The Man Who Ate the World (17 page)

We had eaten lunch at the top of the Dubai World Trade Centre, in one of the rooms behind the second biggest advert in the world, which carries the face of Sheikh Mohammed and covers the whole building. Or, to be more precise, I got to taste a sequence of dishes that were so numerous, the varied forkfuls added up to one meal. On the table, awaiting us, there were bowls of hummus and baba ghanoush and a rich, long-simmered tomato paste flavored with walnuts and chili, home-cured salmon and seared prawns, and an Iranian salad of cucumber and yogurt, a bowl of tabouleh, that traditional mix of chopped flat-leaf parsley dressed with lemon juice, and another of the Lebanese salad fatoush, in which the vegetables are layered with crisp, curling slices of toasted pita bread. There were lamb and chicken kebabs roasted in Indian tandoors, dainty cheese or meat burek—small pies—and vegetable Samosas from the Punjab.

As each item was introduced to me, like honored guests at a wedding,
I noted with relief that nobody was finishing anything. Still, it didn’t mitigate the volume of lunch that was coming at me in waves. I lost count of the platters at two dozen. There was a sweet-and-sour-fish concoction, and two Biryanis, one with fish and one with chicken, various dense meaty curries, and grilled lobster and a few vegetarian stews, and some kofte and something else involving rice, and on and on it went. (At dessert the whole process was repeated, with little pots of things made with nuts and dates and honey and spices, with tottering Parisian-style gâteauxs and even a chocolate crème brûlée.)

There were just three Emerati dishes. The first, called Harris, demands that a cut of veal be cooked in wheat for so long that the meat has completely disintegrated into the grain, which in turn has been worked until there is an elasticity to the glutens. It was a rich and savory paste and very, very solid. At each end of the table were ornate silver platters covered, in turn, by vast silver domes. This, I was told, was the main event. They were why we were here. As we admired the silverware, Khalel told me that, according to Emerati tradition, animals must be slaughtered as close as possible to the time they are eaten. The two lambs under these domes were, he said, slaughtered at six that morning. I am not at all sentimental about these things. I believe that, if you are going to eat meat, you must face up to what that means: the death of a creature. Nevertheless I found it a little disconcerting that I knew exactly when my lunch had died, not least because I also knew there was almost no chance of us finishing any of this. It seemed grossly wasteful, as had so much of this lunch.

When the first silver dome was lifted I was relieved to see that a Dubai lamb is rather smaller than its British equivalent, just four or five kilos. The lambs—known as
ouzi
in Arabic—had been cooked long and slow over water in a large pot called a
jidar
so they were steamed to a sweet and delicate tenderness. Khalel admitted that the addition of chestnuts to this first lamb dish was one of his little flourishes and not really traditional but he thought it worked. I agreed.

The second lamb recipe—ouzi laban—was, however, made exactly the way it had been taught to Khalel by an Emerati who could trace his
family back to 1824. I understood: This little lamb had great lineage. It was culinary nobility. The meat, which had been cooked underneath thin sheets of flat bread, was so tender, it could be carved with a spoon and was pale, almost white. This, I was told, was mostly due to the sauce of dried yogurt with which it had been cooked. There are many foodstuffs I have not heard of before, let alone tried—novelty is a pleasure of the job—and dried yogurt was one of them. (When, I wondered, does dried yogurt become just cheese?) The moment I put the meat in my mouth I knew why I had never tried it. Dried yogurt is another way of saying milk that has gone off. It is sour and has an edge of bile that catches at the back of the throat. It has that pungent, acrid attack that is developed by a bottle of milk left in the sun for three days. The flavor was so foul, so putrid, I found it hard to swallow.

I felt guilty about this because everybody had gone to so much trouble on my behalf. What’s more, this was one of Khalel’s specialities and he seemed like such a nice man—but it was horrible. As I ate my way through the few pieces I thought I could get away with before admitting defeat, I was told this dish was completely authentic. I nodded slowly, my mouth closed. Of that, I had absolutely no doubt.

S
hould anybody ever invite you to sample pressed pig’s ear, think very carefully before putting it in your mouth. If chewing on something with the texture of raw kneecap and the flavor profile of a vinyl raincoat appeals, then clearly that pressed pig’s ear is for you. Don’t hold back. Knock yourself out. Otherwise I can’t recommend it. I tried it a few years ago at a new restaurant in London’s Chinatown called Ecapital. I now look back at the review I wrote then and blush.

