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 thing: the restaurant would carry her mother's name.
“Bint Maryam, Bait Maryam, Maryam, anything related to it,” she recalls suggesting.
It was the reason she wanted to open the restaurant. And the day that happened is when she realised that Dubai had made her dream come true, “When I saw my Mum’s name ‘Maryam’ on top of the restaurant.”
She knew how to cook, but knew little about running a restaurant. That was where Darraj came in with her degree and knowledge.
The daughter who built the business
Darraj had studied public relations at the American University of Sharjah and worked at a PR agency. Her father's businesses were in construction and oil and gas, but she had little interest in those industries. Her mother's restaurant offered something different.
She could use her marketing experience, learn operations and help turn a personal dream into a viable business.
“I wanted to turn that passion into a business,” Darraj says.
The early years were tough.
“We cry together. We fight. We make up,” Daqqaq recalls.
The two established a rule: inside the restaurant, they were colleagues. At home, they were mother and daughter.
“We both have the same vision,” Darraj says. “We want to grow the business together. We want to succeed. We want to build this legacy.”
Daqqaq concentrated on the food. Darraj took on marketing, operations and the commercial decisions needed to keep the restaurant growing.
There was an important difference between them.
“If it's up to my mum, she would feed everybody for free,” Darraj says.
But a restaurant has employees, salaries and responsibilities. The business began with 11 employees. Today it has 190.
Bait Maryam opened in 2017 with a modest indoor dining space. As queues formed outside, the restaurant received permission to expand its seating in 2019.
A central kitchen followed in 2022. The family subsequently expanded into Sharjah and launched Sufret Maryam, a concept that carries the family's cooking into a more contemporary setting. Both Bait Maryam and Sufret Maryam have received Michelin Bib Gourmand recognition. Bait Maryam represents the cooking of Daqqaq and her mother, while Sufret Maryam reflects the collaboration between her and Darraj.
The family's connection to the name has continued into another generation. Nada named her eldest daughter Maryam.
The food carries a history
For Chef Daqqaq, Palestinian cooking cannot be separated from the lives of the people who made it.
She speaks about the dishes of her family's village, Tarshiha, and the customs surrounding food at weddings, funerals and family gatherings.
She remembers the preparation of kibbeh, the traditional stone used to work the meat and the importance of certain dishes during celebrations. The preparation was accompanied by dancing. The meat was pounded by hand using a special stone, and it needed music and dancing to make the mortar and pestle sing. “When women make it, they call us kids, and say, ‘Come, dance in front of us,’” Daqqaq recalls. She still uses her mother’s pounding stone in the Bait Maryam kitchen.
It was a dish prepared for weddings and special guests, with its own place in the village's customs. During periods of mourning, however, the preparation of kibbeh was suspended for 40 days, the stone was covered with a black cloth and left to be.
She talks about musakhan, stale bread revived with olive oil, onions and chicken, how recipes evolved from ordinary ingredients available in Palestinian homes.
Food, she says, is part of a people's culture. Its preparation tells you something about how they lived, celebrated, mourned and gathered. But are the younger generations abandoning this inheritance? She says, “No, no. Now it's coming better, coming back.” Darraj agrees. “People nowadays, they're going back to their roots as people miss that.”
For Daqqaq, the idea of Bait Maryam also came from noticing how many people in Dubai were living far from their families.
Young professionals had jobs, friends and places to eat. But they did not always have someone waiting at home with a meal. She wanted people to come into her restaurant and experience something familiar, even if they had never eaten Palestinian food before.
“I am like a mother for everybody.” Some customers have returned for years.
She remembers a French couple whose children were young when they first visited. The children have since grown up and gone to college, but the family still comes back.
The recognition and the cost
Michelin recognition brought Chef Daqqaq a new sense of confidence.
“Michelin definitely made a lot of change in my… attitude, my confidence, my food,” she says.
Darraj believes the recognition reassured her mother that she was on the right path and encouraged her to continue developing the business. But success has not changed her character. If anything, she says, she has become friendlier and feels younger. Her working hours are gruelling.
She arrives at 7am and often returns home at 11pm.
“My everything, my time,” she says when asked what she has sacrificed for success. She misses sitting down with her family for lunch or dinner.
Her son once complained that the refrigerator at home was empty. His mother, who had always cooked for everyone, was spending her days feeding customers. There was little time left to cook at home.
During the COVID-19 restrictions, when the family spent more time together, Daqqaq returned to preparing breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Yet she has no intention of retiring. “Every day I go to the restaurant, I cook. I am happy.”
The book she wrote
Long before opening Bait Maryam, Daqqaq had dreamed of publishing a cookbook. She had accumulated handwritten recipes on scraps of paper.
Darraj helped turn that ambition into a book, Bint Maryam, which tells the story of the family's cooking across generations with personal stories and memories. Published in 2026.
What Dubai gave her
Chef Daqqaq has lived in several countries but Dubai was where she finally found the opportunity to build something entirely her own.
“Dubai gave me… a lot,” she says. “Dubai believed in me, and it opened all the… places for me.”
She remembers the moment she saw her mother's name displayed above the restaurant. For her, that was when the Dubai-It dream became real.
Darraj believes Dubai's dining industry, international audience and restaurant recognition platforms helped take a family business beyond its original neighbourhood.
“Dubai made it possible to turn a family story and a family business into a recognised brand, not just in Dubai, internationally too.”
Daqqaq has also allowed the city to influence her cooking. On Fridays, she sometimes prepares dishes associated with other regional traditions, including biryani, mandi, kabsa and machboos.
Meeting people from different backgrounds has introduced her to ingredients, techniques and ways of preparing familiar dishes.
But Bait Maryam remains rooted in the food she learnt from her mother.
At the end of our conversation, she returns to the importance of believing in yourself, whatever your age.
“No matter how old you are … you should believe in yourself, and love what you do.”
She is still thinking about what comes next. “Never stop dreaming.”
“Really, I love Dubai… it has a big space in my heart. It let me share my culture, my knowledge, my food with a lot of people.”
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Anupa Kurian is a Dubai-based senior editor and writer with nearly 28 years in journalism. She has been a food editor. Anupa writes across gastronomy, culture, health, environment and the people who make a city what it is, drawn to stories that reveal themselves in the details.