Madinat Zayed Shopping Center’s food court sounds like a carnival. Eaters, from prayer-group aunties to Japanese tourists, pack the place like barnacles. Here, you will find a dress shop selling desi wear and gold shops that bling like supernovas, alongside sliding doors that reveal badminton players whacking shuttlecocks and others from which hundreds of partygoers spill out into the concourse. The noise of it all drives everyone mad. Perhaps that’s why the place has soul, because it feels like you don’t need to covet a Rolex to be comfortable here. Buy quartz instead, or cheap toys for the kids. Madinat Zayed feels normal, the kind of mall your no-nonsense uncle would build if he had money, acoustics be damned.
In the food court, competition is fierce. There are dosas and chaat to be had, hotpot and momos, fast food staples like KFC and Popeyes, as well as a range of bite-sized stalls hawking everything from piping hot chai to fruit cocktails laced with enough syrup to shock bees. Madinat Zayed makes sense for the many in Abu Dhabi who live paycheck to paycheck. The country’s spine shops and eats here. Ride the escalators, be nosy. You will hear languages that have sailed many seas or flown economy on visit visas.
Above the gold shops, to the right of the escalators, is Notebook Restaurant. It is a south Indian restaurant with Gulf roots and fusion aspirations, partial to flavours from Kerala and part of a chain. Tasked with reviewing one restaurant in the whole of Abu Dhabi, a restaurant chain in a mall might seem like an odd place to go. Elsewhere, in high-end hotels and beachfront hideaways, are chefs waiting to blow your mind. I ignored them all.
I picked a restaurant not far from the Central Bus Station, not far from the places I explored as a boy, not far from people who looked like my elders. Much of Abu Dhabi’s culinary heartbeat is situated in malls like this one.
Notebook’s staff remember who you are, even though they may not understand how you got there. And if you go there often enough, I’ve been told on good authority by a Congolese movement artist, they wave, take you to your table, treat you like family. For this review, I test the theory and show up five times in 10 days. I bring hungry, opinionated friends, almost all of them itinerant artists with links to Paris.
I used to come here for one thing only, the fish mango curry. The green mango’s sourness is gently tamed by coconut milk, which breathes life into the dish. The tang that follows pins itself to the tongue like a flag. The sauce feels like a magic potion, so much that it lulls me into thinking fish mango curry does not even need the fish. However, when I taste the sea bream, served whole and partially submerged in curry, the world feels right. We slurp, we lick, we remark that even the fish would be convinced that it is right for us to eat it. For those in love with spoons and forks, park them. This dish was made to help you understand the purpose of fingers.
The curry needs the right accompaniment. My table always asks for appams, pancakes with a spongy bottom and thin crispy edges made with fermented rice batter and coconut milk. The perfect appam should steam when served, and look round and fabulous, like the hubcap of a 1953 Chevrolet Bel Air. They have to be sour; they have to be sweet. Perfectly made appams, as these are, make the fish talk. But on one visit the server suggests the nool porotta, Malabar-style porottas shaped like string hoppers too. I am not convinced, but I say, “Sure,” and when they arrive, springy, crunchy, my tablemates crack a smile. We are seated outside, taking in the food court like tourists at a safari.
Notebook specialises in Malayalee (Keralan) cuisine, even though select dishes from other parts of India are served and arguably doctored. One time a friend toyed with scandal and ordered butter chicken, but she soon remembered her mistake: Malayalees treat cream with suspicion, preferring to add heat to their chicken instead.
The Alleppey chicken, however, is a legitimate contender. Pepper frames the dish, then invades it. The first time I had it, the chicken was overcooked. The second time, I wanted to weep my thanks into a tissue, while the Parisian sound artist looked like he had found God. To return to earth, he took a sip from his fresh lime soda done the right way (sweet and salty) then looked at me and sighed.
Normally, I end my meals at Notebook with fresh-milk chai. Because this is karak country (tea brewed with condensed milk), make sure you specify you want the OG. And ask them to go easy on the sugar. As the tea warms your palms, sip hard and take a look around you: the toddler throwing food from his high chair; the badminton players nursing victories and defeat, ready to go home but not before wolfing down their helping of beef and chapatti and bitching about Madinat Zayed parking; Notebook’s manager, in his informal black suit, greeting another regular.
On the visit with my dear friend the dance dramaturg, we inform staff that she suffers from a congenital condition. Her food can’t have sharp edges. As the restaurant bounces to the sound of speakers that need to be put out to pasture soon, our server arrives with another appam made specially for her, pillowy-soft. That’s what she gets here, care, and the third and fourth time we visit, she gets the same treatment. Bespoke appams with a cotton-like centre. She worships this place, she confides, because there is joy to be had.
Deepak Unnikrishnan is an associate arts professor at NYU Abu Dhabi and author of the novel “Temporary People” (Restless Books, 2017)
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