FOOD FROM THE HEART
Founder of hit Muwailih eatery Paper Fig, Nawal Al Nuaimi never intended to run her own restaurant, but launching it changed her life.
By Arva Ahmed
My fork cautiously grazed the ivory edge of the crème anglaise sphere. I had one attempt to replicate the dramatic Instagrammable moment that I had witnessed on a video about Paper Fig’s iconic French Toast. The idea was to delicately hoist the ivory quenelle off the plate, reposition it atop the sugar-stencilled brioche, then jab it for an explosion of creamy sauce down the edges. The perfect plan.
Planning was one of the few transferable skills that Nawal Al Nuaimi, founder of Paper Fig restaurant and dessert shop in Sharjah, inherited from her past life in IT project management. She had no formal culinary experience as she scaled her home baking sideline into a brick-and-mortar restaurant.
The translucent crème anglaise teardrop quivered dangerously as the tines attempted to cradle it off the plate like a sleeping child that must be moved, but not woken. It shivered. And then burst into the plate. I hadn’t even hit record.
Real life happens between takes. The stories I had read of the successful Emirati restaurateur were ones of strength, creativity and achievement —all of which are true. But behind the glossy pages is also an untold story of vulnerability.
Al Nuaimi’s journey to Paper Fig began as child, when she relished her mother’s pastries growing up in Ajman. An accomplished home baker, her mother would bake a different treat almost everyday, feeding Al Nuaimi’s curiosity around matters of the oven. But that’s where the journey stopped abruptly. Al Nuaimi’s mother nudged her out of the kitchen. There would come a day, she said, when Al Nuaimi would have no choice but to cook. Her mother was right, that day arrived. But it arrived out of depression.
“You know, when you are newly married, life changes,” confides the 37-year-old mother of four. Her husband, Ahmed Al Mazrouei, has always been a generous and supportive partner, and he has been instrumental in helping her realise a dream she never knew she had. But the obligations of a home and motherhood had caught her off guard. “Like you think it’s a fairy tale life, but it’s a responsibility.”
As she navigated those choppy transitional years as a new wife and mother, the feeling of being constantly appraised by those around her intensified her personal storm. It eventually “breaks you inside. I was not able to handle some of the issues I had and this is how everything started, by me crying all the time. This is how I found myself in the kitchen, baking. I felt like baking was taking me from what I was feeling and turning me into someone different.”
It was cathartic for Al Nuaimi; as her cakes rose, so did her confidence. The joy of watching her colleagues, neighbours and especially her own children enjoy her creations transformed her. The skills she surreptitiously learned from her mother blossomed into a home baking business that gained such popularity, she and her husband eventually applied for expansion financing to the Khalifa Fund in 2013.
Paper Fig’s celebrated French Toast. Founder Nawal Al Nuaimi set out to make this classic extraordinary.
Al Nuaimi is not in it for the money. The government role she left to pursue baking in 2014 was a lucrative one—Head of Information Security and Deputy Head of Operations. It was a challenging position that kept her up long after she had put the children to bed—until the day she and her husband decided it was time to reprioritise. A week later, Al Nuaimi submitted her resignation and focused on her home bakery instead. Her timing couldn’t have been better—the Khalifa Fund soon approved the plan the couple had submitted a year earlier.
But even best-laid plans don’t foresee everything. Their original estimate for the Khalifa Fund was 700,000 dirhams. Once they started laying the foundation for Paper Fig, the spend ballooned to 1.7 million. But Al Nuaimi is convinced she made the right decision not to hire an outside consultant while planning Paper Fig. She does not see her lack of food and beverage experience as a detriment. Rather, this has become one of her operating principles—90% of her current team does not have any culinary training either. Her past hires have included a lawyer, a painter and a technician. She recruits people who can soar with her ideas, not be stifled by preconceived notions of what will and will not work.
The impossibly fragile crème anglaise sphere is a case in point. It demands the sort of leap of faith that is taken by someone who is completely unfettered and relentless in their creative process, especially since French Toast is omnipresent on breakfast menus around the world. Al Nuaimi herself orders it wherever she travels.
Yet, she was committed to making this classic extraordinary. And it is. Paper Fig’s brioche arrives as pashmina on a plate, every silky forkful enrobing its diner with the warm, lingering scent of caramelised milk. It is the sort of comforting dish that you eat with your eyes closed, and that you will regret ordering anywhere else. The maple syrup, strawberries and whipped cream alongside are superfluous; this is the first time I have been served a French Toast that stands on its own merit. But Al Nuaimi was not satisfied.
Her culinary goal is that food should unleash a sensory storm. She rarely ventures out for dessert because too many plates have failed to inspire her. Her French Toast may have been a bestseller but it fell short in her eyes. As Al Nuaimi scrolled through photos of the dish taken by customers on social media, the brioche stared back at her with underwhelming mediocrity. The plate hungered for an unexpected aesthetic and experiential element that would beckon diners to engage beyond a drab drizzle of maple syrup.
