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Arabian Business
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Arabian Business
Dubai's top restaurateur Natasha Sideris prioritises flavour, experience over trends
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
Daily Mail
4 days ago
- Health
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE EXPOSED: How restaurants are lying to you about their hygiene ratings. STEVE BOGGAN'S investigation reveals the shocking truth about those green stickers - and exactly what the owners had to say when confronted
Are you from food hygiene? It was an odd question to be asked, but 46-year-old restaurateur Sameh Houeidi seemed anxious to know. I was looking at the official hygiene rating sticker on the window of his Lebanese restaurant near Aldgate in London.
New York Times
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Hans Noë, Architect, Sculptor and Proprietor of a Famed Bar, Dies at 96
Hans Noë, an architect, sculptor and accidental restaurateur who was best known for his meticulous revival of one of New York City's oldest bars, died on May 11 at his home in Garrison, N.Y. He was 96. His death, in his sleep, was confirmed by his son Alva Noë. Although Mr. Noë (pronounced NO-way) designed and built both innovative houses and geometric wooden sculptures, his most visible role in the cultural life of his adopted city was as the proprietor of Fanelli Cafe. In the early 1970s, he began buying neglected buildings in SoHo, fixing them up and renting them to commercial tenants and as artists' lofts. When, about a decade later, the seller of a five-story building on the corner of Prince and Mercer Streets threw in the street-level bar, Fanelli Cafe, Mr. Noë figured he'd clear it out. Though it had been serving alcohol under one name or another since just after the Civil War, the bar was in poor shape. Instead of getting rid of it, though, Mr. Noë found himself adopting the place locals call Fanelli's — dusting the ceiling fans, installing a roller gate and gradually introducing other improvements that were so well considered and gentle that the regulars may not have even noticed. He kept the place open later and more consistently. He cleaned up the kitchen and started serving hamburgers, omelets and bread from Manhattan's Vesuvio Bakery. He got rid of the cigarette machine. Mr. Noë's younger son, Sasha, who took over around the year 2000, described one improvement as particularly emblematic of his father, who shied away from change for change's sake but was never precious about details. 'When you opened the door,' Sasha Noë recalled in an interview, 'the wind would come in, and it would make everyone cold. So he built a little half wall out of glass to keep people warm. But he didn't make it look like it was built in 1847. He used his Mies van der Rohe knowledge to do it. He didn't try to fake it.' As a result of Mr. Noë's loving attention, Fanelli's became one of the few monuments to longstanding authenticity in an ever-changing city — a place where the roar of conversation is still the only background noise, and SoHo artists, Wall Street bankers and international tourists sit side by side at an ornate wooden bar under a ceiling stained the golden color of smoldering marshmallows by a century's worth of tobacco smoke. 'I've seen people come in and try to figure out how to get that color,' Sasha Noë said. 'I've seen them measuring the molding on the outside.' Hans Heinz Noë was born on June 18, 1928, the younger of two sons of Ossy and Sidonie (Rosenmann) Noë, in what was then the city of Czernowitz in the Kingdom of Romania. (It is now known as Chernivtsi, Ukraine.) His father was a pediatrician. Mr. Noë's family was Jewish and spent World War II confined to ghettos in Czernowitz, as control of that city passed back and forth between fascist Romania and the Soviet Army, and in Bucharest. After the war, the family lived for about a year in German refugee camps, including one in Offenbach, where Mr. Noë studied at what is now the University of Art and Design. Receiving American visas, the family arrived in New York City on Christmas Day, 1949. Mr. Noë spent three years as a student at the Cooper Union in Manhattan, where he found a mentor in the sculptor and architectural designer Tony Smith, who introduced him to other downtown figures, including Mark Rothko, for whom he stretched canvases, and Barnett Newman. 'When it came to art,' Mr. Noë told the writer Lawrence Weschler in 2023, 'Tony became my father and Barney my uncle.' After being drafted into the Army and serving in the United States, Mr. Noë enrolled at the Illinois Institute of Technology, in Chicago, where he studied architecture under Mies van der Rohe and met the ceramist Judy Baldwin, a fellow student. They married in 1960. In addition to his sons Alva, a philosopher, and Sasha, a sculptor who runs Fanelli's, Mr. Noë is survived by Ms. Baldwin; a daughter, Adi Noë Brock, whom he had with the artist Kwok-yee Tai; and eight grandchildren. Back in New York, he and Ms. Baldwin moved into Mr. Smith's former office on LaGuardia Place, in Greenwich Village, and Mr. Noë began designing and building summer houses in the Hamptons with a partner, Richard Schust. Uncomfortable dealing with clients' demands, Mr. Noë hit on a way to avoid them. 