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Travel & Food

Inked, Your Platform To Get Inspired Through Food

Dubai’s creative space, INKED, will take you on a memorable, culinary-led journey.

Offering a choice of various food related services from conceptual dinners to guest-chefs pop-ups, inventive cooking workshops and photo-shoots, INKED is a unique culinary concept. Despite the array of facets, there’s one aim, to create enchanting and notable food-inspired moments. We talk to Kenza and Patrick Jarjour about their goal of establishing something that ultimately encourages creativity, emotion and interaction around something most of us all love and all of us need…

By Roula Allam

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The mezzanine kitchen at Inked

Inked is a creative space with many facets, what links everything together?
What links everything together is our passion and drive to design experiences that create an emotion, that remind you of a past one, and that make you feel something unique. This is what will leave you INKED.

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The main space

You are both firm believers in the power of food to connect people. Why do you think people tend to communicate better when food is involved?
Because besides being a vital function, food is a source of pleasure. When people can share a moment of pleasure, communication flows and the connection becomes more intimate.

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Kenza and Patrick Jarjour

Can you tell us about any interesting special guest chef appearances or creative cooking workshops that are scheduled to take place in the next few months?
We have something very special happening in March during Art Week, but unfortunately we can’t announce it right now. Stay tuned!

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Tell us about some of the most memorable concept dinners you’ve organised.
We had a series of themed dinners (public and private) since we last opened in September 2016. Some of the most memorable were our ‘No Waste Dinner,’ where we had to create a menu and set up using a limited number of ingredients in order to demonstrate that we can use all parts of a whole, without wasting anything. This shows that by trying and being creative we can really avoid waste, which is a topic that is very important to us. For ‘This is Not a Restaurant’ pop-up dinners, guests were taken out of their comfort zones, they didn’t know what to expect and were left to create their own experiences. The most pleasurable part was to see how guests who began as strangers had the opportunity to interact with each other and get to know each other by the end of the dinner, which is very rare in today’s society.

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The Chocolate Room at Inked

Why did you choose to have your creative platform on Al Alserkal Avenue?
Aside from Alserkal Avenue’s keen aesthetics, which we fully see eye to eye with, we chose Alserkal Avenue as the compass for our concept because we fundamentally share the same values. Alserkal Avenue has a strong communal drive that is evident in its spacial design as well as its chosen tenants. There is a communicative feel between the organisations residing at Alserkal and this is highly important to us given that our own concept is based on the collaboration and interaction between different creative minds. Equally important to our project and to us is a strong sense of authenticity, which we immediately recognised in all the endeavours undertaken by the Alserkal team. Essentially, it is a love of creation and of the arts that brought the Alserkal Avenue team together, and we believe this common value is what makes us a great addition to their family from a food and events perspective, and theirs a great place for us to make a home.

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Kenza is the culinary whiz, while Patrick oversees the projects from conception to execution. How do the different roles complement each other?
To make a project alive you need to create it/conceptualize it and then make it happen. Like any project, it takes both to actualize it. Though Kenza is the creator and Patrick the maker, strength lays in the fact that neither is a right or left brain personality, they are both sides, times 2.