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 restaurant spending.

Haddad temporarily transformed Moonrise's offering from an Omakase-style tasting menu into burgers, a decision that might seem startling for a Michelin-starred fine-dining restaurant. “If you have a business and what you're selling, no matter how good it is, people don't want to buy it. It means either close your business or change what you sell,” he says.

“We had to change what we were selling or close, and that's that simple. If you're too rigid, you'll fall.”

He believes that instinct to adapt and evolve comes from growing up in Dubai. To him it’s the very essence of Dubai-It.

“I grew up here, so I kind of got that bug. You know what I mean? The never give-up bug. I think giving up is not something I would ever choose. Giving up is like the worst thing a human being could do in my opinion, because when you give up, you not only betraying other people, you're betraying yourself.”

He sees the city's environment as having encouraged the belief that ambitious ideas can become reality.

“It's like the American dream 100 years ago, but now it's in Dubai. I don't think it exists anywhere else, or definitely not to the extent that we have it here. Let's call it the Dubai dream.”

A Dubai story, told through food

Haddad does not think of his cooking as the deliberate combination of techniques and ingredients borrowed from different national cuisines. Instead, he describes it as pieces of the culinary mosaic of his childhood.

“It's like it's just the culture, and it's just what I grew up with. I'm not trying to connect these things. So the best way to explain it is that it's a local story that's written with a global vocabulary.

“One word in English, one word in Hindi, one word in Arabic, one word in French. But the story itself is a Dubai story. If I had to explain what we do, it's like 20% French, 20% Japanese, 20% Arab, 20% Desi, 20% whatever, or 100% Dubai.”

Dubai cuisine cannot be reduced to a standard selection of dishes because the people who grow up in the city experience it through different cultural backgrounds.

He offers the example of Salah, his sous-chef, who is from Kerala and grew up in Dubai.

“So him and I, we agree on everything in terms of the food and the palate. We're so aligned, but I have a European-Arab lens. He has a South Indian lens.”

For Haddad, that is precisely what makes the city's cuisine interesting. The same city can produce different culinary expressions, all of them recognisably its own. And his strongest argument about the Dubai identity in cuisine comes when talking about locally sourced produce, be it tomatoes or fish.

At Moonrise, one of his signature dishes is called Dynamite. Its foundation is Hammour, a type of grouper native to the Gulf waters, sourced from a Dubai-based Pakistani fisherman who supplies the restaurant with wild local fish.

“How can you possibly tell me that a farmed fish that came from elsewhere is better quality than that? You cannot. You just need to know what this sea has to offer … God made the same sea everywhere.”

For Dynamite, the fish is coated in puffed sushi rice and deep-fried. The accompanying sauce brings together a European prawn-head bisque, crème fraîche and Chicken 65 masala from South Indian cuisine.

“You have India, you have Japan, you have Europe, you have the UAE. You have the whole world in one single dish.” His commitment to local sourcing extends beyond seafood; it includes vegetables, greens, and honey.

“I have honey here, and it's amazing, and it's made from trees and flowers of this region.” He wants the businesses that have invested in the UAE to benefit from one another's success.

“Why must I work with someone else when I'm working here, with people that have, like me, invested, that have pooled their effort into this country?”

He is not suggesting that every ingredient must be local. Rather, he believes chefs should first examine what is available around them before automatically turning to suppliers overseas.

The biryani, shawarma obsession

Haddad's enthusiasm for the city's food is not confined to fine-dining. He has a particular weakness for biryani and “…Mallu shawarma”.

“Dubai is the biryani capital of the world because you can find any biryani from any region or sub-region in India here.”

He likes chicken and mutton biryani, and has even experimented with Wagyu beef ribs in a Pakistani-style preparation.

But given the choice, he would happily eat biryani far more often than most might consider possible. “If I could eat biryani every day for the rest of my life and not gain weight, I would eat biryani for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

As for shawarma, he prefers the spicier, South Indian-influenced version commonly sold in Dubai cafeterias as Mexican shawarma.

“This is the kind of shawarma I grew up eating.”

He knows the preference surprises people who expect a chef with Syrian roots to favour a more traditional Arab preparation.

“I'm Arab, and most Arabs are horrified when I say this. Not proud of your roots. I’m like, sorry, my roots are Dubai, and in Dubai, that's a shawarma we have. So I am proud of my roots. It's just that I don't have the roots that you think that I have.”

As for his own restaurant Moonrise, it has a Michelin star. Haddad feels that recognition is very important.

“Of course, it makes a difference. The first star is always the most important.”

He wants a second star, but he is also convinced that the industry's pursuit of recognition can sometimes distract chefs from the people sitting in their restaurants.

“You must focus on the guest first, and then you must focus on everything else.”

He believes fine dining should not be serious. At Moonrise, he wants music, laughter and a sense of ease alongside carefully prepared courses.

“Imagine you're in a Michelin-star restaurant, and it's a set menu. You're getting 12 courses, pristine ingredients, pristine execution, but the music is loud, and the wait staff make you laugh and make you feel good.

“I'm not redefining anything. I'm defining what I think is fine dining in Dubai.”

Building something that belongs to Dubai

“I want to take care of my city. I want to take care of my dreams here. I want to build gastronomy in Dubai. Right now anything that has to do with expansion is within a 200 kilometre radius.”

His vision reaches beyond Moonrise. He talks about helping culinary schools develop programmes, identifying young talent, training chefs and contributing to a wider gastronomic identity for Dubai.

“My goal is to create gastronomy, a gastronomic identity for the city.”

He says he works with Dubai's Department of Economy and Tourism on projects connected to these ambitions.

“It's a very holistic thing wanting to build gastronomy in a city. It's not just ‘Hey, I have an amazing restaurant thanks so much’. This is my home. I'm gonna build it here.”

What frustrates him is the surprise some visitors express when they discover a distinctive food culture in Dubai.

“Tourists are coming to a restaurant and they're mind blown. They're like, I didn't know that Dubai had this culture, and I get so annoyed at this comment because it's like, what have I been doing for 30 years? Of course, there's culture.”

But for all his impatience and ambition, he also finds satisfaction in the repetitive work of a professional kitchen.

“I love getting better every day. I love the repetition of it. It's like incremental, incremental improvements that are so incremental that in your day to day it feels like nothing, and then when you look back a year later, you're like, ‘Whoa, we've grown so much’.”

He offers similar advice to young people trying to decide what to do with their lives: think carefully, make a choice and commit to it, even when the work becomes difficult.

“There's going to be days where you're going to hate your life from it. There's going to be days where you're so happy you did it. There's going to be days, let's be honest, where you're going to cry from why did I do this?”

That determination is central to how he understands the city that raised him.

Asked what the Dubai-it philosophy truly means to him, Haddad reduces it to three words.

“Make it happen.”

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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.