Celeb chef to pioneer healthy in-room dining

British chef and TV favourite Daniel Green is in Dubai promoting his Eat Well, Feel Well campaign in conjunction with Dusit International, for which he’s created a range of low-fat dishes for its bistro-style outlets and in-room dining menus.

But it is in-room dining where Green thinks he can make the biggest impact in the Middle East.

“I wanted to do in-room dining because I don’t believe that anyone’s really pioneered that,” he said.

“You have to have it, but I think it would be nice to bring to you what you could have in a restaurant but you just can’t be bothered to go down for. We can’t take off the beefburger or the club sandwich, but we can offer more.

“Sometimes in-room dining can be smaller portions, which isn’t what we want at all, so I’m offering what you’d want from a nice home-cooked meal, but a little bit on the lighter side.

“Most chefs who have been trained in the kitchen that way do get a little heavy handed with butter and oil,” Green said, “and of course you can make fantastic food that way and I’m not putting that down, but I do believe it doesn’t always need to be the case.

“I feel that a lot of hotels as soon as they touch a healthy concept they go into spa food and calorie counting and I think that just puts people off. It’s just about not putting the added fat, not doing the extra, just doing the food that’s got all the flavour, so not deep frying the crab cakes, just lightly searing them instead.

The Dusit Thani on Sheikh Zayed Road is primarily a business hotel, which attracts a lot of male travellers mid-week, but Green believed that today men are keen to see low-fat options on the menu too.

“Of course men are as conscious of health or weight [as women]. That’s why Atkins was cool for guys because they could go out and have a steak and not have a salad and they didn’t feel they were bringing attention to it.

“If I’m tired and jet-lagged in a room, what would I want if I could have anything? It would probably be a huge bowl of wonton noodle soup to fill the gap. So we can now create that without the carbs, by using more shrimp instead of the wonton. We want to lighten it up, but keep all the flavours."

Green admitted, he has had to take into consideration the workload of the chefs creating in-room meals at late hours on a skeleton staff, but said he has kept his recipes easy-to-create.

“My dishes are very simple because most of my cooking I got into by writing books, not by opening restaurants, and they’ve had to be as simple as possible and easy to follow.

“I sometimes even have to go back to the drawing board and make my dishes more elaborate for hotels. It won’t be hard for chefs to follow these."

The scheme has already been rolled out in with Dusit International in Thailand and the Philippines.