Rude Travel by Vir Sanghvi: A new final frontier
Dubai started out too shallow, too blingy. Now, it seems like the deck of Star Trek’s Enterprise: Multicultural, future-ready, attracting the top names in food.
It took me 10 years to learn to love Dubai. In the beginning, I simply did not warm to it, and all the descriptions that the city’s haters had used seemed appropriate: Too much bling, vulgar, shallow, imitative and derivative, Singapore without the culture, etc.
But over the years, my attitude became much more positive. Either Dubai changed (which it has) or I have (more likely), or a combination of both.
My wife, whose views on Dubai used to be the same as mine, has also changed her mind. It is, she says, a question of perspective. Stop seeing it as another Singapore, she says. It’s not. It’s the most international (and safest) city on the planet, kept afloat by a global assembly of talents. Sometimes, she believes , it’s like looking at the deck of the Starship Enterprise, where every member of the crew has a different origin.
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I thought of the Enterprise when we stayed at the Four Seasons in Jumeirah. The Four Seasons group is pretty international itself: A Canadian company now owned by Americans and Saudi interests, managing hotels around the world, with teams drawn from every country on Earth.
But I doubt if any Four Seasons can be as international as the Dubai property, where the staff are a mini United Nations. The hotel opened in the Jumeirah development in 2014, which is not so long ago, but it has managed to convey an air of timelessness. (A smaller Four Seasons opened in the more central Financial District in 2017). Partly, this is because it is regularly renovated, but mostly, because it has a restrained classy air that contrasts with the bling of many flashy Dubai hotels. Its large rooms look like archetypal Four Seasons rooms and the property is run to the chain’s high standards.
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Even people who haven’t stayed there know the hotel because its compound hosts so many slightly past-their-sell-by-dates independent restaurants. There is cosmetic-surgery-gallery, Nammos, which was once the hot Dubai restaurant. Nusr-Et was a rage when it opened, but the chef-poseur’s global reputation has taken a knocking in recent years. Mimi Kakushi is fine for cocktails, as long as you don’t have to eat the food.
The hotel’s own restaurants aim for a more lowkey but elegant ambience. The Jou Jou Brasserie has a Korean chef who cooks Italian food; the manager is Ukrainian; and our server was South African. Sea Fu is the place for spectacular sunset views, excellent cocktails invented by Pankaj, who I know from Delhi’s Tres, fresh oysters flown in from France and a friendly staff from 18 countries.
The restaurants are a microcosm of upmarket Dubai and I liked them just as much as I liked the Four Seasons accommodation.
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I try not to eat Indian food when I am abroad, but you would be crazy to give Dubai’s Indian food a miss. I was last there in July to see Tresind Studio become the only Indian restaurant to win three Michelin stars, and to be surprised by Jamavar, which got a Michelin star within six months of opening; it already has stars in London and Doha.
Himanshu Saini of Tresind was travelling this time, but Surender Mohan of Jamavar was in Dubai to cook at a party jointly hosted by Anita Lal, who has opened Good Earth in the city, and by Samyukta Nair, who owns the Jamavars.
Surender’s food is classic North Indian, but his flavours are so deep that you can see immediately why Michelin follows him around the world, handing out stars.
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The surprise for me was dinner at Revolver. I know the original Revolver in Singapore, and when I came to the Dubai outpost shortly after it opened, I liked it a lot and thought that it successfully refined many of the ideas that dominated the Singapore menu.
My wife had never been and I persuaded her to come, though I know she can sometimes be bored by modern Indian cuisine. To my surprise, she loved the food. She loved the restaurant and its ambience.
The food is now handled by Jitin Joshi, who may be the best Indian chef you have never heard of. Jitin has worked everywhere from the Taj (in Dubai) to the Oberoi (Raj Vilas) to Gymkhana (London) to top French restaurants run by the likes of Eric Chavot and Pascal Proyart.
But now, at the age of 50, he has found a new voice, fusing decades of experience with a delicate lightness of touch and Japanese influences. His food was outstanding, and though Jitin remains the same publicity-shy, modest introvert, his talent has finally reached a quiet peak that none of us saw coming. (Yes, we had the famous caviar kulchette too…)
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Finally , there was a journey where I saw the best and worst of our trip. We spent our last night at the Taj Exotica, because I love the sea view. The Exotica is in the Palm about ten minutes down the road from Atlantis. It’s not in the centre of town, so we left for the airport early, three hours before our flight, though the drive usually takes 40 minutes. In fact, such was the inexplicable traffic gridlock that it took us two hours just to get to Atlantis.
We knew then that we were going to miss our international flight: Something that has never happened to me in all these years. Would Emirates treat us as no-shows and refuse us a refund?
My wife went on the Emirates app and contacted the helpline. There were no seats available that day, they said. (Diwali rush.) But if we could wait until 9.30pm the following day, they still had two seats, though they were in a higher class.
We said we would take them. They sent us payment links. We paid while we were still in the gridlock and marvelled at the efficiency of Emirates and the smoothness of the process.
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That left us with the problem of finding a hotel for the night. I called Navrose Arora who runs another Taj in downtown Dubai. Come right over, he said, we’ll find you a room. So, we told the driver to forget about the airport and to drive directly to the other Taj. By the time we had reached the hotel, not only had the Taj got a room ready, but the chef had prepared a personalised welcome amenity from scratch.
That’s the thing about Dubai; even when there are problems the solutions are easy to find. We got to Delhi early on Sunday morning and realised why India wasn’t Dubai. Four disreputable guys in plainclothes stopped us at the customs Green Channel, treated us like smugglers, insisted on X-raying our bags and looked positively upset when they found absolutely nothing. I could have probably avoided the rudeness and harassment if I had told them I was a journalist, but I wanted to see how they treated the average passenger.
There has been such an uproar on social media recently about corruption and harassment by the Customs Department that I thought they might have been asked to be more passenger friendly. But no, the rot runs too deep. If you hire thugs to be the face of India at airport arrivals then you can’t be surprised when they behave like thugs.
From HT Brunch, October 25, 2025
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