Dubai-it: Solemann Haddad, the Michelin-starred chef, who found his calling on the streets of Al Rigga, says Dubai is the Biryani capital of the world

Dubai: Solemann Haddad owes his career as a chef, at least in part, to his parents' terrible cooking. His mother, Nathalie, is French; his father, Firas, Syrian. Neither, according to their son, was particularly accomplished in the kitchen. His mother's enthusiasm for healthy eating made matters worse. For a boy growing up in Al Rigga, one of Dubai's best-known streets for food, the meals at home were hardly an invitation to discover the pleasures of eating. “My mum and dad they don't know how to cook. It's the worst food I've ever had.” It was outside the family home, among Al Rigga's cafeterias, shawarma shops and the extraordinary assortment of South Asian and Middle Eastern food available in the neighbourhood, that Haddad discovered what food could be. “Like I thought it was a duty, something you need to do, like going to the restroom, drinking water, sleeping. I thought eating was a duty because my mum's food was so bad. I hated to eat it, and then I started eating junk food. It's like you're seeing colours, and … wow, there's so much more to it.” The experience changed his relationship with food. His education began with the cuisine of the city around him, and the discovery that eating could be something to look forward to. At 30, Haddad is the chef behind Moonrise, the Michelin-starred restaurant in Satwa where he serves a tasting menu shaped by the Dubai of his childhood. He is confident, opinionated, frequently funny and rather impatient with the notion that the city in which he grew up has no culinary culture of its own. He also has little patience for the word fusion. “I grew up half French, half Syrian in Dubai. I ate so much desi [Indian] food. I ate so much like this kind of globalised Japanese food.” He remembers the restaurants of an earlier Dubai, including Japengo, and the different cuisines that were part of everyday life. “I ate Syrian. I ate French. I ate Lebanese. I ate South Indian. I ate North Indian. I ate Bengali food. I ate a lot of Pakistani food.” They were the ordinary experiences of a boy growing up in a city where cultures and cuisines lived alongside one another. “It's like something that people say about my food sometimes that I don't like. It's like, oh, you guys are cooking fusion food. You can't call the food fusion because this is what I grew up eating!” The Dh10,000 rebellion Haddad's journey into professional cooking was anything but conventional. In 2018, he was studying international relations at the American University of Sharjah. His father had other expectations for his future, and although the possibility of becoming a chef had been discussed, the conditions attached to his father's approval were, in Haddad's mind, tantamount to a refusal. “I was like, okay, this is a no. I stole his credit card at night. I withdrew 10,000 dirhams, the card got blocked. I went to London, said I'm dropping out of university. I'm going to be a chef.” The confrontation eventually ended in a compromise. His father insisted that he finish university; Haddad would then be free to pursue cooking. “He kept his part. I kept my part.” Haddad went to Le Cordon Bleu in London for a six-month basic programme. “I never worked in another restaurant.” He returned to Dubai, undertook consulting work for about a year and gradually built a reputation as a young chef from the city. “Everything I know, I've learned how to do in this room [Moonrise].” He opened Moonrise at 25, with considerable determination and relatively little understanding of restaurant finances. “I didn't know what was the meaning of the word balance sheet. I did not know what profit and loss was when I opened this restaurant.” A brave venture based on hope that paid off. He won the Michelin Dubai Young Chef Award in 2022. Meanwhile his father has become one of Moonrise's most loyal customers. “And we have to tell him no. Sometimes, like, please stop coming. We don't want you here. We need the seats for our guests. We make him spend. We're like, oh, you want you want caviar? He's like, yeah. We sell him three of the most expensive caviar. Then the bill comes. And he’s like, what is this?” Why Satwa matters Moonrise occupies a small space in Satwa, a neighbourhood Haddad considers entirely appropriate for the kind of restaurant he wanted to build. “The fact that it was in Satwa made so much sense to me because I grew up here. Being here for me is like it's the most perfect place because it really represents the roots that we come from.” He never wanted a large restaurant. Moonrise serves roughly 30 to 32 guests a day, and he considers its small size one of its strengths. Other fine-dining restaurants, he points out, may serve similar numbers of guests while occupying spaces many times larger, with correspondingly greater costs. “You can imagine their rent. You can imagine their salaries. You can imagine their maintenance cost.” That practical thinking became particularly important when the recent regional crisis impacted restaur