Resturants in Doha, Qatar

The 3rd article describing in more details part of our experience in Qatar during a Fulbright visit for 6 months.

This is one of the harder articles to write although one of the most important ones for those planning to visit Qatar. I am not an expert on restaurants, I am just merely giving our family's experience. If I sound like I am advertising for a restaurant, I am not, we must have just really liked it. To be frank, food is probably the most we enjoyed in Qatar.

Qatar offers a very wide variety of food choices with a wide range of cost. The first restaurant I visited in Doha was Turkey Central on Al Mirqab street, few hours after arriving in Doha. It was not very fancy looking, but I was hungry enough and not that sure about future meals, since I did not have a car at that time. The menu was mostly grilled meats and a mix of middle-eastern salads. My host, Mohammed Alsayed, an engineer at Qatar University proposed a mix of chicken and beef Kabobs and a set of mixed salads including Taboli, Hummus, green salads, yogurt salad and eggplant. The prices were very reasonable less than $6 per person. The aroma of the food as it was being delivered was amazingly delicious. The food itself looked and tasted great. This simple, low cost restaurant became our favorite restaurant during our Fulbright visit to Qatar. We especially enjoyed their chicken kofta sandwiches which consisted of chicken kofta rolled in a pita bread with tomato sauce. Both these were served hot and sizzling, and were extremely appetizing with their savory flavor. There were multiple restaurants that have a much better atmosphere, service and a similar menu, but somehow Turkey central remained the favorite when it comes to taste. So we learned to just order for take away. Across the street was another restaurant, Al Bukhari, we visited once. They are very famous for lintel soup and it is worth the try.

Al-Majlis Al-Arabi

One of the restaurants offering a similar menu, but in a much more elegant ambiance is Almajlis Al-Arabi. It has at least 2 branches, but the one we visited several times was within a very short distance from the landmark Mall, an upscale mall in Doha. The problem was always finding a parking space. Doha has grown so much in a very short time and parking has become a very difficult problem in the whole city, but especially the Malls. After few visits to all these restaurants, we just got a little tired of the same grilled kabob theme. At the recommendation of another Fulbright scholar we decide to give a chance to an Indian restaurant called Caravan.

Caravan restaurant is on a plaza off of Salwa Road. The plaza has different other restaurants including Pizza Hut, Pandarosa and Starbucks. After fighting the parking problem, we venture into the restaurant, the entrance is appealing and an Indian host dressed in western cloth leads us to our table, lights a candle and leads us to the buffet. A large room lined up with between 20 - 30 items of food. The highlight of the buffet, at least for us, is a small whole grilled lamb served on a bed of rice. I tried carving, but did not seem to be that handy with the knives and a server soon came to save me from carving my own fingers. Around the room were other Indian, Thai and even Arabic dishes. Everything looked and tasted just great., but the savory taste of lamb remains etched in our memory. The most popular of the sweets in Doha is Omm-Ali. It seems different countries are fighting on the ownership right of Omm-Ali, but the name supports the Egyptian claim on this delicacy. The buffet was 25 QR per person. I do not believe that this would be less than a $25 buffet in the US.

There are plenty of other smaller restaurants on Salwa road close to the Plaza where Caravan is located. The ones we tried for breakfast were Syrian and Lebanese restaurants selling Falafel, Hummus, Foul (beans), eggplant and other traditional Arabic breakfast delicacies.

Bulhambar Restaurant

The Qatari society is a very closed society. It is very hard to get invited into a Qatari home, but we managed to experience the closest we can get to a Qatari Cuisine in a restaurant on the Corniche overlooking the gulf called Bulhambar. We ventured there without any referrals. It was just a perfect winter afternoon with temperature in the 70's degF. Walking on the Corniche, near the Asian games huge symbol, it is hard to miss that building. It is only few years old, but it is decorated with traditional Qatari rugs and pictures of the old Qatar. This is the first time we have seen workers in a restaurant that were Qataris. The location and authenticity of the environment comes at the price of 100 QR ($35) per person. It is an open buffet. All food has Qatari names that were hard to decipher. The food was very delicious and mostly made up of different types of meat (chicken, lamb, beef, fish) packed within rice and cooked tell extremely tender. The elegantly spiced rice captures all the flavor of the meat. The experience was a great one, but we did not venture there very often.

Although several American restaurant chains such as Pizza Hut, Chilli's, Applebee's, Pandarosa are in Doha, we were not in Qatar long enough to miss the American chain food. Prices in American chains are a bit more expensive than their prices in the US. Starbucks was the only American chain that we have frequented to load up on caffeine. A decent cup of coffee can easily make it to the 25 QR. Famous hotels in Doha including the Sheraton with its unique shape and the Ritz Carlton offer very fancy dining western experiences. I loved the salad bar at the Ritz with the fancy smoked salmon, cocktail shrimp and sushi bar.

It is enough to sum this article by the fact that I have gained 15 pounds in the period I spent in Qatar despite the fact that I was exercising during the same period.

