BRIDGING THE GAP
Chef Reif Othman hopes Nomani will change what you know about dining in Sharjah.
By Peter Drennan
“I have eight chefs in me,” says Reif Othman, chef and restaurateur, when we meet at his flagship eatery Reif Kushiyaki in Dar Wasl Mall in Dubai. As he jogs through a potted history of his impressive CV, while his kitchen team plate dishes at the pass behind, I’m surprised it is only eight. It would take one man harnessing the power of many to have delivered so much so quickly. Othman is just 44, yet he led some of the most successful kitchens in Dubai before launching restaurants of his own.
We meet on a hot Friday afternoon to discuss Sharjah, not Dubai. Amid a raft of launches in three years—four complete, two imminent—Othman has opened a restaurant in Sharjah’s historic heart that he hopes will change what you know about eating in the city. Nomani, at the glorious Chedi Al Bait hotel in Sharjah, is an upscale eatery that fuses the Japanese dishes he is noted for with punchier Korean flavours. Korean food, he says, will be the next big thing in the UAE.
For Othman, cooking started organically. As a child he would help his mother at her busy café in a Singapore foodhall, where she served Malay dishes to hungry shoppers. More interested than his older sister, his mother would take him on Sundays to the market to source ingredients, before preparing the day’s dishes together, up to 40 of them. “I was so impressed that she could turn these raw items into beautiful dishes. This was something else,” he says. His understanding of the primacy of produce started there.
Opening image: Mushroom donabe is hearty and earthy. A medley of mushrooms—shiitake, shimeji, button and oyster—is topped with a savoury seaweed butter and served over Japanese rice. Chef Reitman, above and the emblematic Korean dish, Bibimbap.
Bibimbap, a rice bowl topped with meat and vegetables, and perhaps the most emblematic of Korean dishes, is served with wagyu rib-eye (marinated, then barbecued), Japanese rice, oyster mushrooms, carrots, daikon and kimchi. Hearty, it offers an explosion of rich flavours.
Determined not to be confined to Malay cuisine, his first part-time job was at an Italian restaurant, where he spent two years learning to make pizza. He honed his craft in the kitchen of two of Singapore’s most celebrated chefs. Violet Oon offered an early lesson in the art of fusion, her Peranakan cuisine deftly blending Malay and Chinese flavours. The fusion was more ambitious still under chef David Mollicone at Raffles Grill where he combined his passions for French and Japanese food. “In 2000, nobody was doing this. He changed the dimension. With David I strengthened my technique,” Othman says.
After travelling, he took a post at the premium Al Mahara restaurant in the Burj Al Arab hotel where he stayed for a year. But it was returning to Dubai in 2009 to lead the wildly popular Zuma that made his name. Regional executive chef there for six years, the restaurant climbed into The World’s Best Restaurants ranking sponsored by S.Pellegrino and Acqua Panna, and stayed for four years.
But the passion to strike out on his own had always been there.
When he launched Reif Kushiyaki in 2019, Othman says, Dubai restaurants were polarised at the top and bottom of the market—fashionable and expensive, or simple and cheap. His goal was to open a good quality, affordable, produce-led eatery, the kind of place he and his young family might go to three or four times a week. Signature dishes such as the wagyu katsu sando—a grade-seven wagyu fillet coated in charcoal panko breadcrumbs and deep-fried, topped with a wagyu sirloin, tonkotsu sauce and a touch of Dijon mustard—quickly gained him a loyal following. Clients, he says, do come three or four times a week.
Next came a branch in Time Out Market Dubai (April 2021), then Reif Kushiyaki Cairo (December 2021), and in February Nomani in Sharjah. He will soon launch a Reif Kushiyaki in Riyadh and, in September, a Korean barbecue—Hoe Lee Kow—at the Hotel Indigo in Downtown Dubai.
The menu at Nomani brings together Japanese and Korean cooking, sometimes in the same dish. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the kimchi udon, top, with silky onsen egg. Clockwise from top left: Reif Fried Wings; Shrimp & Chicken Mandu; Crispy Baby Squid; Salted Edamame.
Nomani occupies the former home of the Al Mahmoud family in what is now The Chedi Al Bait hotel, a cluster of historic houses in Sharjah’s heritage district, across from the corniche and tucked amid the souks and art spaces that have come to define it.
Three intimate dining rooms surround a shaded courtyard. The pared-back palette—spartan walls and neutral fabrics in earth tones—is punctuated by jolting splashes of colour, like the crimson-red napkins on which sit humble wooden chopsticks. Decorative details mirror the Asian menu. On the wall of the narrowest space, at head-height above a row of tables, is a wooden art piece that resembles the oars of simple fishing boats. In the private booths that occupy another are contemporary geisha prints that Othman commissioned. In the third, a wall of wooden drawers was inspired by Korean letterboxes.
On the menu, Othman’s established Japanese dishes vie with new Korean ones, in some cases merging in the same dish—take the kimchi udon with silky onsen egg. Nomani means “in between” in Japanese and the menu celebrates that. His signature wagyu sando—a snack food common at train stations in Japan—appears here, but is given a Korean twist. The fillet and sirloin steaks are replaced by wagyu rib-eye (or galbi) and dressed with a bulgogi duck sauce and punchy kimchi mayo.
Bibimbap, a rice bowl topped with meat and vegetables, and perhaps the most emblematic of Korean dishes, is served with wagyu rib-eye (marinated, then barbecued), Japanese rice, oyster mushrooms, carrots, daikon and kimchi. Hearty, it offers an explosion of rich flavours. Chicken and shrimp mandu—a Korean dumpling typically prepared by families as part of Lunar New Year festivities, where they are thought to bring good luck for the coming year—are delicate and juicy with the warmth of chilli and ginger soy and topped with garlic chips and spring onions. Salmon tataki is zesty and sweet; fine slices of raw salmon are dressed in mustard miso and lemon soy and topped with crispy nori and shiso leaf. Mushroom donabe—shiitake, shimeji, button and oyster mushrooms topped with a savoury seaweed butter and served over Japanese rice in a solid earthenware bowl—is hearty and comforting. Also on the menu is a range of nigiri sushi, prime cuts of salmon, otoro, tuna and seared wagyu which is topped with Hadid caviar and a truffle mayo.
Mocktails offer another splash of colour. The grilled plum mojito—Korean plum syrup, grilled plum and yuzu juice—is the colour of the setting sun. The citron yakult—yakult blended with passionfruit puree—is a vivid yellow.
Sharjah has never been a destination for fine dining. The city’s diners have long accepted that upscale eateries require a drive to Dubai, 30 minutes away. “They forget Sharjah, because they are used to it. It’s a culture, we need to educate them. Sharjah is an untapped market.” It takes just one to turn the tide, and Othman hopes Nomani is it.
Nomani is open daily from midday to midnight.
Photographs courtesy of Nomani
