Dinner With Adam

Hey friends,

I have to just share with you what happened last night. A dear friend of mine Adam from South Africa had promised to treat me out to dinner for my birthday. Since he found out I was leaving Dubai too, he decided to do a double treat for me. He claimed his favorite place to eat was Ravi's, which is a local Pakistani restaurant, where the main meal costs around 10dhs. So I was prepared to go to someplace like that, or maybe, just maybe, we might end up going to Chilis or TGIF.

It was with much surprise when he messaged me and told me to come to Spectrum on One at the Fairmont hotel. I was flabbergasted. That's supposed to be an expensive place. I called him up and told him to not go out of his way: let's keep it simple. He refused to budge, and insisted we go there. I had never been there so I was quite excited.

We showed up there at 830pm, and let me tell you what an experience it was. The restaurant is located on the first floor of the Fairmont Hotel, and the minute we entered, the waitress confirmed our reservation, and proceeded to show us around the restaurant. "It's part of the experience," Adam told me. The waitress took us through the passageways, stopping at certain points. This was a multi-cultural cuisine restaurant. We stopped at the Arabic place first, where we could see the open kitchen. Then came the Chinese open kitchen, followed by Japanese and Indian. The bar was so divine, it made me want to start drinking, sitting at the bar with amazing views towards the city. As we passed through the bar, we came to the desserts area, and we already made up our mind as to what we wanted: both of us are chocoholics! :-) The whole idea of dining at Spectrum on One is experiencing Theatre Kitchens; depending on where you are seated, you can view the chefs preparing the meals in the open kitchens.

Browsing through the menu, which had about 20 pages, it seemed more like a small novella. Since I was in a new place, I decided to take something different, and I opted for the Chicken L'Orange. Adam went for the Duck too, but in another kind of sauce. He ordered his special wine too. I stuck with the fancy glass of water. The food was presented so stylishly, I almost didn't want to eat it. I wanted to capture the amazing presentation of my duck in the dark brown sauce, with tangy orange pieces on top of it. Once I took the first bite, I was in heaven. So divine was the taste of my meal, I took about a complete hour to eat my meal, relishing the taste and aroma of the duck.

Surprisingly, I was so stuffed with my meal for it was so rich in taste and made for an amazing culinary experience. We ordered the awesome dessert platter, where we have a sampling of the five of the best desserts in one platter. That alone took us 30 minutes to finish. So heavenly it was, I wanted to just eat more and more of it.

By the time we were done, it was 12:30am. We spent about 4 hours having a dinner. Longer than I thought, but what took us so long was the time we spent talking. I never had such a stimulating, interesting and fun conversation in one sitting with someone, but with Adam I was transported to another world. We talked about Dubai, architecture, art, musems, meeting famous people, travelling, Middle East, technology, movies, books, tv shows, poverty, life in Saudi Arabia and South Africa, climate change, human rights issues, politics, war in iraq, political situation in Pakistan, life's ups and downs, challenges, overcoming adversity, spirituality and religion, our dreams, hopes and goals, our fascination for chocolates and our favorite chocolates ever and the list just goes on and on.

I am certainly sad to leave Adam behind in Dubai, but he has his plans to leave Dubai and move on to a better place. Adam, thanks for your friendship for the last one year, and I will truly cherish it. There are only a few people in my life who make me want to be a better person, and you are one of them.

Mansur