At the time Ecapital was being lauded by its admirers because it specializes in the cuisine of Shanghai rather than Canton or Beijing, as most of Britain’s Chinese places tend to. Ecapital, they said, was the real
thing: So that’s lots of shredded jelly fish and braised pig’s knuckle and pressed pig’s ear. When it opened I said the novelty of its menu was a welcome addition to London’s dining scene. It’s the sort of rubbish desperate restaurant critics reach for when they are too embarrassed to admit they don’t like what they’ve just eaten, because other people have said it’s authentic.

Ah, the “A” word! Authenticity, the greatest red herring in gastronomy; the best excuse for putting nasty things in your mouth that any chef has ever come up with. What do you mean you don’t like pressed pig’s ear? It’s the real thing. It’s authentic. The problem isn’t the dish. It’s you. Well, I’m a few years older now and much wiser and more stroppy and prepared to say the problem actually is the dish. I don’t care if it’s what real Chinese peasants eat. I don’t care if Shanghai is overrun by earless pigs because it’s so popular. It’s horrible and I won’t eat it ever again.

In many ways the growing cult of authenticity is a function of the burgeoning global restaurant scene. In other words, it’s our fault. In a saturated market it is no longer good enough to open a Chinese restaurant. Now it has to be a Chinese restaurant specializing in the food of Shanghai or Zhangzhou or the northeastern suburbs of Dandong just past the gasworks by the second set of traffic lights on the left. It can’t be an Indian restaurant. It has to be Gujerati or Keralan or Goan. Italian restaurants have to be Sardinian or Neapolitan. Forget Polish; what about the luscious cuisine of Gdansk?

This creates two unique pressures. Firstly, if a chef shrinks the geographical catchment area of their menu, naturally they narrow the number of dishes from which they can build that menu. At some point they are bound to alight upon something truly horrible because it happens to be all the rage in, say, downtown Tbilisi. Secondly, if they make such a song and dance about their restaurant being a genuine reflection of the food diners might find on their holidays (if they were unlucky enough to spend two weeks in Tbilisi), they can hardly then start reinterpreting the dishes. They are immediately enthrall to the demands of authenticity. The chef has to do it the “correct” way.

But here’s the real problem: Dishes lauded for their authenticity are either created out of necessity—would ouzi laban have been prepared with dried yogurt if fresh yogurt had been manageable in the desert climate?—or they are those eaten by poor people, and most poor people’s food is not pleasant. Why did anybody in Shanghai have the stupid idea of pressing the pig’s ear in the first place? Because they like pig’s ear? No. Because they were broke and couldn’t afford to waste anything, not even the nasty bristled ears. The wealthy don’t eat pig’s ear. They eat the expensive bits like loin and leg.

Meanwhile the poor get by on what they have at hand, resulting in some wretched dishes. Take that great Cantonese delicacy of long-braised chicken feet. There is no meat on a chicken’s foot. Just skin, cartilage, and bone, but when a chicken is a precious and expensive object, nothing can be thrown away, including the toenails. Or there’s my mother’s perfectly authentic boiled gefilte fish, which, long before I had been able to think about these things, I knew I hated on principle. The Jews made a serious effort to escape a life of grinding poverty. The last thing I ever intend to do is glamorize the world from which they came by clinging to traditional dishes simply because they have been labeled authentic.

Of course, my resistance to the cult of authenticity is all well and good. It’s a perfectly defensible intellectual position, a great subject for debate. But it is of no help whatsoever if you happen to find yourself sitting with a mouth full of baby sheep that has been doused in stinky, soured milk while you are being watched by a table full of eager hosts who have been up since before dawn just to make sure you have the meal of a lifetime. I took a deep breath, swallowed, smiled, and said the only thing that came to me: “What an interesting dish.”

I ran my tongue around my mouth and wondered how long it would take for the taste to subside.

I
t is the next morning and I am sitting in the City Star Restaurant in the Al Quoiz district of the city. Across the table from me is a Pakistani jour
nalist called Malik. As long as I protect his identity he is happy to show me the hidden Dubai, the one the authorities don’t like him writing about. Malik has already done a good job. Last night he took me to the Cyclone Club, a barn of a place draped in fairy lights in the old town where 250 neatly turned out Chinese hookers stood in lines, trying to attract the attention of anybody with testicles and a wallet.

