Dubai: She came to Dubai as a mother wanting to protect her young sons from the trauma of Lebanon’s wars, a single mother seeking safety. Today, she’s a successful chef and restaurant owner, who found hope, a dream and love in the city she calls “home”.
Almost every morning, Chef Wadad Zarzour makes labneh. It is a routine she learnt from her mother, Salwa, in their family home in Zahlé, Lebanon. At her Doughbai Bistro in Dubai's Al Wasl neighbourhood, the quantities she makes are larger - 15 kilograms of yoghurt yield approximately seven kilograms of labneh each day.
“She used to do the labneh every day, like all mums. But she had her special way. Her labneh was really a good one.”
It has become one of the dishes for which Zarzour's restaurant is known. So are the kibbeh, awarma and orange cake, all drawn from Salwa's recipes.
“My mum was not only about the love of food, it's also for the love of people around her. Food alone is nothing. It's the memories. It's the culture. It's the gathering. It's the people on the table. So she was all of those.”
Salwa passed away last year.
Zarzour has also recreated something of the household she grew up in, thousands of kilometres away.
She lives in the community where she opened Doughbai. Neighbours drop in for coffee, share a meal or stop to tell her what has been happening in their lives. The restaurant has 26 seats. Zarzour likes it that way.
“I want the cosiness. I want the feeling of like you are in your own dining room. You are at home. You are in your mum's garden outside.” It is her own little Zahlé in Dubai.
The city she carried with her
Zahlé, in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, is recognised by UNESCO as a Creative City of Gastronomy. She grew up in a family where visitors were expected, whether or not they had announced their arrival.
“My mum used to bake cakes in the morning, like three or four. I would tell her, why all of those? She would say, ‘Who knows who will pass by?’”
There was always coffee. Someone would come for breakfast, stay for lunch or leave carrying something to eat.
“Nobody would visit my mum without leaving with some food, some kaak, a cake.”
Her family were farmers. They grew potatoes and wheat, and Zarzour remembers the smell of tomatoes, the red earth and the scent of soil after rain.
“I know how it smells. You know, the smell of the soil when it rains. All of this influenced my sensory levels, my taste buds, the smell, the feel.”
Zahlé was also a place where eating was a reason to interrupt a journey.
“If you go to Zahlé, the first thing you would do would be having lunch. Even if you're passing by, you have to stop.”
A journey she hadn't planned
In 2006, Lebanon was at war. Zarzour had two young sons. One was around four years old, the other seven.
“Every time he [four-year-old son] was hearing the airplane, the bomb, the bombing, he was not feeling well.” She needed to get away. “Why Dubai? Because when I visited Dubai, I loved it.”
Her parents thought she was taking a holiday to Dubai.
“They thought I would go for a vacation, so they said let her go. At the end of the war, like 30 days of war, they felt like we were stressed. So they thought, okay, let her go for a vacation, and she will come back.” She found work and stayed.
Twenty years later, she still remembers the feeling of being welcomed.
“Where in the world would they welcome you the same way they tell you, ‘Most welcome’? They don't care about your colour, about your nationality, about your religion. As long as you are a peaceful human being, you are most welcome.”
Dubai became home to her children, too. Her daughter Haya, now 14, was born into the life Zarzour built here. “She is a child of Dubai. So when you ask her where are you from, she would say, ‘I'm from Dubai.’”
Zarzour also met her husband in Dubai, during her work in the telecommunications industry.
For the love of dough…
Zarzour studied business and spent three decades working in telecommunications and information technology, including 15 years in Dubai.
“Cooking is my passion. Like cooking and anything around food, going to the supermarket, looking at the shelves, and trying to choose one kind of apples versus the others - this is for me joy.”
Given a choice between the beach and a food market, she says she would choose the market.
In 2014, she enrolled at SCAFA — School of Culinary and Finishing Arts, in Dubai. She studied culinary arts and restaurant management while continuing her full-time job.
“I was going to the office, eight to five. Then I would go to the cooking school in Dubai for three, four hours, every day, on Saturday as well.”
She continued taking courses, attending workshops and reading about food. “I was preparing myself for 10 years.” Then came the pandemic.
Her son Ghadi had chosen to study culinary arts abroad. After he came to Dubai, during the lockdown period, mother and son began experimenting with sourdough at home.
“Everyone was doing sourdough at that time. Why did we do sourdough? I think because, you know, in bad times, you start thinking what the ancestors were doing.”
They made bread, then pizza and manakish using sourdough.
Friends and family came to taste their experiments. They encouraged them to start a business.
Zarzour had also begun sharing videos of her cooking on Instagram during the pandemic. Her following grew from around 30,000 to 150,000.
“Although I love my [corporate] work, but khalas, I felt that I'm not comfortable with what I'm doing anymore.”
Her mother was initially alarmed by the prospect of her leaving an established career. Her husband and children supported the decision.