As Al Nuaimi began her hunt for that missing element, she sought inspiration from restaurants worldwide whose innovations had revolutionised the dining experience. It led her to the concept of “spherification”—chemically stabilising a liquid into miniature translucent pearls that a diner might mistake for caviar at first glance, but then be startled with a flavour that is worlds apart from the delicacy it resembles. The crème anglaise served alongside the brioche was a perfect candidate for this technique, but it required an understanding of something that no one had yet attempted in Sharjah. It called for an understanding of molecular gastronomy.
Baking was cathartic for Al Nuaimi; as her cakes rose, so did her confidence. Watching those around her enjoy her creations was transformative. Here, the Date Pudding.
There wasn’t much by way of research online at the time other than a YouTube video that Al Nuaimi watched repeatedly as she ventured outside her comfort zone, experimenting with alginates and calcium droplets to design her crème anglaise sphere. Even after she managed to decode the technique two months later, the process of making each sphere is so laborious that Al Nuaimi feels guilty ordering French Toast for herself. Iterating through failure is a process familiar to Al Nuaimi; she has learned—and continues to learn—on the job. She welcomes the metamorphic process of making mistakes.
One of those mistakes was her chocolate éclair, brought to light during a visit by Her Highness Sheikha Jawaher Bint Mohammed Al Qasimi, wife of His Highness the Ruler of Sharjah. “I see your éclairs need to be improved. Have you visited Paris and seen how they do theirs?” Her Highness had paid an unexpected first-time visit to Paper Fig in 2017 after hearing “about this place that everyone is talking about.” It was during this encounter that Al Nuaimi learned of her great fondness for dessert. Her Highness relished everything she tried at Paper Fig that day. Everything, save the éclairs.
The éclairs were the one exception to Paper Fig’s philosophy of making everything from scratch. The chocolate glaze they had outsourced at the time was a clumsy partner for the choux pastry, unfit for the glossy, graceful ballet that Her Highness had come to expect from their French counterparts.
“I was shaking the whole day even after she left!” Al Nuaimi admits. But Her Highness had complemented her critique with a generous offer. She was willing to support Al Nuaimi in traveling to Paris to research the perfect éclair.
Al Nuaimi and her husband did travel to the epicentre of éclairs two months later, but privately. Visiting the best éclair makers in Paris, they soon realised that the chocolate glaze was only the tip of an iceberg of issues they had to address. Choux is a finicky dough that throws a tantrum at the slightest deviation, from the piping of the batter to the handling of the hollow shell as it emerges from the oven. To achieve the elegance of a true French éclair, Al Nuaimi had to pick apart every detail of the baking process, right down to the baking sheet. Serendipitously, the premium French chocolatiers, Valrhona, approached her soon after the trip with an exclusive imprintable domed shell designed for éclairs. It was the perfect lustrous cap over her upgraded Parisian creation.
Al Nuaimi went on to craft an éclair not just fit for royalty, but for social impact. She was so inspired by Sheikha Jawaher’s support that she imprinted the exquisite Valrhona shell with a heart and pledged to raise 100,000 dirhams for Her Highness’s charity, The Big Heart Foundation. Sheikha Jawaher returned to Paper Fig to launch the initiative herself. And all this just months after the birth of Al Nuaimi’s third child.
Juggling the roles of mother and entrepreneur is perhaps the hardest act of all. “There is no off day.” Her mornings are at Paper Fig when the children are at school, and once they return, she leaves work to spend the afternoon with them. “I refuse to do any work after that, unless it’s by phone or email. And this is what I have stuck to since the day I opened. It’s my kids’ time.”
Al Nuaimi’s ability to step away from Paper Fig is enabled by her husband, an equal partner in the business who, despite his full-time job, steps in when Al Nuaimi leaves. Al Mazrouei handles the administrative and financial side of the restaurant, which gives Al Nuaimi the bandwidth to innovate in the kitchen. “We’re a good team. We understand each other very well from the beginning because both our minds are from IT and this is how we clicked.”
The couple is committed to building a legacy, not an empire. They have no expansion plans despite the restaurant’s success. Paper Fig has put the sleepy streets of Muwailih in Sharjah on the map and made it fertile ground for small businesses like theirs. An eager investor once offered them 10 million dirhams to franchise the operation. Offended, Al Nuaimi flatly refused. “How can you sell your baby?”
Baking and delighting her customers at Paper Fig is an irreplaceable ingredient in Al Nuaimi’s recipe for happiness, one that lay untouched since childhood until she discovered its potency in healing her broken spirit. She is honest about her past challenges with other women in the hope that her story might inspire others who are struggling.
“I always advise people to look at themselves and see what makes them happy.” And when you discover what it is, lean into it, even at the cost of abandoning the path you thought you were destined for. Not only will it bring you joy, but more importantly, it might help you harness the storm within and “turn it into something beautiful.”
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREA SALERNO JÁCOME
