The modern Arabian desert oasis, Dubai, is a long way for North Americans to taste Middle Eastern and Indian cuisines, but it is a pleasing adventure worth pursuing.
Most of Dubai’s 12 million annual tourists are probably attracted by this city’s architectural icons — the world’s largest dancing fountain; tallest building (Burj Khalifa); only 7-star hotel (the Burj al-Arab); largest artificial islands (the Palm Islands); one of the largest indoor ski slopes (Ski Dubai) and largest natural flower garden (the Miracle Garden) — and many tax-free shopping malls.
But my husband and I recently visited Dubai to taste its cosmopolitan cuisines and we avoided the usual tourist traps: dining in fake Bedouin villages, dinner cruises on decrepit dhows and 4X4 riding on sand dunes. Instead, we explored this multi-cultural city on foot with an appetite for discovery.
We learned that modern Dubai – the city we see today – started to develop only 30 years ago. Previously, Dubai was a small fishing village through most of the twentieth century nestled on both sides of Deira Creek with sand-colored residential and commercial buildings around a maze of souks selling clothes, perfume, jewelry, gold and spices.
Some of old Dubai still exists, and we meandered through the souks and back alleys, but aside from spices, what the souks had to offer was of little interest to us, we wanted to discover what people here were eating. Not surprisingly, a city on the shore of the Arabian Sea boasts a spectacular fish market where the bounty of the local sea is available—kingfish, snapper, shark, shrimp, blue crab, lobster, belt fish, squid and octopus. The produce market sells vegetables imported from the fertile plains of Egypt, Palestine and Africa and locally grown dates.
By contrast, new Dubai is a commercial center that looks like a cross between Disneyland and Las Vegas, an ultra-modern city of tall skyscrapers nestled around Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. Leading architects compete to show off by designing iconic buildings amid artificial oases of landscaping and water features. This part of Dubai is a construction zone, with hundreds of cranes dotting the skyline and thousands of Pakistani and Indian workers building 24/7. Yet, when illuminated at night, new Dubai looks like a setting for Scheherazade, sparkling and magical.
Dubai’s demographics are surprising: immigrants are in the majority and Emiratis comprise only 15% (316,000) of the population of 2,109,000 and are rarely seen on the streets. The remaining 85% (1,792,650) are guest workers from India, Pakistan, Philippines, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Palestine, Kenya, Nigeria with 3% comprising Westerners, an assortment of Europeans and Americans who work as teachers and engineers. As a result of the melting pot, Dubai is surprisingly tolerant of foreigners and there appears to be a respectful accommodation of different religious and lifestyles. English is the lingua franca, avoiding a Tower of Babel, and each of the sizeable immigrant ethnic groups congregates in a corner of the city where shops, restaurants and other familiar support services are available.
Dubai’s cuisine is as varied as the composition of its population with Indian and assorted Middle Eastern/Mediterranean cuisines predominating, and we were fortunate to hook up with two enthusiastic foodie sisters, Farida and Avra Ahmed who operate Frying Pan Adventures (www.fryingpanadventures.com) that guides small groups of food explorers through various cuisine experiences several nights a week.
On one splendid evening, Farida took us on a four and half hour Frying Pan food trail through Little India, as the Meena Bazaar area of Dubai is also known and provided the following brief history: Indians, now comprising almost 40% of the population, settled in Dubai in the early part of the 20th century when Dubai was administered by the British Raj which also administered India and was an intermediary center for trade and transshipment between India and the Middle East. Indians immigrated initially to trade in gold and textiles, but the discovery of oil brought with it an influx of Indian workers in the 1960s. Many came via sea, a trip of about three days from Bombay (now Mumbai) to Dubai. In the late 1960s, the Hindu Temple and first Indian schools were built for expatriate Indian families. Indian migration to the UAE drastically increased in the 1970s and 1980s, with the expansion of the oil industry and the development of free trade in Dubai. Most of the small shopkeepers are from the Indian state of Kerala, or were Muslim Indians, descendants of Arabs who previously emigrated to India.
With Farida in the lead, our first stop on the trail was to sample chaat – Indian street snack food: Our first taste was of pani puri (water filled Indian fried dough ball with green gram sprouts, black chickpeas and boondi made out of fried gram flour, spicy chili water and sweet date chutney).
The puri maker made a small hole in the puri shell and filled the ball of fried dough and the remaining ingredients. We were told to put the entire puri in our mouths before biting into it. But when I did I tasted an explosion of a spicy liquid flavored with crunchy bits of sprouts and chickpeas which grew hotter a few minutes later. The next chaat — bhel puri ( puffed rice with onions, raw mangoes, tomatoes, crushed puris, spices and deep fried gram flour sev noodle had a wonderful balance of savory, sweet and spicy flavors and a crunchy bite.
