Dubai-it: From the brink of bankruptcy to two Michelin stars, Chef Mohamad Orfali finds his home in Dubai

Dubai: Three days after Orfali Bros opened in Dubai, it was fully booked for a week. A week later, the waiting list had stretched to 15 days. Before long, getting a table at the restaurant in Wasl 51 had become something of a challenge. Its founder, Chef Mohamad Orfali, still sounds slightly astonished. “You tell me why. I don't know,” he tells Emirates 24/7. He has his theories, of course. The food was different. His brothers had brought their own considerable talents to the business. The service was unlike what diners were accustomed to. But there was nothing inevitable about what happened after the restaurant opened on March 14, 2021. Orfali had come close to losing everything before a single customer walked through the door. A lot of money had been spent; he was on the verge of bankruptcy. “My father told me, ‘Did what you did? Just open the door.’” Five years later, Orfali Bros received its second Michelin star in 2026. It was named the best restaurant in the Middle East and North Africa for three consecutive years, from 2023 to 2025, and placed fourth in the regional ranking this year. It also reached No. 37 on the 2025 World's 50 Best Restaurants list. Orfali is 46. He has spent almost half his life in Dubai, although he originally came here with an entirely different destination in mind: France. “I came to Dubai to gain an international experience that can help me if I go somewhere else around the world, and also to learn good English and to get the skill of communication,” he says. He went to France in 2009. He studied there and tried to work there. “I couldn't find myself in Paris. I couldn't find the link between the food and my memories. I felt like why am I leaving Dubai? I was lucky to back again in Dubai, to be honest.” This was 2011. The accidental chef Orfali's career began in Aleppo in 1994, when he was 14. “It was by ‘mistake’ I entered the culinary world,” he says. “It was a mistake by my mum.” He hadn't done particularly well at school. He couldn’t progress to high school, so culinary school was the alternative. They accepted everybody. His mother was not happy. “She had never let me enter the kitchen.” His father was an engineer, his mother a teacher, and the family had rather ‘conservative’ expectations for their son. “They wanted me to be either a doctor, lawyer, or engineer,” he recalls. “Even becoming a barber would have been more acceptable to my mum.” At least it meant he could open a barber shop. “For them, a chef is just a cook.” “Whenever I travel out of Dubai, I have to come back. I can't handle more than one week or 10 day," sayd Chef Mohamad Orfali. Picture: Xavier Wilson In the Aleppo of his childhood, being a chef didn't carry the status it does today. Orfali went to culinary school anyway. “I went there and felt like, you know what? It's a beautiful world. I love cooking.” He later worked in restaurants and hotels between Aleppo and Damascus. His mother's perspective changed. These days, she is interested in opening a restaurant herself. His parents now live in Dubai. Aleppo, Syria, is central to the way Orfali understands food. He speaks of its history, its position along ancient trading routes and the ingredients carried into its kitchens by successive cultures. Its cuisine, he says, has depth, complexity and a strong relationship with seasonality. But the cooking he does today has a different name. “We are Syrian. We're so proud, but we don't cook Syrian food. We represent something called Dubai cuisine, which is my journey, where I came from, and how Dubai influenced me. “I'm a classically trained chef, but I've learned to think about food differently. Where do ingredients come from? If you look at their history, you'll find they've travelled from city to city, carried by immigrants and people bringing their cultures together. “We decided to do something different. We call our style of cooking ‘freedom of cooking’. Our identity is still there. You can tell we're Syrian; some dishes reflect where we come from. But as I always say, my palate is Syrian, but it has travelled the world [in Dubai]. “We cook food that represents who we are. And with Orfali Bros, we're building something for the next generation … long term.” The city he returned to When Orfali returned to Dubai in 2011, he found an opportunity that would change the trajectory of his career. In July of that year, he began working with Fatafeat, the food television channel. For almost 10 years, he became involved in producing culinary content across television, magazines and digital platforms. “That was a turning point in my life. Researching food changed me. I had to understand why the French cook the way they do, why Italians cook differently, and the traditions behind Greek and Syrian cuisine. We couldn't just publish a recipe; we had to research it and understand the facts behind it.” The television years exposed him to cuisines he hadn't grown up eating, and Dubai gave him opportunities to explore them.