A Summary

When I first talked to my wife about spending time in the Middle East as part of a Fulbright program, Qatar was not the first name that came to our minds. We did not know much about the country. We started looking at our options and researching countries in the region. To our surprise, the name of Qatar was coming once and time again as associated with interesting developments. We started hearing about prestigious US universities opening branches in Qatar, the Asian Games being hosted in Qatar, Qatar aiming to be the Gas Capital of the world and we decided Qatar should be high on our list of choices. Qatar made it as our first choice when I started contacting different universities in the region and the first to respond was the Dean of Engineering in Qatar University at the time, Dr. Nabil Al-Salim. The letter of invitation was very personal and encouraging and I started to feel this would be a place where not only I could make a difference, but I will be welcomed as well.

After the regular proposal writing and screening, I was selected as a Fulbright scholar to the State of Qatar. I made it to Qatar at the beginning of January with a lecturing/research assignment. My plan was to focus on multidisciplinary education and research. My research was to focus on the gas industry being the most important industry in Qatar. I would like to write few thoughts about only those things that invoked extreme feelings in myself and my family. Some of these are listed hereafter,

1. What impressed me the most in Qatar are Qatari women as represented by those I dealt with directly like Dr. Sheikha Al-Misnad and Dr. Sheikha Bint Jabor and those that I did not deal with directly, but whose actions influence the whole country like Her Highness Sheikha Moza. It was a great experience to show my daughter that women in the Arab world are leaders and that modesty and following Islamic traditions does not impede their ability to be effective leaders and innovators. To add to these fine role models, I was happily surprised by the percentage of women choosing engineering as a career in QU. I compared this to the struggle that we have in the US to recruit women into engineering. This is a phenomenon that I hope social scientists in the region will study and it sure is something that Qatar and probably other countries in the Middle East can teach the west.

2. What made me most optimistic are the abundance of opportunities created by the wealth generated from the natural resources in Qatar. Opportunities created by the availability of research dollars for faculty and students seem to be abundant. Programs such as UREP, and NPRP funded by Qatar foundation are new and promising. Companies are sponsoring chair positions as other venues to encourage research and development in Qatar. QU is a melting pot for faculty and staff from many nationalities and educational backgrounds. This makes it in a great position to offer education that is unparalleled in the region. Moreover, if well utilized, these opportunities could create a great culture of research. However, these programs are still new and it will take time for things to fall in place. The lack of graduate school in QU is a big hindrance to establishing a rooted culture in the university and the country. Although QU is mainly a teaching institute, research needs to become an integral part of each faculty’s performance evaluation.

3. The most enjoyable part of my Fulbright experience has been the teaching component. One of the two courses I taught was the automatic control course. As defined in the catalog, the course contents seemed too packed for a one semester course, so it was a challenge to keep the students interested. Balancing a hands-on component with the theoretical component has also been a nice challenge. The students have been respective and enthusiastic. Many have impressed me with their dedication and hard work. The second course, electric circuits, had a different flavor. It is a college requirement and is taught to all majors within the college. The section I taught had mostly chemical and civil engineering students. Electric circuits are usually a tough sell for students from a non electrical engineering major. Motivating the students through examples from everyday life and explaining circuits’ concepts through analogies from other fields such as fluid mechanics seemed to help. As with the first course, students have been interested, enthusiastic and hardworking. I believe that this has been one of the most enriching teaching experiences for me.

4. What surprised me the most was the speed at which things change in Qatar and QU. Most of the changes I have seen were positive, but a process for affecting changes seems more of a choice rather than a must. This was a bit different from what I was used to back in the US where circumventing the process is not usually an option.

5. What disappointed me the most was the accommodation? This seems to be the issue every Fulbright has complained about. I have a long list of issues that would make this article a lot longer than I planned. I have seen the signs of wealth in Qatar in many places, but not in the housing for visiting professors. Bureaucracy is what I have seen the most of when it comes to accommodation.

6. What agitated me the most was driving in Qatar. Although, growing up, I was trained on driving in the busy streets of Cairo; the danger level was always limited in Cairo. Speedy drivers roam the streets of Doha in huge SUVs and cameras and speed tickets do not seem like a big deterrence. My son spent a little time on the internet investigating cars with tickets in Doha. One of the cars he investigated had 7500 QR of traffic tickets in one week. The three Fulbright scholars that visited Doha this year have all had one or more accidents; mine ended up in a broken finger and a run-away driver. This is one of the issues the government of Qatar needs to address.

7. What my family and I wished for was a chance to get to know a Qatari family up close. Although the Qatari colleagues that I have dealt with have been extremely polite and generous, we did not have the chance to visit a Qatari home during our stay in Qatar.

To sum it up, Qatar is not a perfect country, but it sure has the ingredients and momentum to be one of the best countries in the region if not the world. It offers interesting challenges and opportunities. We will miss Doha as we go back to our home in the USA. I will follow up with a series of more detailed articles about our experience in Qatar.

I will continue to write about our experience in Qatar in more details in this blog hoping it will benefit someone as they venture into this area of the world.