NETTE’s New Purple Ube Menu is Coming for Dubai’s Matcha Obsession
The French-Japanese darling tucked into Al Barari's gardens is trading green matcha for purple yam this summer, and the internet is already turning a shade of violet.
A purple unicorn-driven hue is creeping over Al Barari. NETTE, the French-Japanese café that has spent two years ruling photogenic breakfasts as a Dubai birthright, has announced an ube menu landing on June 22nd, with a teaser so committedly lilac.
NETTE has supplied a primer on its new obsession. For the uninitiated, ube (pronounced oo-beh) is a purple yam with roots so deep in Filipino kitchens the word itself simply means "yam." Botanically it answers to Dioscorea alata, and spiritually it is the most attractive offering in any Manila bakery. The electric colour comes courtesy of anthocyanins, the same antioxidant pigment that lends blueberries their swagger and grants purple cabbage one moment of glamour.
The taste is gentler than the hue would suggest, somewhere in the neighbourhood of vanilla, toasted coconut and roasted nuts. And for anyone already drafting a correction in the replies, it is worth stating plainly that ube is neither taro nor a sweet potato, however often it gets mistaken for both.
What NETTE is offering, in its own gauzy phrasing, is "a softer kind of summer sweetness," all cream and colour, made for the slow, green-fringed mornings that the Al Barari outpost was designed to host. The café is keeping the exact menu under wraps for the moment. What it will show you, in a run of artfully lit close-ups on Instagram, is the gist that includes matcha and ube blended drinks, sugar-cracked ube cookies and -you guessed it- ube cheesecakes.
The choice of venue is its own small comedy: NETTE first opened inside MATCHA Club, the boutique padel-and-yoga sanctuary in Al Quoz where the house colour is, with grim inevitability, green. Conceived by the team behind the Parisian bistro Cassette, it earned a devoted following on miso Benedicts, yuzu-flecked everything, and a clientele that arrives in activewear. Its second home, the Al Barari branch tucked inside Seventh Heaven, pushed the serenity further still, with trees, streams and now the lilac colour.
