Dubai-it story of a Michelin Chef: Akmal Anuar's audacious road to the stars

Dubai: He dropped out of school, washed dishes, cooked in the Solomon Islands under the watch of an armed bodyguard and once had no money left to send his daughter to school after pouring everything into a new restaurant. There is a group chat somewhere in Singapore populated by friends who knew Akmal Anuar before anybody called him “Chef”. They went to school together. They remember the boy he was. Some became truck drivers. Others settled into ordinary jobs and ordinary lives. And then there is their old schoolmate Anuar, turning up in magazines and on television, building restaurants thousands of kilometres away in Dubai. A literal definition of Dubai-It: A man who has turned ambition into achievement, exceptionally and fast. “They have no clue how I became…,” Singaporean Chef Anuar says to Emirates 242/7, the sentence disappearing into a laugh and the slightly chaotic shorthand with which he often tells his story. Neither, apparently, does he. He looks back at himself in 1992 and comes up with two words. “Dropout…, punk.” Today, Chef Akmal Anuar is a Michelin-starred chef and restaurateur whose professional life has become entwined with Dubai's extraordinary rise as a dining destination. His restaurants have brought awards and recognition. He has opened projects beyond the UAE, built brands, left others and started again. In 2022, he received his first Michelin star. He describes 2023 as one of his best years professionally, a period when money, ideas and opportunity converged. “When times are good, you make money,” he says. “So that was the time when I was super creative.” The distance between the ‘punk’ and the Michelin chef is considerable. But Anuar, 45, doesn't tell it as a triumph. He tells it as work. Ask him what he feels when he steps back and considers how far he has come and his first answer is prosaic. “It's working… moment my eyes open, it is work,” he says. There are school fees to pay. Salaries, responsibilities, another day to navigate. For all the improbable turns in his life, Anuar has never quite learned to regard himself as either as lucky or as a remarkable success. Instead he says it’s “Baraka” or blessings he prays for every day. “I always believe … it’s faith. Allah is the One to determine my path. If He allows, He allows. If He wills, I will do it. If He says yes, He will open doors there, if He says no and there’s a reason why He says no….” Anuar has now spent over 12 years in Dubai. It is where his family, friends, teams and businesses are. It is where, as he puts it, feels “appreciated” and recognised for being part of building the F&B industry in Dubai. It is “home”. Picture: Najeeb Mohammed The first kitchen was barely a kitchen by the standards of the restaurants he would later run. About three metres by four metres, he remembers. His parents were blue-collar workers in Singapore. His father had tried his hand at a fried chicken business; it failed. Then came Harummanis, the family food shop, opened in 1992 which served Malay dishes and local breakfasts. Anuar was about 10 years old. The family lived upstairs. By 11, he was downstairs working. Potatoes needed peeling. So did onions. Plates had to be fetched. Food had to go out. There wasn't much romance attached to any of it. His parents worked, day in and day out. “We were not poor or broke,” Anuar says. But this was a household in which work mattered. School, meanwhile, was not going the best way. His father reached a practical conclusion. If his son wasn't going to study, he could work in the shop. By 12 or 13, Anuar could cook. By 15, he understood considerably more about running a food business than many adults. He just didn't know that this was what he was learning. “I know how the trade works. I know how the timing works,” he says. “I know how to cut, I know how to cook.” Then he adds: “Fundamentally, I don't know what I was doing.” He wanted other things. Football. A band. Maybe he would become a rock star. Chef was not the plan. Professional cooking entered his life almost by accident. At 18, after dropping out of technical school, Anuar bounced through odd jobs. He worked as a dispatch rider. Then came kitchens. China Jam in Boatquai. Les Amis on Orchard Road. At Les Amis, one of Singapore's celebrated fine-dining restaurants, the future Michelin chef started as a dishwasher. He earned S$700 a month, roughly AED1,900. The hours could run to 16 a day. He had grown up around Malay cooking. Now he found himself looking at ingredients that belonged to a whole new culinary language. Asparagus sticks in his memory. A small detail but for Anuar, it represented another world. “I have the skills. I can cut now,” he remembers thinking. “I need to refine it.” And that is what he began to do. For years, the food of his parents moved further into the background as he immersed himself in French and European cooking - Saint Pierre, then Iggy's. In 2006, newly married, he and his wife spent two weeks travelling through Europe.