The Man Who Ate the World (18 page)

The migrant workers, increasingly with nothing to lose, had started to kick back, though. There had been protests as unpaid men poured off the building sites to block the Sheikh Zayed Road, the main highway through Dubai. These protests had led to riots as tensions overflowed and, with the release of the Human Rights Watch report, the government had finally committed itself to cleaning up the industry. More inspectors were being employed and construction firms were being threatened with having their contracts curtailed if they didn’t stop abusing their employees.

There is still no disguising just how grim life remains down here, only a few minutes in the wrong direction from the Sheikh Zayed Road. The air stinks of sewage, and as we drive around we can see down long, cramped concrete canyons between the hastily built accommodation blocks. The world here is entirely male. There are no women, no children. The men will see their families perhaps once a year on trips home. “It’s true money is going back to India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka that wouldn’t otherwise be going back,” Malik says. “But that doesn’t mean the system isn’t corrupted and twisted.”

I say, “This place really is terrible.”

He says, “There’s worse.”

We drive to the Jebel Ali district, where gentle hills rise and fall, and the tightly packed accommodation blocks give way to an industrial wasteland of electricity pylons and corrugated sheds on dusty, rutted red earth. We turn on to an unmetaled road leading up a hill and follow a chuntering tanker marked “portable water.”

“If anybody stops us, just say you’re going to one of the churches,” Malik says. Although Dubai is Muslim, other religions (apart from Judaism) are tolerated. Up here, at the top of the hill, the churches are crammed together. There is a church for the Anglicans, one for the Episcopalians, and another for the evangelicals. A new Greek Orthodox church is also being built. We park around the side of the Catholic church and Malik points down into the valley. A short distance below us, ringed by high-wire fencing, is a tightly packed compound of perhaps 1,000 Portacabins. At least ten workers will live in each of those cabins. There is no drinking water down there, Malik explains, hence the tanker. I ask if we could go in. He shakes his head. The gates are guarded against people like us, he says.

Malik lights up a cigarette and we stand in silence, looking down upon the compound. I realize that a few years ago, in another life, these camps would have been my reason for coming to Dubai, the story I would have covered. The city’s restaurants would simply have been the way I rewarded myself for a hard day’s work. Now the restaurants
are
the work, and I have come to look at the labor camps not because I want to, not because I need to, but because I feel I should. It is an uncomfortable thought. It leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, one that goes far, far beyond the vicious confection that was lamb in a dried yogurt sauce. I tell Malik we should go.

I
realize now that I am still searching for the quintessential Dubai experience; the one that sums up the place in the way that Pushkin, with its mix of play food, sentimentality, and sky-high prices sums up Moscow, but it is difficult to get a handle on this city. Many of the signs are in
Arabic. The spoken language is English. Most people are Indian. The food is from everywhere. The restaurant critic is confused.

I visit Indego, the high-end Indian restaurant at Grosvenor House, where the British-based chef Vineet Bhatia is the consultant. In Moscow, at Indus, where he had the same sort of consultancy deal, his food had been castrated to suit the Russian palate, and without the aid of anesthetic. Nothing had been done to mitigate the loss of heat. It was the culinary equivalent of beige. Here, the chilies are back and I recognize the Bhatia dishes that I have loved so much in London: the tandoorispiced, home-smoked tranche of salmon, the aromatic Biryanis, and the crispy chocolate and almond Samosas. (How could anyone resist a dish that uses the words “crispy” and “chocolate” so close together?) I feel comfortable eating this food. Quickly I realize why. As so many of the people I am having contact with in Dubai are Indian—the waiters and the cooks, the doormen, the receptionist, and the butlers—it feels right to be eating Indian food served by Indian people. Except of course that I am still a bloody long way from India.

I take a trip to the Emirates Towers Hotel for a long, lazy dinner at Al Nafoorah, which is regarded by many people I talk to as the best Lebanese restaurant in Dubai. I am there with Guillaume Rochette, who, as in Moscow, happens to be in town at the same time as me. I take the opportunity to ask him whether Mrs. Putin really did have money invested in the restaurant she had suddenly arrived at, the day he had taken me to meet Arkady Novikov.

Rochette, keen not to betray a good client’s confidences, purses his lips in a showy display of keeping his silence, but he is a noisy Frenchman, incapable of muting his body language, and he rolls his eyes theatrically as if to say: the naïvete´ of this boy! Why else would the Russian president’s wife spend forty-five minutes touring an unopened restaurant?

We drink a bottle of Chateau Musar, the soot-black Lebanese red from the Beka Valley that kept being produced throughout that country’s civil war in the 1980s, and eat fatoush, a lusciously smooth hummus and great smoky skewers of expertly grilled lamb and chicken. Quickly we begin to
imagine that this is the Middle East we are really in, when of course Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates are not the same thing at all.

One morning I am taken by the French executive chef of the Grosvenor House, Patrick Lannes, to meet a seventy-year-old Bostonian who has just arrived in town. The moment we see each other I feel only pity for him. This Bostonian is a twelve-pound lobster, dragged out of the chill waters off America’s northeast shore only forty-eight hours previously. He is a huge, black-blue thing, with two-foot-long pincers that are misshapen and gnarled from years of growth. He is still alive, but sluggish and heavy of claw.

I point out to Lannes that, at this advanced age, the lobster will make for very poor eating, the meat woody, tough, and flavorless.

“Perhaps,” the chef says, staring admiringly at him over the top of his fashionable, black-framed glasses. “But he will make a very impressive centerpiece for the New Year’s Eve buffet.” Life in Dubai is a parade, a raucous spectacle, and after surviving for seventy years, this lobster will now die to become a part of it.

