I walk into Al Ekram and am greeted with a gigantic smile.

Umesh Prabhu, the restaurant manager, recognizes me immediately and has the waiter bring out a cup of sweet, milky tea. As the kitchen doors swing open, I can hear the sizzling of oil, and delicately spiced smells waft to my appreciative nostrils. He takes me to the kitchen and I watch the chefs’ hands dance across their workspaces. The chef at the tandoor, Umesh tells me, is a “master in bread.” He flattens the silken dough and sticks it to the wall of the roughly spherical oven, hollowed out from a cubical block with a fire burning at the bottom to heat its walls. Umesh shows me the paratha, crackling in butter, and offers me one.

Photo by Dorothy Lam/The Gazelle

I head upstairs to meet Sameer, the director. Sameer was born, raised and educated in Abu Dhabi but is ethnically Indian and returned there for college. He renovated and opened Al Ekram two and a half years ago.

Sameer is quiet, thoughtful, with good but sometimes stilted English. His eyes gleam like a true businessman’s as he talks about the possibility of a franchise, and his new restaurants opening in Bangalore, India and Berlin, Germany. As soon as we begin talking about the planned NYU Abu Dhabi campus on Saadiyat Island, he offers to cater for us, asking me for the email of someone he can talk to. This is a man for whom every opportunity is a business opportunity.

The restaurant is lively but not overwhelmingly so. Noise washes over me, a harmonious background to our conversation. Al Ekram is an Arabic name, which Sameer struggles a little to translate, but he finally settles on “a mixture of hospitality and service with a nod to the idea of a gift.” And he sees good service as a gift, later going on to explain that his prime motivation for opening a restaurant was frustration with his own dining experiences.

Sameer plies me with special tea, which turns out to be a delicious sweet masala concoction. When the tea is brought out, he sips it first and declares it too hot to drink, summoning the waiter back to cool it down. When it is returned at the perfect temperature, we resume our conversation.

His marketing heritage begins to show as we talk about my friends in London, and he tells me about a friend’s restaurant there, saying my friends must try it. This is the first glimpse I get of something that he believes in very deeply — the power of word-of-mouth advertising. That’s why, I realize, I have been welcomed to the restaurant with such open arms. In today’s cutthroat market, the best way to attract customers is almost certainly through personal recommendation. Friends are not only an integral part of life, but facilitators of businesses’ success. This is why politeness and upkeep mean so much to him: these qualities are a point of difference from the local coffee shops, where price comes before ambience and service.

Businesses in the food industry can take two to three years to establish themselves, especially in cases like this in which advertising comes not from expensive ad campaigns and infiltration of television and social media but from genuinely good experiences being voluntarily passed on. Sameer remarks that no one ever reads ads in the paper or in magazines and compares their business to Starbucks: whenever Starbucks opens a new branch, “everyone just goes there straight away.” For Al Ekram, a new restaurant, it took time.

“It’s like [trying to teach] a baby [to walk],” Sameer said — they fall, you help them up, and then they learn to run on their own.

Umesh makes his way over and sits down, and I find out that before taking the position at Al Ekram, he spent fourteen years managing a restaurant in a branch of the Sheraton hotel. He tells me about a missed opportunity to work in the Sheraton in Beijing with a little sadness, but no remorse. There’s no room for that in this busy restaurant.

Umesh has had a hard time seeing his family. During his stint at the Sheraton, his family was in India, and now they live in Bahrain while he works here. As he says with a shrug, “Once you get married, you are dedicated.” Astonishingly, he actually considers himself fortunate, telling me,“I’m lucky that I had the chance to see my family every three months.” He cites other families he knows that can afford to see each other only once every two years. “Now I am used to this place and this situation,” he tells me with a stoicism that my Western paradigm struggles to comprehend.

I am fascinated by his family as he explains that his sisters were completely his responsibility before he got married. “This is Indian culture,” he says with the pragmatism that I have come to expect. “It’s my duty to help them, you know?” I tell him about the very different matriarchal roles in New Zealand and he doesn’t look surprised. No doubt living in Abu Dhabi has acclimatized him to Western culture in a way that his life in India did not.

I ask Sameer what his favourite type of food is; he is a big fan of Thai food, as well as Indian and Chinese. We talk about the supposed authenticity of food, which is fascinating to me given the common Western obsession with tracking down truly authentic food. What we authenticity-hunters don’t realize, Sameer said, is that real Chinese food encompasses dishes that are not as appetizing as we would like to think. Umesh agrees but believes that Indian food can withstand a change in geographical location without losing its authenticity.

Umesh has a very simple hope for the future: “My ambition is to get out of this country … to go back and be with my family.”

As the two of them wave me out of the restaurant, Sameer making me promise to bring all my friends back, I consider our conversation. On a mission to learn about the restaurant of Al Ekram, I serendipitously discovered the people of Al Ekram instead. People are never what they seem, and as someone living in a country with not only incredibly high economic inequality but also extreme rates of migration, I would do well to remember that I am not the only one in this city far from home.