Ghadi had completed culinary training and an internship at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Switzerland. “When he came back, I felt like with a bit of his support, we can do it.”
The name came from two things she loved. “For the love of the dough that we have, and for the love of Dubai. I wanted to name something that combines both.”
Doughbai opened in November 2024.
For dreams to become reality, profit and loss matter
Zarzour had spent much of her career managing corporate projects. She approached the restaurant in much the same way.
“I did the planning, the forecasting, so I knew what would work, what wouldn't work. For me it was a project. But instead of being an IT project, it's an F&B project.”
The family financed the business.
“Don't take a lot of risks and think that, okay, I open and business will come. Do your calculations right. Do your forecasting right.”
Her advice to aspiring restaurateurs is to keep money in reserve for emergencies.
“You never know what would happen. Maybe a thunderstorm would stop the business for a few days. Maybe a force majeure.”
Without that financial cushion, she says, owners may begin compromising on ingredients, service or standards.
“At the beginning, my son and myself, we thought we are at home. So I would tell him do this. He would say, ‘No, Mum.’”
They argued over decisions and had to learn to separate their relationship at home from their responsibilities in the kitchen.
“If you would ask me, if we would do this interview two years back, when we opened, let's say the first few months, I would tell everyone don't work with family.”
She laughs at how much has changed.
“Now we understand each other more as colleagues rather than as mum and son.”
Ghadi has his own dishes on the menu, including a burger named after him. Zarzour says he sometimes works quietly on ideas for weeks before presenting something new.
“He might go quiet for a week or a month, but then on one day he might put two dishes on the table, and both would be the stars.”
The fish market, the farms and the figs
Zarzour arrives at Doughbai around 7.30am and often stays until closing, between 10pm and 10.30pm.
She buys produce herself. On Fridays, she visits the Jumeirah fish market to choose the fish for her sayadieh, a Levantine fish and rice dish.
Her menu reflects the way her family ate in Lebanon, rather than a narrowly defined idea of Lebanese cuisine. “We eat Lebanese food, but we also eat a mix. We eat a bit of Greek, a bit of French, a bit of Italian.”
There is sourdough manakish, sourdough pizza and a dish called Not a man2oush, which takes a familiar Lebanese staple in a different direction.
The produce changes with the seasons. In winter, there may be beetroot salads, pumpkin soup and warmer dishes. Summer brings watermelon and lighter preparations.
She remembers once wanting figs from her hometown in Lebanon. She contacted a supplier in Dubai in the afternoon. “They were there the next morning.”
She is equally particular about waste. Bread not used up becomes croutons or breadcrumbs. Very ripe tomatoes are roasted for muhammara, a spicy dip. Citrus peels are used in desserts and drinks. “I prefer to be sold out rather than to waste. Allah gave us the food, not to waste. Food is a scarce resource, and it's not available to everyone.”
The Dubai-it resonance
Ask her when she felt most grateful to be living in Dubai - she responds that it was during the recent regional conflict.
“I was very grateful for being here. I come from Lebanon. I lived through all the wars except the last two. Although I love Lebanon, my heart is like two pieces. One is UAE and one is Lebanon.
“The way they handled the situation, how we feel we are protected, and how the UAE government comfort us, making us feel like this is our home, and that they want to protect us all. This is a moment of gratitude, being in a country where safety and security are their highest priorities. I kept coming to work. People kept coming. Even in COVID, all those things, when they happen, it's like Alhamdulillah. I thank God that I moved here 20 years ago.
“If you tell me, if you were in Zahlé, would this have happened? With all due respect to my country, I say no. Because in Dubai, I went to cooking school while working.”
She remembers how straightforward it was to register Doughbai and begin turning the idea into a business. Government representatives, she says, even visited without identifying themselves, asking how they could help.
“Maybe I would have thought of it [elsewhere], but it wouldn't have happened that fast and with this amount of love and support.
“I'm a woman advocate, definitely, by default. But in Dubai, you won't feel that you are a woman or a man because there is no difference. You are treated equally.
“A lot of people have ideas and they dream, but how practical is the idea? If you have a realistic dream that is doable, and you know what you want, and you know where you want to reach, and you have the will and the perseverance to reach there, in Dubai you have all the components that would support you to make it happen.”
Having travelled to more than 40 countries, she says she still measures other places against the standards of hospitality she has encountered here.
“Being in Dubai shaped my personality, my work mindset. The love of life came from here.”
She was leaving Dubai through the airport when an immigration officer stamped her passport, wished her a safe journey and told her to come back safely.
“I felt like as if it's a cousin or someone giving me the feeling of belonging to here. This is when I knew that Dubai is the place, like home, home. Dubai is a city. If you love it, it will love you way more.”
When the Dubai-it initiative was introduced, Wadad Zarzour recognised something of her own journey in it.
“When the initiative started, Dubai-it, I told my PR, I want to do a campaign about Dubai-it. You know, this is the perfect example of my life.”
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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.