Rhodes around Dubai

What made you want to be involved with Taste of Dubai?

It was on evidence of Taste of London, which has found such great success.

The great thing is that it creates a wonderful community among the restaurants. From my point of view, the other chefs in town know one another, but to have an occasion where we’re all together is fantastic.

There’s a kind of brotherly spirit – we’ll be starving and we’ll run over to one of the other restaurants and they’ll hand us something to eat, and before you know it, you’re tucking into a nice little Indian meal or something – it’s really great.

I really can’t wait to get to know the other chefs who are around because at the moment, apart from Matt [Pickop] at Verre and the other Grosvenor House guys, I don’t really know any of them.

I think that’s one thing that’s always good [about the Taste festivals] – it’s a great opportunity to get to know the other chefs of Dubai on a social level. But with that, of course, the most important thing of all – as with our restaurants – is that it’s also a great opportunity to interact with the general public. And it’s a great opportunity from the public’s point of view.

The number one thing is that they [the public] can actually come and try the food, and many that perhaps didn’t know that Rhodes Mezzanine is at the Grosvenor House yet will suddenly realise, so it’s a fantastic PR event for the restaurants. You get more of a one-to-one communication with the customer, very much an interactive, personal experience.

What were the challenges for you before for the event?

Of all the restaurants, I think we’re the newest, and yet probably we’re the most organised, after having done it in London so many times.

As the newest restaurant, our priority is to make sure we’re ready for service every evening within the restaurant itself, so trying to get all of this food prepared was quite some challenge. But Paul Lupton – who’s the chef at Rhodes Mezzanine on a daily basis, and has been with me now for about five or six years – was brilliant. He had it all organised.

For Taste of Dubai, we haven’t tried to be over-silly and produce everything from the menu. I think that’s a pointless exercise, because the food that we’re actually creating on the restaurant’s menu couldn’t possibly be re-created to serve to numbers of up to 3000.

Other chefs will probably take that on and realise that what they’ve taken on is a bit too ambitious – they won’t do it again next year!

We did the same thing in our first year in London – you try to be that little bit extra-special. But then you suddenly have about 50 or 60 people standing outside, waiting for something to eat. Then you realise, “This is very foolish”.

We just try to give people something that’s all about flavour, that’s tasty and simple. That’s why we’ve created our white tomato soup, then we’re just doing beautifully, slowly braised beef, with caramelised onions and onion gravy on a potato cake, which is very English-style, very simple, but it eats wonderfully.

And then it’s iced lemon chiboust, which is almost like an iced lemon mousse, sitting on a little almond sponge, with fresh strawberries and strawberry coulis. So it’s all quite simple and great to produce en masse.

It’s just through lessons learnt over the years that I’d rather it be nice and simple like that and, hopefully, it’s the kind of food that’s always going to please the public. I think people are going to be presented with lots of fantasies, but they can come here and taste something that’s real.

I suppose simplicity is a good lesson to learn, not just for events like this, but for the restaurant business in general.

Are you planning to return to Taste of Dubai in future years?

Definitely. Any excuse to get in the sunshine and out of the cold UK, I’ll be here! I hope so anyway. Certainly next year we’ll take part, because the festival will still only be very young.

It will be good to see how much it’s going to expand and how many more restaurants are going to take part. It will be interesting to see how the other restaurants get onboard. I think we’ll find all the restaurateurs and chefs from other restaurants will be here sampling and realise that they should be involved. I think the event could be a lot bigger, and if it’s bigger and better, I want to be here. I want to be a part of it.

Do you have any plans for more restaurants in Dubai or in the rest of the region?

I’d love to. Grosvenor House Dubai is building another identical hotel right next door to the existing one. But at the moment I just want to concentrate on what we’ve got. I don’t want to jump the gun.

Pretty much the whole team we started off with at Rhodes Mezzanine were brand new and we only opened in September 2007, so it’s only now we’re having the opportunity to start taking the menu on to another level.

The last couple of days, I’ve been here with Adam [Gray], the head chef at Rhodes Twenty Four in London, and between us we’ve been going through another 10 dishes for the à la carte, which we’ll be introducing at Rhodes Mezzanine at the beginning of March. I’ve got Paul Lupton practicing and practicing the new dishes and then they’ll be introduced on the menu full time.

I’m not ruling out the possibility of another restaurant in the future. I’d like to think that could possibly happen, but I think that it will only be borne from the success of what we already have.

At the end of our first year, we can take a look at things and if we think, “Yes, we’re in a position to move on”, then we’ll look at doing that. But if I still think for one minute that we’re not quite there, or haven’t achieved what I want, then we’ll wait. It’s got to be right; otherwise it’s a pointless exercise.

It’s about taking it on to another level and another level, until I’ve got the menu where I really want it to be. I had to start off very simple, because it’s a brand new team and I couldn’t make things overly difficult. I realised that, while we would’ve been able to achieve the standard, we certainly wouldn’t have been able to maintain it.

But now I believe that they can. They’re doing very well and we can move on. Consistency, as we know, is the key to success, so it has to be one step at a time and that’s the way we’re working.

How has your approach been received so far?

It’s been well received so far. We’ve been doing some good numbers every evening and I’m very happy with that. And we’ve had some great customer responses and some superb press write-ups to go with it.

An event like Taste of Dubai can definitely only help to get us more well-known among the Dubai crowd – it’s the greatest PR event of the year and there shouldn’t be a single restaurant or chef that doesn’t want to take advantage of that.