The chef tells us how a healthier diet helped chill him out, and why he’s adding lower calorie dishes to his Dubai menu to keep up with the ‘cutting-edge’ food scene in the emirate

When the W Dubai – The Palm Hotel opens at the end of this year, one of the highlights will be Massimo Bottura’s new restaurant, Torno Subito, which promises “to take guests on a journey back to 1960s Italy”. It is the three Michelin-starred chef’s first venture in Dubai and should be every bit as ambitious as you would expect from the man whose restaurant in Italy, Osteria Francescana, was crowned number one in this year’s list of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants.

Akira Back Dubai

Another exciting opening at the W Dubai – The Palm hotel is South Korean chef Akira Back’s new restaurant, which will continue to showcase some of the finest Asian food in the world. Back, whose Seoul restaurant, Dosa, won a Michelin star last year, describes his menu as, “an innovative Japanese cuisine prepared with a Korean accent”.

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal

The highly experimental chef, whose dishes are as much about spectacle as taste, opens his first restaurant in Dubai next year. Housed at The Royal Atlantis Resort & Residences, Dinner by Heston Blumenthal will feature contemporary twists on recipes that date back to the 1300s, including goats’ milk cheesecake. Always remember with a Blumenthal dish: nothing is quite as it seems.

“There’s nothing more off-putting than a chef on a diet,” says Gordon Ramsay, a chef who, as far as I can tell, is on a diet. He must be. At 51, he looks fantastic. There is scarcely an ounce of fat on him and you could slice through an overcooked steak with one of those cheekbones.

But he assures me that this is simply down to “a healthy lifestyle” and that it really isn’t necessary to swap burgers for beetroot all of the time. “I love cooking and I love eating,” he says. “It just has to be done in moderation.” Hmm, it sounds a bit like a diet to me, but this being Gordon Ramsay, I decide not to argue.

‘I don’t want my taste buds to get bored’
Anyway, how to eat healthily without compromising on flavour – that is the conundrum he has tried to solve in his latest cookbook, Ultimate Fit Food: Mouth-Watering Recipes to Fuel You for Life, which was published earlier this year.

It is filled with recipes – courgette and fennel carpaccio; panzanella with poached chicken; shaved asparagus and hazelnut salad – which challenge the idea that “healthy” has to mean “dull”. “I don’t want my taste buds to get bored by eating the same things over and over again,” he writes in the introduction to Ultimate Fit Food. “And I don’t ever want to feel deprived.”

Ramsay puts it in slightly more bald terms to me. “I’m not putting you on a lentil diet for 18 months,” he says. “This is about balance. It’s about [using different] cooking techniques, whether that’s steaming, slow-cooking, braising or poaching. And it’s about scrutinising the level of dairy you’re cooking with. It’s not about scaring yourself into going on a diet, which is bloody unpleasant.”

The chef believes that the recipes in his latest cookbook are “restaurant quality” and has backed up that claim by permanently including a selection of them on the menu at Bread Street Kitchen & Bar Dubai, the restaurant he opened at Atlantis, The Palm, in 2015, and which is headed up by chef de cuisine Cesar Bartolini.

So alongside the beef burger, lamb chops and fish and chips, you will now also find a watermelon and cucumber salad, roasted bass with curried mussels and spicy tuna tartare with avocado and wonton crisps – these Fit Food dishes are highlighted on the Dubai restaurant’s menu by a little running man.

‘Dubai is like a mini Vegas’
Serving these sorts of dishes is a risk. Do people want such healthy food when treating themselves? “I never want to replace the pleasure of eating out,” the chef explains. But he also knows that he must continue to innovate if he wants to keep up with the rapid pace of change taking place within the UAE’s restaurant scene. “It’s very cosmopolitan. The young chefs at the cutting-edge of cooking are all coming to Dubai to set up shop,” he says. “Dubai is like a mini Vegas, every top chef in the world wants to have a restaurant here.”

Celebrate UAE Mother’s Day at Bread Street Kitchen Dubai at Atlantis, The Palm.

Story for Arts & Life by Afshan Ahmed.

Courtesy Bread Street Kitchen
Bread Street Kitchen & Bar Dubai offers healthy options alongside its decadent beef burgers and lamb chops. Courtesy Bread Street Kitchen
Nevertheless, this is not the food for which Ramsay is be

st-known. It is all a far cry from the indulgent, fine-dining dishes that defined Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in London, the chef’s first restaurant (he now has 38 worldwide), which has held three Michelin stars since 2001. What prompted this change of direction?

“It started about 10 years ago when I hit 40,” says Ramsay, who has four children with his wife Tana. “All of a sudden, your life is consumed, you’re saying ‘yes’ to everybody, and there’s no time for yourself. That’s when I started putting weight on, getting cranky and feeling lethargic.”

He began running and competing in triathlons. The healthier food – the fuel he needed to perform – soon followed. “This book gives people an insight into how I have conducted my life over the past three or four years, in order to maintain that level of fitness,” Ramsay explains. “It’s advice from a chef based on what I cook and eat at home, using the ingredients stocked in my fridge.

“My little secret is to make sure I can still cook a sumptuous, rich dish with lots of calories but only take a mouthful, as opposed to eating the whole dish. That’s how I get the best of both worlds.”

‘Everyone should have goals in life’

The chef’s diet is not the only thing that has changed. That notorious temper of his seems to have mellowed, too. He can still turn it on for the cameras, of course – and there are few more entertaining things to watch on television than a good, old-fashioned Ramsay rollicking on his long-­running series, The F Word and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares – but this is no longer how he conducts himself in real life.

“Kitchens are run differently now than they were in the 1990s,” he says. “It’s much less aggressive, which is a sign of the times. I wouldn’t say fear is the essence of perfection.”