Dubai's top restaurateur Natasha Sideris prioritises flavour, experience over trends

Arabian Business

2 days ago

Tucked into a side corridor of Dubai's Alserkal Avenue – a zone better known for contemporary art than culinary revelation – Natasha Sideris is doing what she always does before launching a new menu: tasting, tweaking, judging. In front of her sits a marble table scattered with ceramics, hand-thrown and unlabelled, as if she'd plucked them from a market in Athens or Marrakesh. This isn't a boardroom. It's a tasting lab, a theatre of decisions. This is where flavours are debated, dissected, and reimagined.
'Nothing goes on the menu unless I taste it,' she says, her hands moving with the kind of kinetic sincerity that comes from years on the floor. 'Every single dish, I taste. Then I treat it – I say, 'Okay, I love it,' and it goes on, or 'It's got potential. This is how we're going to fix it.''
This is the paradox of Sideris: a global restaurateur who operates like a local chef. While Dubai's culinary scene leans into spectacle – gold leaf, dry ice, neon mocktails – Sideris is building something slower, deeper, and far harder to replicate. Her empire is rooted in memory, in emotion, in the fundamentals of flavour that don't trend, but endure.
The reluctant restaurateur
She never meant to be in the business. The daughter of a South African restaurateur, she watched the job consume her father's time. 'I said I would never be in the restaurant business,' she admits, then smiles, half in memory, half in disbelief. 'I was going to study psychology.'
But a detour changed everything. Asked to help out at her father's restaurant, The Fishmonger, while studying, she found herself seduced – not just by food, but by the alchemy of space and emotion. There was a rhythm to it, a certain choreography – the way a good dining room moved, how people responded to small details.
'I love food – I'm Greek – and I love spaces. I like the way space can make people feel,' she says.
That trio – people, food, space – would become her business model. By day, she studied Freud and Skinner; by night, she wore an apron and closed tabs. 'I would go to university during the day, have my apron in the boot of the car, drive to the restaurant, put my apron on and start working, party like a crazy lady… go out till three, four in the morning, go to lectures and repeat.'
Her life became a symphony of motion. No investors. No safety nets. Just instinct and hustle. The psychology student was learning more from the kitchen pass than the classroom.
A Greek tragedy with a modern ending
It didn't get easier. Her first independent foray came via a loan shark and a franchise. 'I was taking a salary of AED 1,000 month,' she says. 'I did all the ordering, all the receiving. I cooked all the dishes.' The grit is almost mythological – 'Mine is a story of real Greek tragedy, and struggling.'
That early struggle embedded a discipline. She wasn't just managing a kitchen – she was managing possibility. Everything was personal. Every shift a test. Every menu a message.
When offered the chance to open something original in 2005, she came up with nearly 50 names before reluctantly landing on her own. tashas, in lowercase, debuted as a contradiction: understated but ambitious, rooted but elevated. That tension – soft branding with uncompromising standards – has defined her ever since.
The first location became a kind of pilgrimage site for locals looking for something sincere: not just food that tasted good, but an atmosphere that felt considered, whole, deliberate.
Building quietly in a loud city.
In Dubai, Sideris is an outlier. She avoids gimmicks. She isn't chasing the algorithm. Instead, she obsesses over balance. 'I think an important thing is the balance between over-innovating and being overly trendy and trying to be viral… and being classic.'
She speaks like a designer, but works like a chef. And she names her influences not from TikTok, but from legacy players. 'La Petite Maison… they do not care what everyone else is doing. They do what they do. They do it well – classic, good ingredients, good service, nice music. Quanto basto, just enough.'
This is her competitive advantage. Where others compete on noise, she bets on calm. On texture. On taste. The result is a quietly growing hospitality group with longevity – and loyalists.
Each venue in her portfolio is more than a restaurant – it's an environment. A world unto itself. There are no recycled templates. Every site has a different narrative. From tableware to typography, she obsesses over details that others outsource.
The Dubai chapter
In 2014, tashas landed in the UAE, opening in Galleria Mall. It wasn't instant magic. 'It was dead for the first four or five days. Oh my God, what have I done?' she remembers. But by day seven, the switch flipped: 'I remember not leaving for 17 hours, even to use the bathroom. It was packed.'
It was a tipping point, and it taught her something crucial about Dubai: if you build it right, people show up. But they only return if it's real. That kind of growth – slow, deliberate, unflashy – has been her method all along.
Today, her UAE portfolio includes tashas, Flamingo Room by tashas, Avli by tashas, Bungalo34 and Nala, the concept where we meet. With Saudi Arabia and London now on the map, the expansion is accelerating — but never carelessly. Each opening is a measured move, grounded in location, community, and her own near-obsessive involvement.
'Everyone thinks they're going to make it overnight,' she says. 'Some people are very lucky. They do make it overnight. Mine is a different story.'
The art of enough
At Nala – self-described as a 'casually fancy canteen' – everything speaks of restraint, not extravagance. The interiors are warm, not blinding. The plates are handmade. The food is unfussy — but faultless.
This, Sideris insists, is the future. 'One minute kale is in fashion, and everything's kale, and then everyone's just jumping on the same bandwagon. There's a lot of noise, and sometimes just providing people really good food and great service is much more effective than just all of this noise.'
It's not just ideology — it's business. Her view is that design might bring people in once, but only taste and service bring them back. 'A lot of restaurants are forgetting that they're actually serving food. No one can eat the table or the chair. The food's got to be good.'
She sees dining not as theatre, but as communion. A good meal, in her eyes, is about what happens between people: conversation, laughter, reflection. She's less interested in plates that go viral than in dishes that evoke nostalgia, that spark a memory.
And even as the industry contemplates AI, automation, and ultra-efficiency, she stays rooted in something older: presence. 'Nothing will take away human connection,' she says. 'There's a reason why someone goes to a restaurant. It's not just to look at nice things. It's also to feel a sense of connection.'
What's next?
Sideris doesn't talk in hockey-stick projections or IPOs. When asked what she would love to do next, she very quickly identified a gap in the market: a cool, independent boutique hotel. 'There are so many huge hotels… amazing ones, but big brand names, lots of keys… there's no really cool, hip boutique hotel.'
Although she shows no clear signs of building one soon, her team is bigger now and her systems are stronger. So, who knows what she might do next? 'We've had very slow and steady growth, few people working in an office. Now we have an army. I think we're ready to get into another gear and speed up a little bit.'
Speed, yes. But never chaos. The Sideris