Saudi Arabia’s Pursuit of Michelin Stardom
AlUla, an oasis town in northwest Saudi Arabia, sits on a swath of desert creased with red-stone canyons and hard-baked river scars. Thousands of years ago, the region was the southernmost capital of the Nabataeans—the ancient civilization that built Petra—whose ornate tombs are hewn into the rocks. Some religious scholars in Saudi Arabia have preached against developing the area, claiming that its former inhabitants were struck down by the wrath of God. This makes it somewhat surprising to find, amid the wind-sculpted monoliths, the Maraya concert hall—a reflective box the size of an Amazon warehouse, where you can sit on the rooftop and eat raw-scallop ceviche.
I visited Maraya in January, after I’d heard that Jason Atherton, a British Michelin-starred chef, had opened a restaurant there. It was the night before the full moon, and my taxi cleared a security booth before entering the Ashar Valley, where we weaved through rock formations and saw the pinprick lights of luxury resorts in the distance. I didn’t notice the building until it was right in front of us: its reflective surfaces blended into the night. The concert hall holds the Guinness World Record for largest mirrored building, a category in which there is little meaningful competition. I circled the structure looking for a door, all but palming my way around the walls.
Inside, I was shown up to Atherton’s restaurant, Maraya Social. Except for two guys taking photos of each other, making sure to get the plush green-velvet upholstery and the marble bar in the frame, the place was empty. The menu ran international and glibly luxurious: Dover-sole meunière, a hundred-and-seventy-five-dollar tomahawk steak, mocktails priced like the real thing. A waiter regretfully informed me, before I ordered, that they were out of the lamb rigatoni and the lamb shank. This was fine. Oh, and the short rib, he added. And the chicken karaage. I had already written off the Dover sole, given the desert setting, which is how I landed on the tagliatelle alla caponata with whipped ricotta. The waiter returned a couple of minutes later to say that they had run out of ricotta, too.
The pasta—a hair clump of noodles in a soupy, sweetish tomato sauce—came in one of those parsimonious bowls with a small hollow in the middle and a rim as broad as Saturn’s rings. The centerpiece ingredient was, inexplicably, sautéed carrot. It had the unmistakable whimsy of a fridge-raid meal. When I spoke to the manager and, later, a representative from the restaurant operator, they described the trouble of running a restaurant in a place as remote as AlUla. They talked about how often they have to eighty-six things if the delivery trucks don’t arrive in time from Riyadh or Jeddah, and how difficult it is to find staff, especially chefs, this far from the cities.
Albandari bin Ibrahim, a local, remembers when AlUla had a handful of sit-down restaurants, several of which were owned by her cousin. “I used to hate the food because we ate it daily,” she said, laughing. In the past few years, high-end restaurants have arisen like mirages, and the town has been the setting for dinners by the likes of Hélène Darroze, Emmanuel Renaut, and Yannick Alléno, all Michelin-awarded chefs of the French gastronomic élite. By my calculation, the cumulative number of Michelin stars that have passed through AlUla—a town where date palms outnumber people by a hundred to one—stands at about sixty-five.
Inside a candlelit boutique hotel in the Old Town is what many consider AlUla’s best restaurant: Joontos, a Spanish-Saudi fusion place that in the past year has welcomed Bill Gates and Kimbal Musk (Elon’s brother). The head chef, Clint Montano, is an improbably gentle Swedish gym buff, who, when I met him, was wearing a thermal vest despite the heat. At Joontos, the chefs concoct dishes such as the batata harra, which recalls patatas bravas with black lime—a pervasive, earthy-bitter top note in Saudi cuisine. “Fusion, not confusion” was the idea, Montano told me.
Like many restaurants in AlUla, Joontos is partly a creation of the Saudi government. “We are working for the R.C.U.,” Montano acknowledged, referring to the Royal Commission for AlUla, which has been given a mandate to develop the area into a world-class heritage destination. “The new Saudi El Dorado” was one epithet coined by L’Agence Française pour le Développement d’AlUla (AFALULA), an intergovernmental tourism agency established in 2018 by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (M.B.S.) and Emmanuel Macron. It is because of AFALULA, which connects Saudi funding with (mostly) French contractors who are willing to take it, that the town has welcomed a roster of blue-chip chefs serving camel and foie gras; the agency also greased the wheels for Arduna, a new art exhibition with a Picasso on loan from the Centre Pompidou.
