interesting enough, but she still allows Paris its central significance, and rightly so. It is not in the fields where the raw materials are farmed that the greatest number of great restaurants have ever been found. It is in the cities, where people with spare cash congregate. That is one reason why, as a city boy down to the last knotty, twisted helix of my DNA, I am fascinated by them. I have always seen the restaurant as a mark of civilization. As Sheikh Mohammed is attempting to build a great city, hereon this narrow stretch of sand tucked in between Saudi Arabia and the sea, it seems reasonable to hope that it will also be a good place for a man like me seeking good food. Or at least food.

In the 1950s, long before anybody had thought of serving lobster bisque in the Middle East, only 6,000 people lived in Dubai. It was little more than a trading post, with a reputation for the wild pearls that once grew in the oysters on its seabed and for the smugglers who liked to sail dhows full of contraband up the creek. It was the ruling Maktoum family
who decided it could be much more than that. Though oil was discovered offshore in the 1960s, it was in relatively small amounts. Instead, the Maktoums decided to focus on trade. In the 1970s they dredged the creek and built huge docks, and set up free-trade zones to attract investment. None of this softened its rough edges. Dubai still had something of the frontier town about it, and continues to do so.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian Mafia poured into the old town, recognizing it as a place where they could buy and sell anything. In 2004, when news broke that a Pakistani government scientist, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, had been selling nuclear secrets to North Korea and Iran, it was discovered that many of the deals had been made through front companies in Dubai. It is still rumored that containers full of contraband—gold, weapons, narcotics—flow through its docks every day, and terrorist money trails have regularly been traced into the city and back out again.

This is not the Dubai that Sheikh Mohammed wants you to think about. He doesn’t want you to come to Dubai for a little light arms dealing—or at least not just for that. He wants you to come here for dinner. He has declared that, by 2010, 15 million tourists should be coming every year to experience capitalism’s unfettered bounty. In service of that aim, Dubai’s massive construction companies, which are all either fully or partly owned by the royal family (despite the fact that they compete with one another), are building ever bigger apartment developments, and shopping malls and five-star hotels. The Jumeirah Palm alone will, when it is finished, be home to thirty-two new five-star hotels. And every one of those will, in turn, be home to multiple restaurants.