The Dubai authorities enforce strict laws on morality. Mixed couples are not allowed to live together if they are unmarried, and the Internet is fiercely regulated so that access is barred to any site whose contents are deemed “inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political, and moral values of the United Arab Emirates.”

They don’t seem to care about the trade in prostitutes. The expatriate men like their services, and Dubai needs the expatriate men. The only rule the Cyclone enforces is that the girls prove they are older than twenty-one before being allowed into a place where alcohol is served. We strolled around the room, trying to look casual, and as I passed, lines of pretty Chinese women reached out to tug at my sleeve with a call of “hey, fella, hey, fella.”

Malik suggested we talk to a few of them. I shook my head. “I am so far out of my comfort zone here,” I said, and I slugged my beer.

He told me to finish my drink and took me instead to Pancho Villa’s, a seedy club in the Astoria Hotel, once a favorite haunt of the international security services who have long liked to hang out in Dubai keeping tabs on one another. In the 1980s, Pancho Villa’s was famed for its Tex-Mex food, which was reputed to be the best on the Arabian Peninsula, though there is no record of how much competition it had. When we arrived, a belly dancer was entertaining the sweaty crowds and hookers from West Africa reached out, not to tug at my sleeve but to grab my arse with a raucous, throaty laugh.

“The real Dubai,” Malik said with a grin. “It’s a crazy place.” He was amused by my discomfort.

As the prostitutes groped me, I told him about the restaurants I had been eating in, with their mineral water lists and their tasting menus.
Which is why, this morning, he has brought me here to the City Star. It is a noisy, cluttered room of chipped Formica tables and greasy tiled floors, and fans that buzz and clank from years of hard work fighting to keep the heat at bay. Outside, on a painted board, the menu makes a virtue of the cheaper cuts. It reads: “Brain fry, kidney fry,” and, for those with a few extra dirham, “Chicken fry.” Around us, men from across the Indian subcontinent—Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India—sit hoovering up buttery flat breads, samosas, and milky cups of sugary tea.

At Al Mahara a meal costs 1,000 dirhams ($275). At the City Star it is about three dirhams, which suits the economy in this part of town. Malik offers me some of his vegetable samosa and I try to resist. This place really is filthy, and a bout of gastric distress, brought on as much by meeting unfamiliar bugs as toxic ones, would not be helpful. But I realize I can’t refuse and I chew on the flaky pastry and the soggy filling of potato and peas seasoned with garlic, chili, and turmeric. It’s pretty good, even at 7:30 in the morning.

Malik has brought me to where the laborers live, in square concrete blocks, ten to a room, thirty to a bathroom; to where the sides of the road are piled with rubbish and stinking rivulets of water run in what passes for the gutters.

“The glittering Dubai was built on tears, man,” Malik says. He is small and squat, with bloodshot eyes that only emphasize the intensity with which he speaks. He smokes too much and punctuates his conversation with a jab of the burning cigarette invariably caught in his knuckles. “Most of the workers are trapped. They are forced to stay here because of the loans they have taken out back home to pay travel agents and recruitment agents to get them here in the first place. It’s a vicious circle.”

This is not hyperbole. A 2006 report, by the pressure group Human Rights Watch on the conditions faced by the half a million migrant construction workers employed in the UAE, described appalling conditions. It is standard practice for newly arrived workers to have their passports taken away by their employers so they can’t abscond, and for
wages—on average just $175 a month—to be withheld for months on end, forcing laborers to stay in the hope of finally getting their money. In 2004, the Dubai municipality admitted thirty-four of these men had died building the towers and islands that were putting Dubai on the map; the magazine
Construction Week
had found evidence that closer to 880 had actually perished.

The hours are grueling, particularly in the fearsome heat where temperatures can reach the high 40s (120 degrees Fahrenheit), and there is little regard for the damage done to the human body by working in such conditions. In the summer of 2004 it was estimated that 5,000 men had been brought into the accident and emergency department of just one Dubai hospital. Critics have called the conditions a return to serfdom and little more than indentured slavery.