The exhibition opened while I was visiting, and Montano was catering a stargazing dinner for some V.I.P.s. Security was locked down in the date-palm groves, and traffic was diverted to the back roads; a mobile laboratory was set up in the desert to make sure that the food was safe for such esteemed guests to eat. When I asked Montano what drew the uber-élites of the world to AlUla, he said it was the peace and the privacy, noting that you can’t fly drones there without a permit. Around a thousand private jets landed at the AlUla International Airport in 2025. “Let’s be honest, ” Montano said matter-of-factly. “This is the new Monaco.”
When the chef and writer Anthony Bourdain went to Jeddah for his gallivanting food series “No Reservations,” in 2008, he found a thriving but thoroughly local scene: he had a breakfast of liver and onions at a souk and a supper of stewed camel in the desert. Because Saudi Arabia had not yet been opened to nonreligious tourists—that happened in 2019—many visitors to the country were pilgrims, who didn’t expect flashy meals. In Mina, the encampment outside Mecca where millions of pilgrims stay each year, buffet catering is provided, along with occasional surprises such as popcorn machines and ice cream. There are four KFCs beside the Kaaba, as both fried and broasted (pressure-fried) chicken have become accidental staples of the hajj diet. Saudi Arabia’s greatest restaurant success story is Albaik, a chain of broasted-chicken shops that started in 1974, which opens additional branches in Mina during peak pilgrimage times.
For much of its history, Saudi Arabia—which, like a lot of the Islamic world, has a rich tradition of hosting at home—was not especially suited to restaurant culture. This partly came down to lawmakers’ interpretations of religious principles. Restaurants were required to separate single men from women and families. A few years ago, one cleric questioned the morality of all-you-can-eat buffets, because they require—in the heady optimism needed to hand over money, up front, for unquantified rewards—something of a gambler’s mentality. The sale of alcohol was banned until 2024, and, even now, only high-earning foreigners living in the diplomatic quarter can reportedly shop at Riyadh’s sole liquor store, which has no name and no sign. The hospitality industry “reflected the society at the time,” Stefan Breg, a British food-and-beverage consultant who has worked in Saudi Arabia for more than a decade, told me. There were about a dozen high-end hotel restaurants, in major cities, and that was about it.
Then, in 2016, the kingdom announced a program called Vision 2030— a brain dump of economic initiatives, infrastructure plans, social reforms, and cultural gambits, apparently dreamed up by M.B.S., designed to make the country less economically dependent on oil. The aim was not just to make Saudi Arabia a juggernaut in burgeoning industries such as A.I. and fintech but also, seemingly, to paint over the country’s reputation—cemented by the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, in 2018—as a repressive autocracy. The most notorious parts of Vision 2030 have been its beleaguered giga-projects, such as the Line, a futuristic megacity that was meant to be housed inside two parallel mirrored buildings, each roughly the height of One World Trade Center and more than a hundred miles long. (The Financial Times reported in January that construction had slowed, and that the development would be much smaller than anticipated.) Other initiatives have been comparatively down to earth, such as the kingdom’s investments in Formula 1 racing and in soccer, and legal changes that permitted women to drive and travel freely without the permission of a male guardian or a family chaperon.
M.B.S.’s evident hope was for Saudi Arabia to look and feel more like other wealthy, modernized countries, where people drink matcha and go to music festivals, and where foreigners visit not solely for business or pilgrimage but for a good time. The kingdom revoked the enforcement powers of the religious police (also known as the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice) and committed to attracting a hundred million tourists yearly by 2030. This endeavor forced the obvious question of where all of those people would eat. In 2018, a government task force laid out a few goals: there would be 3.33 restaurants and cafés per thousand people by 2030, and the number of “globally rated fine dining restaurants” would be at least twenty-one. The official program document reported that “3star Michelin chefs are recognized as the utmost level of food quality.” How many restaurants run by such chefs would suffice? The task force established an opening target of three.
