Dubai Chef Salam Daqqaq Brings Her Mother’s Palestinian Recipes to Lif

There is a story they tell about Maryam, the kind of story that blurs the line between memory and myth. Neighbours in her Palestinian village would come to her door and ask for a glass of water. She would laugh, "Why? It's the same water." But they would insist, "No, the flavour in your house is different." Even the water, they believed, carried the essence of her presence. This is the inheritance of Mariam's daughter, Salam Daqqaq—a formidable belief that a space can be imbued with a soul, and that the act of feeding someone is a sacred geometry of care. Years later, in the gleaming, transient heart of Dubai, Salam's restaurant in honour of her mother, Bait Maryam, operates on this same principle. To walk in is to feel, immediately, that you have stepped into a different atmospheric pressure. The air is thick with the perfume of toasted cumin and caramelising onions, an aroma that feels like a timeline, connecting a village past to a metropolitan present. Salam is at the centre of this, a woman who decided at fifty-three that her life’s purpose had been waiting for her all along, as a practice. Before the Michelin Bib Gourmands and the title of Best Female Chef in the Middle East and North Africa, she was a teacher, a social worker, a mother living across continents, a collector of experiences her children fondly called "Ibn Battuta." But always, she was her mother’s daughter. "Food was never just food for me," she says, "It was the language of care in my family." The grammar of that language was written in her mother’s kitchen. It was a kitchen that was always alive, where leftovers were alchemised into new feasts so no one would grow bored, and where the night’s batch of cookies was made in a quantity that only made sense later, at Maryam’s funeral, when the streets filled with strangers whose lives she had sweetened one plate at a time.
This is the spirit Salam has bottled at Bait Maryam. Her mother’s old sewing machine—a tool of creation and devotion—sits as a quiet monument. Her curtains frame the windows. A deep kibbeh bowl, worn smooth by the press of her hands, holds a place of honour. The space feels assembled by memory, not a designer. In the kitchen, the same philosophy governs. This is a place where parsley is cut by a dedicated hand, and where French fries are born from whole potatoes, because Salam refuses the convenience of frozen. When her daughter, Nada, pressed her in the early days to systemise the recipes, Salam’s measurements were things like "a little" or "measure with your heart." It took two years to translate the instinct of a lifetime into a cookbook.
This is fidelity. "The soul of the dish is everything," she explains. "The soul is the memory, the love, the intention. We hold that with both hands. The presentation, the flow of service—that is how we allow that soul to breathe in a modern city." The result is food that feels both foundational and startlingly immediate. The Fatet Mousakhan, a layered masterpiece of bread, yoghurt, and chicken, is a direct translation of her mother’s ingenuity, a dish that feels like a long, comforting conversation. The team, many of whom have been with her since the beginning, call her "Mama." They turn down higher salaries elsewhere because, as they tell her, this is the first time they have felt part of a family. She is aware of the energy her staff brings to their work. She has been known to send someone to rest if their spirit seems heavy, believing that the food requires not just hands, but heart.
When the Michelin guide first contacted them, Salam’s first thought, upon her daughter sharing the news, was to ask if she was pregnant. The recognition that followed—a Bib Gourmand and a unique Service award created, it seemed, just for her—felt like a validation of a universal truth she had always known. "It validated that the food of our mothers and grandmothers could stand on the world stage," she says.
As Bait Maryam grows, with a new branch in Sharjah and the more refined Sufret Maryam, the expansion feels organic, a family growing rather than a corporation scaling. The mission remains singular: to set a table where everyone has a seat.