Q&A: Rosewood Abu Dhabi executive chef

Rosewood Abu Dhabi executive chef Wolfgang Eberle, who recently moved to UAE from sister hotel Al Faisaliah in Riyadh, reveals the upcoming property’s plans for its signature restaurants

What are the signature dining concepts at Rosewood Abu Dhabi?
The Catalan restaurant is our Spanish fine dining. The set is a family Catalan home in the 19th Century. It’s a light, modern approach to Catalan cuisine which is cooked in the area around Barcelona up to the Basque. The chef comes from this region.

The second restaurant is an Indian restaurant, which is 60% traditional Indian cuisine, and 40% will be a bit more of a modern approach using western ingredients, for example sea bass and other seafood, combined with Indian spices.

We have an indoor and outdoor Lebanese restaurant. It has a beautiful view of Abu Dhabi. It will be a stunning place at night. We are trying to serve it a little bit more modern, [using] glass, stainless steel, but the food is 100% traditional Lebanese.

I spent four days in Beirut to look at the current trends and cooking methods they are using over there. You have to do this in order to be successful. We have to put in a big effort in order to be able to cook traditional Lebanese cuisine. Most of the restaurants in the UAE could do better. We’re trying to push the level up.

We have an Italian…La Cava. We have a beautiful wine cellar, with 10,000 bottles of wine from all over the world. There’s a cognac room; a cigar room. It will be fantastic for culinary events and tastings.

What stage of recruitment are you currently at?
I have started the recruitment process for Catalan chefs, we have all the chef de cuisines, the exec pastry chef, the exec sous chef – now I’m looking for the middle management and the line staff. It’s important for me that I have a kitchen team that comes from all parts of the world, in order to give you the best. I can only be as good as my kitchen staff.

What are the main qualities a chef needs during pre-opening?
[You need] good organisational skills, you have to be creative. You have to be able to prepare your team – do a lot of training.  About 10-15% of my daily routine is dedicated to staff training and staff issues.

What makes a successful hotel restaurant concept?
Most important is value for money, a great service, consistency in your product, a good location, easy accessible parking and friendly attentive staff.

What are your favourite cooking techniques?
Sous vide and temperature cooking; it’s my preferred way of cooking. The product is simply beautiful. It’s slow cooked, it’s braised. It’s a fantastic cooking technique.

On the ingredients, as an executive chef you still need to surprise customers. You show them new ingredients, new textures and if some of them are successful in delighting the clientele, we have success.

What are the main issues affecting THE industry?
Increasing food prices, a lot of places are still not serving value for money, and that affects the industry. There are too many F&B outlets, too many new outlets, a lot of them close at the end of the year. They need to be more particular in how they open their restaurants.

What’s your opinion on the standard of the F&B industry?
It came very late, but they came a very long way in a very short time. In Europe it took far longer to come to a level, for example, that we have in the UAE at the moment.

There’s a great opportunity for me in Abu Dhabi. I want to show off what we can do. It’s a very open-minded company, a very open-minded place. You sometimes are restricted in Europe or north America. The opportunities are here and as a hotel and F&B product we have a great opportunity.