The kingdom was setting out to build an illustrious dining scene, more or less from scratch. At the outskirts of Riyadh, dozens of big, glitzy restaurants manifested seemingly overnight, among them a branch of Wolfgang Puck’s Spago, a Japanese steak house called Wagyumafia, and Madeo, a Tuscan-inspired restaurant whose only other outpost was eight thousand miles away, on Sunset Boulevard. A new government body, the Culinary Arts Commission, was created to codify Saudi recipes and increase the number of chefs at the country’s disposal, brokering the opening of a Cordon Bleu campus in Riyadh and dispatching young Saudis, on full scholarships, to culinary colleges around the world. Big-name restaurateurs had their rent and startup costs subsidized. Much of this has been funded by the Saudi government and the Public Investment Fund (P.I.F.), the country’s nearly trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund, which has been the engine of M.B.S.’s breakneck reforms. Madawi Al-Rasheed, a British anthropologist of Saudi origin, told me that the P.I.F.’s investments in Western brands and pre-Islamic heritage sites such as AlUla reflect the prince’s intention to forge a “Saudi identity where Islam is just one component of it.” “The contradictions in the national narrative become apparent,” she said. “It’s all about Saudi Arabia, but it’s also all about globalization—foreign tourists, shopping centers, and patterns of consumption that we see across the globe.”
Last June, the kingdom’s efforts were rewarded with the announcement that there would be, for the first time, a Saudi Arabia edition of the Michelin guide. Seba Zarea, a likably frank Saudi bureaucrat who helps run the Culinary Arts Commission, told me that the decision required years of discussion. “People, specifically in the West, have a perception about Saudi that wasn’t easy to change,” she said. Gwendal Poullennec, the international director of the Michelin guide, insisted that the organization was simply waiting for Saudi Arabia’s restaurant scene to reach maturity. “We have partnerships with states at all different levels,” he told me. “Whatever the political—let’s say, the political situation.”
The Michelin announcement didn’t inspire the kind of backlash that engulfed, for example, the American performers at the Riyadh Comedy Festival, who were excoriated in the U.S. for taking checks from a regime that prolifically executes people and quashes dissent. Still, I detected shyness from some Europeans involved in the Saudi tourism project. I’d written to nearly every French chef whom AFALULA had brought to Saudi Arabia and none wished to sit for an interview. On a video call, I proposed to the chairman of the agency, Jean-Yves Le Drian, that some might be anxious about the P.R. ramifications of collaborating with the Saudi government. “I understand the caution,” Le Drian said, after going off mike to consult with his press team for longer than I would have expected of someone who previously served as France’s defense minister and minister for foreign affairs. “We are in a phase of emergence, a country taking a new form,” he added.
Le Drian, who is seventy-nine years old and currently serves as France’s special envoy to Lebanon, has worked in the Middle East for nearly two decades. I wondered whether he thought his agency was helping Saudi Arabia accrue a certain kind of soft power. “ ‘Soft power’ is a term that’s a bit overused,” he said. “Personally, I’m not a big fan.”
His Saudi counterparts could be more forthcoming. “Food is a soft power,” Zarea told me. “Everyone agrees on that.”
Of all the culinary royalty to visit the kingdom, the most senior is Alain Ducasse, a French chef and restaurateur who has received more Michelin stars than any other chef alive today. Under the auspices of his seasonal restaurant Ducasse in AlUla, I found myself at an alfresco dinner in a canyon, in the light of a full desert moon. Waiters circulated with non-alcoholic champagne and canapés; a group of American tourists tried to get the moon in their selfies. There was a d.j. playing spacey house music, just a little too loudly.
Of course, Ducasse himself was not there—he cannot be at the many dozens of places to which he has lent his name, including restaurants in Qatar and Japan and an outpost on Le Commandant Charcot, a luxury polar-exploration vessel. But this was, at least nominally, Ducasse food: French classics, spliced with Saudi ingredients. “Oasis-to-table” was the concept, Ducasse explained in an e-mail afterward. To honor the region’s native produce, we ate cured fish and beet with geranium, which happens to thrive in the oasis, as well as lobster and caviar in a sauce of local citrus.
