This 40-Year-Old Kebab House in Dubai Has an Unofficial Wall of Fame

In a city built on reinvention, Dubai's Al Ustad Special Kebab has been perfecting the old since 1978. The chairs are solid wood, the receipts still tapped out on a calculator, and the yogurt kebab tastes of old Persia: tangy, smoky, and faintly sweet with charcoal. Abbas Ansari, one of three brothers running Al Ustad Special Kebab, tells SceneNowUAE how it all began: “My father didn’t plan any of this. He was a trader with Iran, and when the war stopped the routes, he just put a small desk at the front, laid twenty or thirty notes from his exchange business on the table, and started cooking.” That was 1978. The men of Bastakiya—officially known as Al Fahidi Historical Neighbourhood in Dubai and originally built by Persian merchants—who once dropped by for gossip, began showing up for lunch instead. They called him Madal, “Let’s go eat at Madal’s.”
The restaurant has been on the same patch of land since, though the neighbourhood around long traded its dunes for towers. “Behind the restaurant it was all sand,” Ansari recalls. “No partitions on the road. You could barely drive a car there.” Al Ustad’s first menu was a short one: yogurt mutton kebab, a few gravies from Ansari’s mother’s kitchen. Today, everything from the staple Kabab Khas (yogurt-marinated chicken or mutton over rice) and Joojeh (saffron-marinated chicken) to Khorak Bahraini (meats with a dry-lemon marinade) and Kabab Koubideh (minced meat skewers), remains within a narrow orbit of grilled meats and comforting starch.
Here, meals begin with vegetables and mint-yogurt on the house, setting a cool counterpoint before the fire. Sides are few: soft flatbread, buttered saffron rice, fresh onions, tomato, and the occasional soup or hummus. The portions are generous, the pricing modest by Dubai standards. The guiding rule: do less, much better.  Every wall is a gallery: Shah Rukh Khan, Jackie Chan next to Salman Khan, all nestled between Polaroids of royal dinners and backstage candid shots. You can also find clocks from multiple time zones, currency under glass. The most prized image hangs near a leather satchel: His Highness Sheikh Hamdan’s picture when he visited Ustad. 
The clientele spans decades. One customer, once a student, now travels with Ansari’s brother on family holidays. “Customers aren’t just customers,” Ansari said. “They’re like our cousins. We meet them in malls, we have coffee, we talk about their kids.” 
Ansari described how the family hopes to carry the restaurant’s legacy forward. His son, 16, wants in, but Ansari has sent him to Toronto “to learn the value of life.” When he himself joined after university, his father made him start with the dishwashers. “He wanted me to feel the heat of the grill,” he said.
These days, the restaurant runs more like a small institution than a family diner with a full team in motion: servers who’ve stayed for decades, and younger hires managing the flow of delivery orders. Al Ustad has also joined the digital age, partnering with major online delivery platforms to reach customers across Dubai.  For Ansari, what keeps the place alive is familiarity. “You don’t come just to fill your stomach,” he said. “You also come for memory.”