Dubai-it: A daughter’s love for her mother led to Bait Maryam and Michelin recognition

Dubai: If Maryam could walk through the doors of the restaurant Bait Maryam today, her daughter Chef Salam Daqqaq knows exactly what she would say. “Stay, don't go.” It has been 30 years since Daqqaq lost her mother. Yet Maryam is everywhere in the restaurant that bears her name. In the recipes, the food served at the tables, and the small rituals she has carried from one home to another across the Middle East. There is one childhood memory she returns to with a smile, as Daqqaq bundles away her knitting basket and sips on her amber-hued tea. It’s like a conversation with your grandmother, the twinkle in the eye and the warmth she exudes. Guests blow her kisses as they leave after an early lunch. Maryam would make Arabic bread at home. As she worked the dough, she would put aside a little and shape a smaller loaf especially for her youngest daughter. “It's nothing. It's dough,” Daqqaq recalls. Her brothers had ordinary bread. Hers was different. “She makes me special.” At 63, Daqqaq is a mother of three, a grandmother and the founder of a restaurant business that has grown far beyond anything she imagined when she first opened Bait Maryam in Dubai's Jumeirah Lakes Towers in 2017. She had asked her husband for four tables. “I don't want more than four tables,” she remembers telling him. She chose JLT partly because it was close to home. If nobody came, she reasoned, she could simply go home. People came in droves. A childhood of departures Daqqaq was born in Zarqa, Jordan, to a Palestinian family. She was seven when her father moved the family to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia for work. She remembers crying at the prospect of leaving her friends and the community she knew. Her father told her they needed to travel and work to build a better life. She could not understand why. They already had enough to eat. “We have zaatar and zeit,” she argued. Breakfast, lunch and dinner were covered. What more did they need? The family remained in Riyadh, where Daqqaq completed her education. Another move followed when her father's work took them to Jeddah. Eventually she married and raised three children, Nadine, Nada and Mohammad. In Saudi Arabia, she worked as a social worker and in a school. She also began teaching cooking from home. It started with just eight seats. Word spread, and soon there were more eager students than chairs. Daqqaq laughs at the memory. “They would say, ‘You don't have seats? We'll bring our own seats!’” What began as a weekly class became twice a week. In 2005, she moved to the United States with her children. Two years later, the family relocated to Dubai, where her husband had begun establishing a business. Daqqaq was in her forties. Once again, she found herself in an unfamiliar place, wondering what to do next. Her children were growing older and becoming more independent. For years, she had devoted herself to their upbringing. The woman in the kitchen Daqqaq was the youngest daughter, with a considerable age gap between her and her older siblings. She spent much of her childhood beside her mother. The family kitchen was more than somewhere to prepare meals. There was a sofa, a table and room for people to gather. Outside, the garden grew vegetables, including tomatoes and courgettes. Maryam would ask her daughter what she wanted to eat, then send her into the garden to choose. “She's my idol,” she tells Emirates 24/7. When she married, Daqqaq knew the basics of cooking but struggled to reproduce her mother's flavours. She had to learn how to handle ingredients, how to judge quantities and how to recognise when a dish tasted right. Gradually, it all began to make sense. “One day my mother came to visit me in Khobar [Saudi Arabia], and that time I started to cook properly. She cried. She told me, ‘Khalas, I'm not afraid about you. You know to cook everything better than me. You are a good mother, excellent wife, a good cook.’” Maryam passed away in 1996. Daqqaq kept her recipes and possessions. She continued cooking for family and friends, and later travelled to countries including India, Singapore, China, Hong Kong and Morocco, exploring different cuisines and taking short courses. Eventually, she questioned why she was travelling so far to learn about other people's food when she had inherited something precious herself - her mother's cooking. A restaurant named Maryam Daqqaq’s cooking had already developed a following. Her daughter Nada Darraj remembers friends coming over for meals when she was a schoolgirl. Afterwards, they would tell their mothers about the dishes they had eaten and ask for the recipes. For Darraj, there was never any question about her mother's ability to cook. The question was whether she could turn that ability into a business. Daqqaq had spent much of her life caring for other people. When she finally expressed a desire to do something for herself, her children encouraged her. Her husband worried that running a restaurant would exhaust her. She was determined about one t