I couldn’t stop wishing I’d spent more time on my hair and touched up my makeup.
Those were the self-absorbed thoughts I had while spending almost two hours eating four delicious courses in front of a candlelit mirror Sunday night, tucked into a warehouse at the back of the hip arts hub Al Serkal Avenue. Before Inked Dubai’s Tete-A-Tete popup dining event I’d mostly felt dread, worried I’d be drained by small-talk.
But something happened when I sat down in front of that mirror.
I didn’t look at myself all that much, I listened a lot harder to the person I couldn’t see and my dread turned to curiosity – and then calm.
The concept is simple enough: sit in front of a mirror, with a stranger on the other side, then at the sound of a bell shift to a new partner with each course. There were 24 guests, a mix of women and (mostly) trendily bearded men.
I met Karamah as we gathered our mocktail and sat down for a crispy, tasty appetiser of slow-cooked salmon with a pea, ginger, chive and shallot emulsion. The 48-year-old from Jordan is taking a two-year break from teaching art to find her true passion.
I’m on her inspirational WhatsApp list now.
Next up was a crab and avocado, burrata, mango and beetroot coulis (my favourite part of the meal) and Jason, a 30-year-old tech entrepreneur from San Fransciso. I embarrassed myself by trying to serve our shared appetiser with a fork, spoon and one hand but he seemed unbothered. Clearly buoyed by the success of his food delivery app Caviar, Jason has been travelling for about two years (52 countries and counting) and is only in Dubai for a week.
He and a friend were drawn to Tete-A-Tete because “someone we met at a restaurant in Sweden told us about it”, a global citizen comment if I’ve ever heard one.
By the time I moved across from Shalva, a 26-year-old project manager from Georgia, I was much more relaxed. I also realised I wasn’t drained at all because there wasn’t much small talk going on. We enjoyed our very tender cocoa-glazed beef fillet, potato galette and truffle cream and talked about what Shalva called “imaginary priorities”; those things you believe you should do, even if you don’t want to do them at all. Also, he compared arguments over religion to the ones he used to have with friends at the age of seven about Superman versus Batman. Just as silly, because there is no one who can say what’s right. I wanted to tell Shalva I felt he had the best beard in the room, but I felt it would make me seem superficial and I didn’t want him to think I was flirting.
I’m still not sure if I was supposed to pop over the top of each mirror and introduce myself face to face after each changeover but that’s just how I tackled the evening. And I probably shouldn’t have asked Alexi his age (31) right after meeting.
“Wow,” said the Russian, “so soon”.
With a background in art, Alexi works right at Al Serkal Avenue. Organisers had handed out samples of Marcel Proust's The Proust Questionnaire, and Alexi pointed at a random question under the mirror and told me to ask it.
“Okay,” I asked. “What is your most treasured possession?”
He sounded kerfuffled, said he couldn’t answer and then we never went back to it.
It’s hard to find a good Russian restaurant in the UAE, he said, after I had mangled our shared piece of apple tart under the mirror dividing us. He’d like to bring his aging mother to Dubai but she doesn’t speak much English. He hadn’t had much small talk either, it turns out.
When I told him I was thinking about touching up my makeup again, he gently reminded me why that wasn’t important at all.
“The point is that no one is really looking at you,” he said, “apart from yourself”.
The final Tête-à-Tête takes place tonight at 8.30pm. Tickets cost Dh300 per diner from www.inked.ae
Ann Marie McQueen is features editor at The National.