Basmah El Bittar, Director of Alserkal Avenue, and Leen Al Zaben, curator of What The Food 2026, discuss supporting homegrown food businesses, this year’s Khubz wa Milh theme, and the evolving food culture of Dubai
Basmah El Bittar, Director of Alserkal Avenue
Supporting homegrown creative businesses is a big part of Alserkal Avenue’s wider mission. How does that shape the What The Food programme?
At Alserkal Avenue, we have always placed a strong emphasis on nurturing homegrown talent and businesses, and the platform we have created for young businesses in the F&B sector through What The Food is no exception. It provides an environment where restaurants, chefs and entrepreneurs can connect with one another while engaging with the wider cultural ecosystem and audiences.
This year, What The Food extends beyond its main programme through Off The Menu, a series of activations led by food concepts across the Avenue. This creates more opportunities for exchange between our concepts and our community.
Have the programmes changed the kind of audience Alserkal Avenue attracts, or how people engage with the space?
What we have noticed along the way is that our audience is evolving with us, allowing us to take more risks with the public programmes we curate. There is an increasing appetite for the stories, people and cultural perspectives that are part of the Avenue. Experimenting with how we design our programmes also allows audiences to engage with and experience the Avenue in new and different ways.
What has food brought to Alserkal Avenue’s identity that other creative disciplines have not?
In our experience, the best outcomes come from collaboration and the intersection of different creative disciplines. At Alserkal Avenue, we try to create space for creative practices to complement one another rather than compete.
Food is an accessible cultural marker, and the depth of meaning carried by our culinary and food rituals resonates with audiences. We have found that culinary practices, and the programmes we build around them, make a great entry point into more nuanced cultural perspectives.
How do you keep Alserkal Avenue’s food programme distinct as more destinations in Dubai adopt a similar model?
We trust our instincts and stay true to what feels authentic to our values, while listening and responding to our audiences and their evolving interests. For us, it is about creating programming around food and culinary practices that feels connected to our wider cultural context. We are particularly interested in exploring what each concept is rooted in and the unique perspectives it brings to the table.
Leen Al Zaben, Curator of What The Food 2026
Why was Khubz wa Milh, or ‘bread and salt’, the right theme for What The Food 2026?
Khubz wa milh, bread and salt, is the phrase we use when a meal has been shared. When you have eaten with someone properly, you say you have shared khubz wa milh, and after that there is a loyalty between you.
That is a lot to put on the two most basic things in any kitchen. I like that ordinary things represent it, and I think that is the poetry behind it: taking something basic and making it special, or rather seeing how it can be special.
I wanted a season built around that promise rather than spectacle. Last year, we disrupted the table. This year, I wanted to sit at it, with intention, and make sure every activation was about being present with the people next to you. If someone leaves the Avenue having eaten with a stranger and now looking out for them, the theme did its job.
How have you translated that idea into this year’s programme?
Everything is built around bringing people to the same table, literally. The long table at the heart of the festival is where this is most obvious: you are not watching a demonstration; you are sitting next to the person who makes the food, eating it with them and hearing how it is done.
Some of the people running the workshops are established names, but that is not really the point. The point is the art in the thing itself: the bread, the cheese, the oil and the everyday work of the hands that make them. I wanted the focus to be on the craft and the ordinary things we take for granted, rather than on who is behind the counter.
We also opened it up beyond the kitchen. There is a poet who documented the home kitchens of one neighbourhood, architects who think about the rooms we eat in, and designers reworking the tools we cook with every day. Food is shaped by all of that, and I wanted people to see the connections.
Behind the programme are a few questions I am curious about: which traditions we hold on to and which we update, who gets to decide that, and where inspiration really comes from. Hopefully, people leave having thought about food from an angle they had not considered before.
How do you think Dubai’s food and dining culture is evolving as we head towards 2027?
Dubai has always been a city where you get to bring your kitchen with you. People come with their food and their language and get to stay who they are. That is what is so beautiful about the UAE. People arrive from everywhere and keep cooking the way they cook, and the city absorbs all of it.
That is why there is so much here, and it goes back much further than people assume, to street food in the 1950s and family restaurants that existed long before anyone was writing about them.
What is changing is that people are starting to ask where things come from and who made them. Producers are the foundation of all of it: the fisherman, the dairy, the farmer and whoever is pressing the oil. For a long time, they were invisible behind the word ‘scene’.
I think the next few years will be about putting names back on things, buying closer to home and cooking with what the land and the season give you. None of that is new. It is how our grandmothers ran their kitchens without calling it anything. We just need to pay attention again and do it on purpose.