The main course was a beautiful but insipid pâté en croûte—a French terrine wrapped in pastry, made here with barely seasoned chicken. I’d been seated, at the singles table, with a dentist who lived nearby. When I told her that I was a food writer, she began to ask, sotto voce, what I would rate each course on a scale of one to ten. “I prefer my food with . . .” She probed for the right word. “Flavor?” At the end, the servers brought out madeleines, as if to conjure more memorable meals from years past.
If the goal was to champion local food, it might have been more apropos to serve a dish such as shorba al ulawiya (an aromatic soup thickened with green wheat) or to finish the dinner with cardamom-spiced qahwa (Arabic coffee). But the DNA of fine dining is written in French, from the choreographed service to the very idea of doing things en croûte. To “elevate” a cuisine, as it often tends to be framed, French chefs must be summoned, French techniques deployed. “The same phenomenon takes place throughout the world,” Ducasse wrote to me, when I asked him why he thought the Saudis might want the French je ne sais quoi. “Nothing to be surprised of in this: whatever the passing trends and fads, French cuisine remains a reference.”
Could Saudi cooking become a reference, too? Another aim of the Saudi gastronomic project—one that seems to compete with the Ducasse of it all—is to make its cuisine more prominent internationally. The trouble is not that Saudi Arabia lacks delicious things to eat but that foreigners have almost no way of knowing about them: usually, cuisines become beloved abroad because of tourism, or because of emigrants who go into the restaurant trade, or with help from a strong culinary literature (such as Julia Child’s and Marcella Hazan’s cookbooks). Until recently, Saudi Arabia had almost none of these things, which is why few people outside the country can name a single Saudi dish.
In AlUla, I sampled some kabsa (a spiced chicken-and-rice dish that originates in the Gulf) and tricorn sambusas (fried, meat-filled pockets of pastry) at Tofareya, a home-style restaurant in the Old Town, but whether most visitors are leaving conversant in Saudi cooking remains to be seen. When I spoke to Le Drian, who has been the chairman of AFALULA for three years, I asked if he enjoys Saudi food. “Of course,” he said. “I’m a little hesitant about camel, but the rest is good.” I asked him specifically which Saudi dishes he liked. The diplomatic complexity of the question seemed to weigh on him. But then it came: “Hummus. Yes, it’s hummus.”
A while later, I asked Anissa Helou, a Lebanese food scholar and the author of a cookbook about Saudi food, whether she considers hummus a distinctly Saudi dish. A laugh careened through the phone. “Wherever hummus is from,” she said, “it is not there.”
After my time in AlUla, I flew to Riyadh, where I had plans to meet Naif Alsuwilam, one of the city’s first restaurant influencers. I’d discovered him a couple of months earlier in a video on Instagram: a cheerful guy in his late twenties, bespectacled and immaculate in a smart white thawb, reviewing a new burger place called Junkie. (“Wallahi al-Azeem”—I swear to God the Almighty—he said, with evident pleasure, after downing some cheesy fries.) Alsuwilam has been documenting the city’s food scene since he was a teen-ager, posting across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, where he has almost four hundred thousand followers. Around half of the Saudi population is under thirty, and, like young tastemakers everywhere, they are chronically online.
Shortly before we were due to meet, Alsuwilam tried to cancel—he said he had a horseback-riding lesson. He eventually agreed to talk for half an hour in the early evening, over mint tea and date-filled kleija pastries at Abu Waleed Tea. The original Abu Waleed was a streetside tea vender who became something of a local sage. “It used to be word of mouth, then social media started,” Alsuwilam told me. Waleed died a few years ago, and his store has become an Instagram-friendly chain: the café was slickly designed, with the kind of moody lighting that you might expect at a night club, and guys standing around watching sports.
Alsuwilam and I drove around for a while in his pickup truck—our brief meeting had been upgraded to an hours-long sojourn, though he never said as much. Saudis love pickups, he explained; I spotted a crew of men in thawbs hanging out on the bed of a bright-red vintage Ford. There were other familiar sights: a British-style fish-and-chips van, an In-N-Out dupe called California Burger. We sampled flavored drinks at a camel-milk store and stopped by Sold Out, a fast-food restaurant where Alsuwilam had to film some sponsored content. The place had inscrutable stoner-eclectic décor, with pictures of Salvador Dalí on serving-tray papers and a Rastafarian lion statuette on the counter. “Best themed restaurant in Saudi Arabia,” the award plaques hanging on the wall read. I asked Alsuwilam what the theme was, and he shrugged.
