Changing times
Jack Zhang, the restaurant manager at Kiku, Le Meridien Dubai admits that Japanese is very fashionable right now, but believes it’s the traditional offerings that diners want more than anything, especially Kiku’s Japanese clients.

“Most of our Japanese guests want traditional food because they’re away from Japan and miss it,” he says.

“It’s become a fashion for people to eat Japanese food though,” he continues. “Everybody knows that Japanese food is healthy, and that’s the reason it’s booming. Also, people have started to take an interest in Japanese culture, and through that they find the food.”

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Whereas Nobu restaurant sources its food from many different markets, including its fish, Kiku imports 90% of its food from Japan – everything from the soya source to the fish.

“We only serve traditional food,” Zhang explains. “We want to be authentic.” However, when it comes to recruiting Japanese chefs, he says it’s difficult to be truly authentic.

“It’s not easy to get a good chef,” he admits. “We have to go through an agency to find one, then we interview him and do a food tasting. We usually try a couple of chefs and after that take one. It’s not easy to get a good Japanese chef though.

There’s a language barrier: most of the Japanese chefs don’t speak English and we do need it here really for team communication. And then, the really good Japanese chefs, they want to stay in Japan because they have all the ingredients, they can cook good food there.

I’m not saying that there are no good Japanese chefs in the country, but they’re not easy to get.”

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