Carlos Frunze doesn’t want to serve avocados.
He doesn’t have anything against them but, after two seasons of prioritising local produce at Teible, he’s now going all in on his sustainability mission – and that means no more avo toast.
“In Dubai, the first thing people think of when it comes to breakfast is sourdough and avocado,” he laughs. “We’re a seasonal, local restaurant. I cannot put avocados on our menu anymore and pretend, because I know it’s not from Dubai. I know it comes from Chile, Mexico, Peru, sometimes from Uganda. And I’m tired of doing it. It’s wrong.”
Currently closed for a refurbishment designed to make the restaurant space itself more sustainable, Frunze’s kitchen will reopen this month for a third season, and this time, everything that can be local, will be.
With breakfast off the roster, the brigade will focus on lunch and dinner, and Frunze is excited about the two menus shortly to be unveiled – a bistronomy offering featuring 85 to 90 percent local ingredients, and a seasonal tasting menu that will reach 95 percent locality.
“Ten years ago, I don’t think this was possible,” Frunze explains. “Around seven years ago it kind of became possible, but we’d still have to cheat a lot. Since then, though, the government here has invested so much to increase local production.
“I think COVID also taught everyone that we cannot be focused on buying stuff from outside. When everything was closed down, everyone was fearful of what was going to happen with the food supply chain, and how we were going to survive. I have huge respect for the rulers of this country who were like, ‘You know what, we’re not going to wait’.
“That year, we opened farms, farms, farms… There was so much investment. Now, supplies are coming to us. Amazing supplies.”
For Frunze, making use of that new bounty isn’t just a privilege for a chef. It’s a duty. “Locality is not supposed to be a trend,” he says, firmly. “Chefs like me who come from out of the country and make Dubai our home need to appreciate, support and respect locality. I know not everyone will take the approach I do in Teible but they don’t have to. Just don’t buy tomatoes from Holland when the tomato grows in Al Ain and it’s ten times better.
“We have beautiful ingredients, we have beautiful farmers. I recently met a fifth-generation farmer in this country, who does only birds – geese, chickens, quails, guinea fowls, partridges. He brought them all the way from the UK and introduced them here.”
For Frunze, who has been in the kitchen daily, “playing” with the new menu during Teible’s refurbishment, cutting kitchen waste is the key driver in his creative process. Finding local ingredients is one thing, he says, ensuring every bit of those ingredients is used to best effect is another.
“Look at a cucumber, and gherkins or pickles. Imagine, from fresh cucumbers, those have become sour, salty and sweet. I see that and I know I can do a lot of things with vegetables. I can do a lot of things with beef. I can do a lot of things with chicken. I can do a lot of things with eggs. I can do a lot of things with so many ingredients to make tasty food.”
Even soy sauce, he says, has been given his twist to ensure he can produce it, himself, using kitchen waste.
“I couldn’t live without soy sauce, and I need to put soy sauce somewhere, so that was a huge challenge for me because to create soy sauce with locality means without soya beans. But I found a way to make bread soya, using the old stale sourdough bread,” he grins. “So yeah, of course, you face these challenges, but then you think outside of the box, That’s where the fermentation comes in…”
Heavily influenced by his third culture upbringing, Frunze’s experimental approach draws on his experiences as a Mexican/Russian kid raised in the Middle East and the US, classically trained in French gastronomy and heavily influenced by Asian traditions. With no rules to follow when it comes to flavours, he describes his approach as “renegade”. And while the new menu is still being tweaked, Frunze says he’s looking forward to putting local fish under the spotlight in a new way this season – especially as it is so often overlooked by restaurants, chefs and diners alike.
“I’m really excited, to be honest, to show diners what we have here. I mean, Teible isn’t just a restaurant. Yes, we need to make money, but I want it to be more of an educational restaurant to showcase everything we have here in in Dubai. And we have so many different fish.
“Often here, salmon comes from Norway. But there is a local guy who opened a fish farm and he ranched it here and it tastes really beautiful. I mean it’s amazing, honestly. Then you have a guy who decides to grow oysters in the middle of the ocean. Then you have the wild catch itself, and the beautiful shellfish of the Arabian Gulf – cockles, whelks, conch, clams. It’s an amazing season right now for fish.
“And what I hope is that people try my food and then they leave and the next time they shop, they go to the fish market to buy local and support the fishermen. Because if even a hundred people do that, we will show there is a market and popular demand and then we will have it in supermarkets, instead of just the fish market. So I feel it’s important to educate people. That’s the whole point of it really.”