Our final chaat, a Mumbai roadside speciality, dahi batata puri (fried dough ball filled with potatoes, garlic-red chili chutney, spicy chili water, sweet date chutney, yogurt, powdered cumin and deep-fried gram flour noodles) was an arrangement of tiny, crisp puris amid a mélange of potato patties, toppings of miscellaneous chutneys and beaten curds!The milder taste was appealing after the fiery pani puri and the still spicy but crunchy bhel puri.
Then we proceeded to a street stall to discover fried potato bhondas (mashed potato, onion, green chili and spice filling covered in gram flour batter) and onion samosas (fried dough triangles filled with onion, chili powder, cumin, chopped green chilis and other spices) with spicy green chutney. Hard to beat the taste of fried spiced mashed potatoes and onion pastries.
Next, we wandered into a sit-down restaurant for a mini tiffin which is Indian English slang for a second breakfast or lunch, sometimes applied to any light meal. Our tiffin consisted of a sampling of savory breakfast dishes and chutneys: The southern Indian masala dosa (fermented rice and black gram lentil crepe stuffed with mashed, curried potatoes) had a slightly tangy, but pleasant taste.
The Tamil-origin mini idlis in sambar (steamed discs of fermented rice in a split black lentils stew) were a curious combination of bland rice cakes in a sweet-sour tamarind flavored sauce. The medu vada (a fried black gram doughnut) , is a traditional south Indian breakfast because it provides a hearty start to the day and has a savory but heavy unleavened consistency quite unlike a western doughnut.
We continued with rava khichdi (semolina mash spiced with curry leaves, cashews, tomatoes & green chilis) is an Indian comfort food of Brahmin origin, which has the texture of a spicy cream of wheat porridge with nuts, drizzled with clarified butter. Rava khichdi is also often a part of an Indian wedding ritual when it is served to the groom who comes to meet the bride for the first time in the hope of successfully concluding the arranged marriage. The pongal (rice and green gram lentils mashed with curry leaves, ginger and cashews and ghee) is a savory rice pudding from Tamil Nadu served with sambar (lentil stew with gourd). For an added zing, these satisfying stick-to-the-ribs breakfast dishes were accompanied with plain coconut chutney, coriander chutney and a toor dal (split & skinned pigeon peas) based chutney. And let’s not forget the topi dosa (hat shaped crisp crepe of assorted rice and lentil flours with a touch of fenugreek) which looks massive when straight from the kitchen but disintegrates into thin, crisp, slightly sweet and nutty chunks, perfect for scooping chutney or lentil stew or curries or eating plain.
For dessert, we tasted super sweet kesari, a very filling and very sweet mixture of flour, sugar and butter and a steaming hot cup of Madrasi filtered coffee.
While we were starting to groan at the amount of food we were consuming, after a walk of a few blocks to another popular stall, we were ready for a freshly baked tandoori roti (bread) which we slathered with ghee (clarified butter) and jaggery (unrefined sugar) on a corner street. Buttered and sugared flatbread is always a hit even when assembled and eaten in the middle of a noisy Dubai alley.
At this point, we were more than halfway through the four and half hour food trail. But after another brisk walk, we found room to indulge in two candy shop treats. We were served appropriately tiny amounts of mysore pak (gram flour-sugar-ghee golden brown candy) which tasted like a bar of butter and sugar! For relief from the sugar overdose, we sampled salty and crunchy chivdaa/chudwaa (savory snack combining fried lentils, cereals and sev noodles).
After three and half hours of sampling, there was more to taste. At the next stop we faced a delicious traditional Indian dinner menu:
Beginning with a sip of sugar cane juice with lemon and ginger, we munched on tiny portions of masala papad (crisp lentil disc topped with fresh coriander, tomatoes, onions and salty and sour chaat masala), tandoori-cooked chicken and paneer tikka (chunks of paneer –Indian cottage cheese and vegetables marinated in a yogurt and tandoori masala mixture and grilled), chana masala (chickpea stew), butter naan (refined flour bread) and lachha paratha (whole wheat flour bread).
By now we were ready to throw in the towel, but Farida said there was one more stop to taste jalebis (refined flour, yeast and saffron roundels coated in sugar syrup) and rabri (a dense milk with dried fruits) and sample pistachios flavored matka kulfi (Indian ice cream in an earthenware pot). We were tuckered out by this culinary marathon and even the sight of more food was hard to take. But tasting the jalebis – thin squiggles of fried dough soaked in a heavy sugar syrup – I realized that Indians had tolerance for super sweet desserts. By contrast, Indian ice cream was a barely sweetened, frozen, un-aerated, dense mixture of dairy and nuts, quite different from conventional ice cream.
Although our Indian Trail adventure was a food orgy, we also learned a great deal from Farida who provided historical background and origins of the Indian dishes sampled. Most of the food we ate on the Indian Trail was vegetarian, but the complex spicing of the dishes convinced me that it would be easy to be vegetarian with such full and palate-pleasing flavors. We didn’t miss the meat.
Photo credits: Slava Johnson