The clock ticked toward eleven. In Riyadh, where daytime temperatures often break a hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit, the food scene is liveliest after dark: many restaurants stay open until one or two in the morning, and Saudis drink coffee until well into the night. We headed toward Diriyah, a sixty-two-billion-dollar development outside Riyadh that is home to the At-Turaif historic district, the Saudi dynasty’s first capital, which is being transformed into a tourist hub. (A Trump International Golf Club is slated to open nearby in the coming years.) Much of the area is under construction, and as we left the city proper, we drove in curving paths through what felt like an interminable building site.
Our destination was a newish restaurant complex called Zallal. It is essentially a mall food court, but great care has been taken to make it feel traditionally Saudi, as if in rebuttal to comparisons with ultra-modern Dubai: the design replicates mud-brick textures, decorative battlements, and triangular peepholes. Alsuwilam wanted to take me to Aseeb, one of the city’s higher-end Saudi restaurants. After we were seated, and after I’d told Alsuwilam that I really ought to get back to my hotel soon, he ordered half a dozen dishes and then said that he wasn’t hungry.
So I tucked into a spread that included sambusas and warak enab—vine leaves stuffed with rice. There was shorbat al-shoufan—a gently spiced oat soup with pieces of tender camel meat—and marquq, a meat stew with zucchini and ribbons of dough, which were cooked in the broth until they became soft and slick like pappardelle. When I got to the jareesh, a comforting and savory broken-wheat porridge, Alsuwilam gave me an expert recommendation: press the black lime under the spoon until it bursts, and work the salt-sour juice through the contents of the bowl.
Aseeb serves hearty Najdi cuisine from the central highland region around Riyadh, food that felt familiar to me as a Brit: heavy on meat, unafraid of compound carbs, and, arguably, overly conservative with spice. The restaurant is the kind of reverent cultural flagship that a tourism board dreams of—the superego to Sold Out’s id. On social media and on its menus, Aseeb describes itself as having been opened by Abu and Umm Saud. This is a bit like opening a midtown steak house and saying that it was founded by a nice old couple called Mr. and Mrs. Rockefeller.
“Luxury restaurants” received their own legal designation in Saudi Arabia last year, with enforceable requirements for valet service and a clause forbidding drive-throughs. One of the most successful restaurant groups in this realm is Modern Food Company (M.F.C.), which operates ten brands across Riyadh. The most esteemed of these is Myazu, a plush, moody Japanese-ish place that follows the interior-design principles of a haberdashery box (velvet, ribbons, a basket-weave ceiling), and that has become a template for trendy Riyadh finger food, with its Wagyu sliders and prawn-tempura hand rolls. Roberto Carta, an ebullient Sardinian expat who runs operations for M.F.C., said that it was always an ordeal when Saudi royals ordered takeout.“You have army guys watching the chef cooking—it’s a pain in the ass,” he said, while giving me a tour.
The biggest headache is staffing the kitchen, as there are few Saudi chefs. “My friend’s brother was the first one I ever heard of,” Nawal Alkhalawi, a chef who was raised in Jeddah and lives between there and London, told me. “But there was so much stigma around it, even for a man—like, that’s not a job for us.” By “us,” she means Saudi nationals, who often have domestic help (mostly Filipino migrants), and for whom entering a restaurant kitchen as an underling, chopping onions, might come as a shock. There is only one Saudi head chef in the entire M.F.C. brigade, a forty-year-old named Rayan Alayesh who studied at Le Cordon Bleu. He told me that he’d hoped to get a head-chef role at M.F.C. a few years out of culinary school. As a reality check, his bosses made him work for two years in a café.