That night I go for a dinner with a brassy Mancunian woman called Gail Colclough, who was once the private DJ for the Sultan of Brunei’s brother and his harem. “They wanted a woman because they didn’t trust a man around the girls,” Gail says, over Barbie-pink daiquiris. “It was the largest private rig in the world. The lights were so powerful, they kept setting fire to the curtains.” Was she a part of the harem? “No, love. I just put on the ABBA.” She took the job, she says, because she wanted to find out if the richest people in the world were happy. “In the end, it was pity that drove me away. They were all sad. They were the saddest people I’d ever met.”

So she left Brunei and came to Dubai, where she promotes tours by British stand-up comedians and runs package holidays for wealthy women who want a little cosmetic surgery done while they are in town. Cosmetic surgery is booming in Dubai. “Liposuction is the most popular,” she says. “After that, it’s breast enlargements and face-lifts.” She arranges a lot of face-lifts.

Gail is such a remarkable source of stories, delivered in such a deadpan manner, that she almost manages to distract me from the curious food being served to us at Tang, which is located inside a beach hotel not far from the Jumeirah Palm. The young chef, Stephane Buchholzer, has become enamored of the cooking of Ferran Adria at El Bulli, even though he has never eaten there. So there is a deconstructed Niçoise salad: raw tuna wrapped in a lettuce leaf alongside powders of olive, green beans, garlic, and tomato, all topped with a foam of smoked egg. I drag the fish through the powders and it almost tastes like a Nicoise, but not quite.

Strands of crab come wrapped in dehydrated mango and sprinkled with licorice powder, and foie gras is served with tubes of coffee-flavored gel. The young team is enthusiastic about what they are doing, and it seems churlish to point out that I have seen versions of all these dishes at restaurants in London and New York. One thing is certain: Theirs will be the only place specializing in this kind of culinary mischief for 1,500 miles in any direction. That is an achievement of sorts, and a mark of the speed with which ideas are now disseminated around the world. If a dish is served in the Catalan hills one week, it will be on a menu on the other side of the world the next.

N
one of these adventures manage to sum up Dubai for me. No matter. I now know what I have to do. I ask my butler to call up the limo so I can return to the Mall of the Emirates.

I take a table at the St. Moritz Café and sit next to the plate-glass window looking into Ski Dubai, where children in salopettes throw snowballs at one another, skid down icy slopes on their bottoms, and laugh uproariously. Next to me is a fireplace where logs burn fiercely, casting a warming glow across my table. Except that it is not a real fire, but an image of one on a sixty-inch plasma-screen television fitted into the fireplace. Naturally, I order the fondue.

My wife is half Swiss. As a result, fondues have been eaten without
irony in our house for many years. I know a lot about them. I know about the need to rub the pot with cut garlic to start and I understand the careful mix of salty Gruyère for flavor and waxy, dull Emmental for bulk, and what temperature to heat the wine to before the melting can begin. Of course, the fondue served here is awful. How could it be otherwise? St. Moritz is unlicensed, so they cannot use wine and there is a graininess to the melted cheese which speaks of much too much flour to thicken it, but there is a guttering paraffin burner, a basket of cut bread, and a prong with which to introduce it to the cheese.

Outside the Mall of the Emirates it is 23 degrees Centigrade (74 degrees Fahrenheit), which only adds to the experience. The televisual logs crackle, the children rub snow into one another’s hair, I eat my fondue and revel in the glorious fakery of it all. I am afloat on the seas of the twenty-first century, enjoying a lunch that only modern technology could gift me. The fondue part of it should be comforting. It should have grounded me. Instead, the whole experience is so bizarre, so contrived, I quickly realize I am in the grips of an intense culture shock. I conclude this is no bad thing. I regard it as an initiation, a taste of things to come—because where I’m going next I’ll be getting an awful lot of that.

M
y cab driver is lost. This is not a criticism. All Tokyo cab drivers are lost for most of the time, and mine, a tidy, middle-aged gentleman in the standard uniform of black jacket, white collar, and tie, is no different. Or, to be more precise, he knows where he is but he has no idea how to get me to where I need to go. Few of the city’s streets have names, and most addresses are merely descriptive—third door along on the left, just past the big tower block opposite the park—which makes the end of many journeys a random event. One might imagine that, after years of having to deal with the problem, the drivers would have devised a cunning strategy to get around it, but they haven’t. They have merely made an accommodation with it, submitted to its chaos, and I have been told I should do the same.

Which is why, despite nine time zones of jet lag and a pathological tendency to control freakery, I am not at all bothered when the driver swerves to the side of the road, flings open the door, jumps out, and disappears on foot down a black-shadowed alley in search of my destination, leaving me alone in the cab, its engine idling. If anything, I am pleased. It means the restaurant I am about to visit is the real thing, a place of such refinement and exclusivity that, despite the likely size of
the bill and the difficulty of securing a reservation, almost nobody has ever heard of it.

Tokyo’s restaurant world has proved a steep learning curve for me. In the other cities I have visited, identifying the top restaurants has been a breeze, hardly demanding the investigative talents of, say, a Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein. In Las Vegas it had to be the restaurants of Robuchon and Keller. In Moscow it had to be Pushkin and Turandot. In Dubai it had to be Al Mahara, Ramsay, and the rest. In Tokyo, nothing is obvious. Sure, there are the cloned outposts of the Western chefs, the restaurant of Pierre Gagnaire, say or—stifle the yawn—Robuchon and Ramsay. What fascinates me about Tokyo is not merely its appetite for non-Japanese food, which is both deep and broad, but its parallel commitment to its own culinary traditions. I had been told stories about tiny, high-end places, hidden away in apartment buildings or in the basements of office blocks, serving intricate menus of extraordinary clarity and precision to just four or six people. There were dozens of them. The problem was that I didn’t know any of their names, let alone how to book myself a seat.