Alain Ducasse Is Going Alcohol-Free in Qatar

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/dining/alain-ducasse-is-going-alcohol-free-in-qatar.html

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DOHA, Qatar — Can a great French restaurant make it in a place it cannot serve wine?

Put another way, can a great French restaurant make it with a signature dish that involves the hindquarters of a camel?

Those are among the questions facing Alain Ducasse, the celebrated chef formerly of France who now describes himself as Monégasque, a citizen of the tax refuge of Monaco. With some 25 restaurants around the world, 3 with 3 Michelin stars each, Mr. Ducasse has taken on the challenge of an alcohol-free establishment with mixed but undeniably interesting results.

The Idam restaurant opened in November, serving only dinner, five nights a week. (There are plans to add lunch in October.) While the price tag is not terribly high by Qatari standards (725 riyals a person, or about $200 for a seven-course tasting menu), getting a reservation is easy, with less than a third of the restaurant’s 60 seats occupied one evening at the end of last month.

Idam was a long time in the making. Its chef, Romain Meder, along with Christian Julliard, executive chef for Mr. Ducasse’s organization, spent two years traveling the Mediterranean (particularly the Islamic parts) looking for inspiration to create a menu ethnographically appropriate yet quintessentially French.

“We had to look for spices and study them, because traditionally we don’t cook with spices in France,” Mr. Meder said.

The chef-ethnographers spent a lot of time in juice bars, trying to work up alternatives to alcoholic beverages, and the Ducasse firm’s sommeliers and chefs in Paris are trying to develop new “mocktails” interesting enough to make up for the lack of alcohol. Chilled red chile mango and iced coffee with crushed almond paste are both much better than they sound.

Alcohol is allowed in Qatar only in hotels for foreigners; enforcement of that stricture in 2011 led the celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay to shut down his restaurant, the Maze, saying he would much rather see a ban on smoking than one on alcohol.

Smoking in fine restaurants, and nearly anywhere else, is the norm in the Middle East, but no such luck for Idam, which is on the top level of Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art. Smoking is banned out of respect for cultural sensitivities.

But the setting is stunning for this restaurant, which aspires to be rooted in place and to transcend it. The museum, which opened in 2008, was designed by I. M. Pei, and the restaurant sits under its soaring dome, on what seems to be a massive stone plinth with a vertiginous atrium on two sides, plunging more than 100 feet to the ground floor.

The interior design is by Philippe Starck, who used primarily black and white; black carpets, for instance, decorated with white Arabic inscriptions on the theme of hospitality.

Mr. Julliard said he was initially skeptical about a wine-free restaurant, but he has been won over. “Now after two years of working without wine,” he said, “it’s another vision: more light, you concentrate on the food and not the wine.”

So the chefs devised a serving regimen that keeps things coming to the table at a brisk tempo — even the intermezzos seem to have intermezzos — from the choice of nine kinds of bread (not counting the free chickpea crispbread); to the tea caddy with 16 varieties of tea and 3 pots of various Yemeni honeys; and finally, the intimidating riches of the dessert trolley, which is just the free warm-up to the main dessert course, which itself is followed by a coda of bonbons and truffles. There are a staggering 30 sweet things on offer, in all.

“It forced us to think differently,” Mr. Meder said. “Always have something happening on the table.” He has been pleasantly surprised that many patrons said they did not mind the lack of alcohol.

Camel is the only red-meat entree on the extensive menu, and preparing it for cooking takes six days. To soften the strong taste, it is braised, rather than boiled or roasted, as indigenous cooks do, then served with black truffles and foie gras.

“The chef refused to import beef from abroad,” said the restaurant’s manager, Mehdi Ouidane, “because it was too easy.” Cows are not native to desert countries; the camel, he said, is free range, and like most of Idam’s ingredients, sourced locally — though in the case of most fruit and vegetables, that means from hydroponic farms.

As locally famous as his camel has become, Mr. Meder admits it could be better. “If only we could cook with a little red wine,” he said. “I can just imagine it with red wine, it would have more ... more character.”