Instead, top kitchen jobs go to Europeans, almost all of them men: Myazu’s Riyadh branch employs no women back of house. When I visited the restaurant, I met M.F.C.’s chef-director, Ian Pengelley, and the executive chef Barry Andrews, a Scottish double act who have ended up custodians, somehow, of Riyadh’s pan-Asian dining scene. A few days earlier, they had been at the awards ceremony for the Middle East and North Africa edition of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, and Myazu came in forty-fifth. “We pissed off the Saudi ladies who do the voting, because we’re two Scottish lads,” Pengelley quipped. “I think we may have cracked some jokes. I might have touched one on the arm.” European chefs are everywhere in Saudi Arabia, though it does not exactly provide the “Kitchen Confidential” life style that they’d prepared for. “I think you need to be at a very specific point in your career,” Andrews told me. “You can’t be so young that you want to party and stuff.”
The lower ranks of the kitchen—the commis and the line cooks, the kitchen porters and the cleaners—are made up primarily of migrant men, usually from the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Indonesia. As of 2022, migrants accounted for forty-one per cent of the Saudi population, and they hold a huge majority of kitchen roles. Many of M.F.C.’s two thousand employees are recruited through agencies abroad and subsequently housed in segregated compounds, divided into women’s and men’s blocks, then subdivided along roughly ethnic lines. They are transported to work on charter coaches: if you go to Myazu’s neighborhood in the late afternoon, just before the evening shift, you will see buses arrive in waves.
Most M.F.C. line staff and waiters come to Saudi Arabia without family, and, barring emergencies, they must stay in the country for two years before the company allows them a visit home—a common arrangement for migrant workers in the Gulf. “For European people, it’s one year,” Carta said, while we walked around Coya, an upscale Peruvian restaurant that’s decked out like an Andean Planet Hollywood. “Obviously, it’s different.”
As we left, the front-desk staff stopped Carta, a snappy dresser who can be counted on to wear slimline Italian tailoring no matter the temperature. They asked him about his nose ring—it was new. “They were laughing at me,” he said, when we stepped out into the heat. “They said that in Nepal only ladies get these.”
One tour guide in AlUla told me that Westerners were coming around to the idea of Saudi Arabia as a place to go on vacation. Like Dubai or Abu Dhabi, he said, it was a Middle Eastern destination that was “away from all the war and stuff.” This proved untrue less than a month later, when the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, setting off a months-long conflict that has included retaliatory strikes on Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia. The U.S. Embassy in Riyadh was struck by two Iranian drones during the early days of the conflict, with no reported injuries; the people I’d met in the city said they experienced few disruptions to their daily lives, though air travel in the Gulf had come to a standstill. “We actually got a lot busier at the beginning of the situation,” Andrews told me by text, because fewer wealthy Saudis were going out of town.
Even before the war, there were signs that the Saudi tourism project wasn’t going as planned. Take, for instance, the Red Sea island of Sindalah, a speck of land two kilometres long and half a kilometre wide, which was conceived as a luxury yachting resort connected to the now diminished giga-project of Neom. Sindalah was meant to have thirty-eight food venders, seven of them inanely titled concepts—Les Bubbles, Le Deli, La Crème des Desserts, and so on—from the Joël Robuchon restaurant group. Thousands of workers moved to a compound on the mainland, commuting by boat to Sindalah to prepare for the arrival of the promised tourist élite. The island soft-opened in October, 2024, and Alicia Keys—whose husband, Swizz Beatz, owns a Saudi camel-racing team—performed at the party. But, in the months that followed, the project seemed to stall; the island is still not open to the public.
No one I spoke to could pinpoint what went wrong. Carta told me that only three of the restaurants had functioning toilets. “Whoever did the feasibility plan is an idiot,” an industry source told me. “It was a massive humiliation for the king.” The British consultant Stefan Breg, whose company worked on food and beverage for Sindalah, and who is quick to praise Saudi Arabia as a nation of dreamers, declined to elaborate on the resort’s unravelling, though he indicated that there had been logistical slipups. The kingdom, Breg acknowledged, can’t achieve its aspirations “without those boring old fundamentals of boxes and people.”
The boring old fundamentals, it seems, are asserting themselves across the country. The Public Investment Fund has tightened its belt, according to its governor, Yasir al-Rumayyan, who said earlier this year that the fund would be focussing on “improving the efficiency of its spending and disbursements”—hence the reported abandonment of schemes such as the Line. The Royal Commission for AlUla is hoping to have a million visitors to the area by 2030, but the count last year stood at around three hundred and eighteen thousand—fewer than the number of people who annually visit the seaside pier in my home town, a place with slot machines and a doughnut stall.
