Dubai: They missed cooking for their children. Now queues form outside their tiny Karama restaurant in Dubai.
At Khao Soi, fresh noodles and ‘mum food’ have turned a tiny four-table eatery into one of Dubai’s hidden gems
The chef is not in the kitchen. It’s mum instead.
Yet, outside a tiny four-table restaurant tucked away in a quiet lane in Karama, queues form on most weekends.
The American-Thai couple who started Khao Soi never meant for it to become one of Dubai’s most talked-about hidden food spots.
In fact, it began modestly – with a handwritten ‘open’ sign taped onto the door.
“We bought this place, it was a cafeteria earlier, and we were just playing in the kitchen and took a white piece of paper with ‘open’ written on it and stuck it on the door,” Spencer Black recalls with a laugh.
One year on, the restaurant has customers waiting patiently, some travelling from the other end of Dubai, for bowls of fresh noodles, homemade curry and crispy enoki mushrooms drenched in tamarind sauce.
The 54-year-old American expat can usually be found outside chatting to guests, carrying plates to tables, or explaining why certain dishes have already sold out for the day.
“The kitchen, it’s her place,” he said about his wife, Mayuree Black.
“We wanted to serve the kind of food my wife made for our children growing up,” he added. “For mum's food to be served, mum has to be there.”
Their journey to opening a restaurant began decades ago, across cities, countries and kitchens.
Spencer, a professional chef from New York, first moved to Thailand in 1993 while his parents were living in Bangkok. He met Mayuree in 1999 and the couple married in Bangkok in 2000 before moving to New York together. A job opportunity as a chef later brought him to Dubai in 2002, and the couple has lived here since.
Rebuilding the empty nest
For years, the two had played around with the idea of starting a restaurant inspired by the food of Chiang Mai, one of their favourite places in Thailand. But the real push came when their daughter moved abroad for university.
“We are almost empty nesters,” he said. “Our son’s got one more year of school and our daughter’s studying in the Netherlands. That was the point of it all - we wanted to let people come in and enjoy and it’s just taken off.”
For 56-year-old Mayuree, who had been a homemaker since moving to Dubai, the restaurant became a way to hold on to a role she deeply missed.
She said that she carefully planned the budget of the restaurant herself to keep the project manageable.
“We wanted to get a small place and we wanted to have fun. So, I would share the pictures of my food with a designer in Thailand, and she made these illustrations, and then I printed them out and stuck them up on the wall. It was like a school project that you do for your children,” she said.
The food, too, is a reflection of her role as a homemaker.
“I missed cooking for my kids. So, we decided to start this restaurant, where I could still cook that food that I made for my children when they were growing up. I like to create the food, you know? Trick the kids to eat the thing that they don't want to.”
One of those experiments – crispy enoki mushrooms with a sweet, sour and lightly spicy tamarind sauce – has now become one of the restaurant’s most popular dishes.
“I tricked my son to eat the enoki mushrooms,” she said, laughing. “And now it is his favourite. He literally calls me at the restaurant and orders it ‘mama, bring the enoki mushroom when you come home!’ But that’s because it’s the same food he eats when I cook at home.”
Almost everything on the menu – which has less than 10 items – has a similar story behind it. The space feels less like a commercial restaurant and more like being invited into someone’s family kitchen.
“I wanted it to be one of those neighbourhood restaurants you have when you’re growing up,” Mayuree said.
“You know when you’re a child and you have a restaurant in your neighbourhood where you can just run to and eat a healthy meal? Talk to the owner, fighting or talking… That’s what this restaurant is.”
Even now, customers regularly walk in with hopeful smiles asking if they are open, even when the kitchen is overwhelmed or ingredients have run out for the day.
“They know that we have a homemade approach,” she said. “We make everything from scratch – the noodles, the curry, the broth … everything. Nothing is frozen.”
Keeping everything fresh also means starting the day early, preparing ingredients fresh every morning and sometimes letting customers know that something is not available. But for Mayuree, Thai cooking – which she learnt from her grandmother and mother – has always been a more instinctive exercise.
“Thai food is like – you need to cook, you need to look, you need to taste all the way through,” she said.
And it is this personal touch that seems to have connected with thie community. After a food blogger discovered the eatery and featured them on Instagram, word spread quickly.
Now, weekends regularly mean customers waiting patiently outside their tiny restaurant.
“It’s been a whirlwind with four tables,” Spencer said.
The couple are now exploring plans to expand to a new location, although their plans are still at an early stage.
Yet despite the sudden attention, the spirit of the place has not changed. Mayuree still walks around like a mother watching over her family.
“When I am walking past a table and I see someone hasn’t touched their vegetables, I’ll just look at them and say ‘eat your vegetables’,” she said with a laugh.
Perhaps that is also why the restaurant has resonated so deeply in Dubai.
“Dubai is a city for families, at least that’s what I feel. It’s safe and I’m happy to be in Dubai. My kids were born here, have grown up here, they can run around in the community and it’s safe. There’s no need to be scared and everybody feels that sense of safety here. But the other thing is – Dubai is changing in a positive way. I love the way that people see their future here, they see their life here. It’s beautiful,” Mayuree added.