'I would find a cheap property,' he recalled, 'clear it by hand, and then design and erect the structure on my own, with the help of Judy and a few friends and assistants, all on spec — and then sell the thing and generally break even.' Reluctant to promote himself or his business, Mr. Noë built only about a dozen houses before turning to derelict buildings in SoHo. Ms. Baldwin opened Baldwin Pottery on East Seventh Street, which evolved into a successful ceramic supply business. After two decades or so at the helm of Fanelli's, Mr. Noë handed over the management to his younger son, and he and Ms. Baldwin moved upstate to a home he built in Garrison, in Putnam County. There, he could spend his time constructing the strange geometric figures that he often lay awake thinking about: intersecting pyramids, extended triangles, sliced-up cubes and a distinctive trapezoidal solid that he called a 'truncated tetrahedron,' first used in a building proposal in the 1950s. When stacked up, these shapes — especially the extended triangles and truncated tetrahedrons — produced surprising and disorienting effects. Depending on where the viewer stood, a dozen of Mr. Noë's special tetrahedrons might evoke Constantin Brancusi's notched 'Infinite Column,' or might seem to have perfectly straight sides. The triangles, stacked up, made skyscraper-like forms that seemed to be bent or falling down but were perfectly stable. If Mr. Noë had had a different sort of temperament, or perhaps just different luck, his constructions might have been maquettes for large public sculptures in steel or aluminum, or for mass-produced design objects destined for museum gift shops. Instead, he showed his work only twice, in exhibitions that came to him. In 2021, through the offices of an art collector who lived in a house Mr. Noë had built, he was given a show at the Fireplace Project in East Hampton, N.Y. An exhibit at the National Museum of Mathematics, in the Flatiron district of Manhattan, 'Sculpture: The Work of Hans Noë,' followed in 2023. 'I used to imagine my general distaste for self-promotion and my indifference toward fame as sort of emblematic of a certain kind of moral or, at any rate, aesthetic superiority,' Mr. Noë told Mr. Weschler. 'But I'm no longer so sure: I think rather that my problem may simply have been one of fear, a prolonged form of PTSD, as it were, with its roots wending back to my experience of the war, when survival enforced an entire regime of perpetual hiding.' He added: 'Any and every calling of attention to oneself could so easily have proven fatal, not only for myself but for my entire family. And maybe it's just that I never got over that way of being in the world.'
CTV News
14-05-2025
- General
- CTV News
Timmins business owner honoured with city's Heart of Gold award
Timmins restaurateur Estela Chow received the Heart of Gold Award for decades of community work, including feeding those in need and founding local groups.
Vogue
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
The Unhinged Joys of the Boomer Instagram
While I have yet to successfully wean myself off of social media, try as I may, I've become quite good at figuring out what kind of Instagram behavior most makes me want to delete my account. Maybe I'm a traitor to my generation, but I just can't stand how curated yet faux-spontaneous half the posts clogging my feed tend to be, with their perfectly posed photos captioned by purposely self-negging little captions like 'recent dump' or 'life's ok.' Am I a hater? Yes, absolutely. But I don't hate it all: Over the last few years, I've become enraptured by what I like to call 'boomer Instagram,' in which people over the age of 60 take to the platform and make it their own in a way that we millennials can only dream of. Obviously, the father of boomer Instagram is none other than restaurateur Keith McNally. While I can't wait to dive into McNally's new memoir, I'm catching up with old posts on his completely epic Instagram, on which he slams a recent Telegraph profile of him as 'poorly written and woefully inaccurate' (get 'em, Keith!), delves into what can only be described as soft erotica about sexual opportunities gone by, and, of course, weighs in on the issues of the day in his own inimitable style. I've never had the opportunity to spend IRL time with McNally, but I can't imagine the experience is all that different from reading his Instagram; each post feels like he's coming up next to you to whisper something snide and right on the money in the middle of weekend brunch service at Balthazar, and I absolutely can't get enough. Of course, McNally isn't the only social media poet who's endeared me to boomer Instagram. No less a film authority than Francis Ford Coppola himself is quite online too, charmingly describing himself in his bio as 'Film Director, Writer, Producer, Great-Grandfather' and posting extremely dadcore (or, indeed, great-grandpa-core?) shots of himself vacationing at waterfalls in fun, printed shirts; impromptu odes to Noël Coward; and fangirl-ish tributes to granddaughter Gia Coppola after the release of her film The Last Showgirl. Not to be outdone, Kyle MacLachlan is also out there with his little 'hi! i'm kyle' bio, adorably dancing to Haim songs and posting thirsty odes to Lactaid. (He's so babygirl for that!)