And many of the restaurants that materialized during the gold rush have struggled. In 2023, Cool Inc., a Saudi company, opened twenty-one high-end restaurants within four months, including Spago, the widely hyped London restaurant Gymkhana, and the New York bistro Raoul’s, turning VIA Riyadh, a shopping-and-leisure precinct, into something like a Saudi Vegas Strip. Each place cost between five and ten million dollars to fit out; most of them have since shuttered. “We expected the tourism to come in much bigger numbers,” Sinan Al-Saady, the company’s former C.E.O., told me, the day before Spago closed, too.
Perhaps a restaurant group’s best bet would be to open businesses that Saudis actually like. A server at a Ducasse bistro in Riyadh told me that the place was averaging forty covers a day: “French cuisine doesn’t work well here—without wine, the cuisine itself is nothing.” Breg said that some consultants’ fixation on awards could be out of touch. At a meeting about one of the giga-projects, he recalled, “Someone said, ‘We should do a Michelin restaurant.’ Why? The concept of the Michelin guide isn’t relevant to Saudis at all.”
As it happens, Michelin held its first-ever Saudi awards on the final night of my trip, at the Four Seasons Hotel in Riyadh. I followed a stream of people in suits and abayas and thawbs into the Kingdom Ballroom—a vast space, big enough to hold a track meet, and almost completely characterless save for dozens of remarkably vulvic chandeliers. The prizes would be divided into three categories: Michelin stars, for the best in fine dining; the more inclusive Bib Gourmand, for excellent food at a moderate price point; and commendations for all the other restaurants that had merited a writeup in the guide.
There was traditional string music playing and hosts bearing cups of fresh qahwa. Seemingly everyone I’d met in the kingdom, from the Myazu Scots to Seba Zarea, of the Culinary Arts Commission, was there, hobnobbing. I spotted Tom Aikens, an English chef, tweezering microgreens onto canapés. When I asked if he, too, was being courted for a Saudi opening, he said, “I’ve been talking to a few people,” and raised a cryptic eyebrow.
We all took our seats for the ceremony, and an attendant led the Michelin Man—whose given name is Bibendum—to the stage, where he stood for much of the night, waving to the crowd. The event was somewhat shambolic, with confused chefs stopping for selfies with Bibendum as the host tried to move things along. Everyone applauded politely when Joontos collected its Bib Gourmand, and when Aseeb and Myazu received commendations. The Exceptional Mocktail award went to Santiago Latorre, a bartender at Riyadh’s Il Baretto. The host asked him to name his favorite mocktail. “It’s a Negroni,” he said. “The real one, or the mocktail one.” The audience laughed nervously. “We weren’t expecting that answer,” the host said, “but thank you.”
No Michelin stars were awarded in Riyadh that night. Instead, people talked generously, in bland motivational patter, about the potential of the scene. If people were disappointed—after all the time it had taken to get Michelin into the kingdom, after all the chefs trained and restaurants subsidized—they did not let on. At one point, a man placed a hand on Bibendum’s shoulder and led him offstage, as if to be put out of his misery.
After the ceremony, I made my way toward Tahlia Street, a bustling thoroughfare near my hotel, in search of a late-night pick-me-up. I clocked lounges and chicken shops, a billiard hall with a buzzing Egyptian restaurant underneath, a popular seafood spot serving something called Viagra casserole. Tables and chairs spilled out onto the sidewalk, where diners made the most of the cooler evening air.
On a side street, I came across Kunafa Abu Al Hous, a Riyadh institution that specializes in kunafa, a Levantine dessert of molten cheese, syrup, and crunchy, shredded kadaif pastry. Close to midnight, it was busy with cliques of men—Saudi and non-Saudi alike—hanging out over coffee and sweets, and parents in the family section wiping their kids’ syrup-sticky fingers. In the universal sign language of the hapless tourist, I ordered a slab of each of the kunafas: the famous version with kadaif, another with a buttery semolina crust, and osmaliyeh, which is sandwiched with thick cream. It took all of thirty seconds for the man behind the counter to pack my order, but, while I waited, he insisted that I take two fat pieces of pistachio baklava. ♦