Eating Like a Prince

Eating is elevated to new heights in the Middle East.

On the day we arrived, we were treated to dinner after a long and exhausting day of meetings. I was really tired from not having slept much on the flight the night before and starving as I had to to run off early from a sumptuous Japanese lunch to collect some documents for our meeting that afternoon. So we were all really looking forward to dinner except for one small detail they didn’t tell us till much later – Dinner was at 9pm

So we sat in the highly elaborate majlis or sitting room with its beautiful curtains, thick carpets, chandeliers and plush couches and waited…and waited…and waited. There were of course the non-stop intermittent bursts of activity when a server would come with a never ending round of cold drinks, water and the ubiquitous Arabic coffee.

Arabic coffee is in itself a culture. The minute we’re seated, a server would burst through the door looking really important with a sole urgent mission of serving us coffee. He’ll carry a silver teapot in one hand and a stack of little cups (similar to the little teacups Chinese drink tea from) and pour a teeny amount into the top cup. You then take it from the top of his stack while he does the same to the next guest. It has the colour and consistency of tea and tastes terribly bitter but does a fantastic job as a perk-me-up! If you want more, you hold out your cup but if you don’t, you shake your cup and he’ll collect it back from you, stacking it at the bottom of the stack! Quite an interesting thing to watch.

So we sat, waited and waited, fortified by many many cups of coffee to keep ourselves awake while our stomachs grumbled. A quick trip to a high-end mall in between didn’t do much to pacify its grumblings and I was very very close to running out to see if I could find a bun for my hunger pangs.

Finally, 9pm rolled around and when we were invited to the dining room, I had never felt happier! The door opened and lo and behold! Next to the main dining table was a long long table literally groaning under the weight of all the plates it held! There were salads, at least 4 different types of prawns, 5 different types of chicken, 3 types of beef/mutton, 3 types of fish and for the pièce de résistance, 3 huge plates of briyani at the end of the table, one of which was covered with a whole lamb! Unfortunately, by 9pm (2am our time), my starving stomach refused to cooperate so I couldn’t eat much of it at all though I did try about half of the spread. There were loads of desserts as well but most of them were really too sweet and I ended up eating strawberries the size of little plums.

It was a very long night and we were practically zombies by the time we got back to our room only to have a wake up call at 5am to catch another flight out to another state. It was a really unique experience and I do wish I could have enjoyed the food better.

But that’s the ironical part about business travel I’ve learnt. You stay in the best hotels that you don’t have the time to enjoy the facilities of and you eat lots of good food that you can’t enjoy either because you have to make small talk and look polite. Contrast that with the barbaric glee I tore into some salt baked chicken the minute I reached home with my family and you’ll get no prizes for guessing which meal I enjoyed much better!

P/S That wasn’t a photo of the food we had but the closest I could find.