Em Sherif Sea Café Abu Dhabi

A chef keeps the line moving

Yasmina Hayek holds Lebanese memory in service as Chef at Em Sherif Sea Café Abu Dhabi, Dubai, where the pass moves between mezze, fresh fish and the seafood counter. Her station sits inside the Em Sherif Group’s wider discipline, with formal training at Institut Lyfe, formerly Institut Paul Bocuse, and in Milan behind the way she handles inheritance: not as a fixed archive, but as a working method. The restaurant opened in 2022 on the lobby floor of Rosewood Abu Dhabi, on Al Maryah Island, and the address matters to the cooking. The room faces water; the menu answers with fish, shellfish, Levantine seasoning and the familiar grammar of Lebanese hospitality. Hayek’s role here is current, and her title extends beyond this kitchen into the group, but the Sea Café gives the work a particular frame. Lebanese taste arrives in a contemporary register, kept legible through mezze, seafood and a beef bar corner rather than through nostalgia alone. Her own language for the work carries the same tension between memory and experiment: “The kitchen is definitely a happier lab to be in.”

Mezze, fish and the counter

The program is à la carte, built for lunch and dinner rather than a fixed tasting sequence. That format gives the kitchen room to place Lebanese appetizers beside seafood from the Mediterranean and Levantine coast, then turn toward distinguished meat cuts at the beef bar corner. Wagyu hummus, yellowtail, fresh fish, Lebanese mezze and the seafood counter form the public vocabulary of the place. The method is not hidden in a single signature plate; it sits in the way the table can move from bread and small dishes to a chosen fish, then back toward coffee or cocktails without leaving the line of the cuisine. The house names local sourcing and sustainable seafood among its working commitments, and the menu’s stated tribute to land and sea is carried through that split structure. One side of the pass reads the Lebanese table. The other reads the counter, the catch and the cut.

The room keeps its ear on the water

The room has the polish of a hotel restaurant without losing the looseness of a café. Indoor and outdoor tables face the waterfront, with the island and surrounding sea close enough to affect the pace of the meal. The counter is part of the theatre because the fish is part of the decision. Guests do not encounter seafood as an abstraction from the kitchen, but as material chosen in the room, then folded back into a Lebanese-Mediterranean sequence. The setting is scenic, yet the pass, the counter and the terrace all point in the same direction.

First Sea Café in the UAE

This is the first and only Em Sherif Sea Café location in the United Arab Emirates, separate from the group’s traditional Em Sherif Café format and from Sea Café branches in Beirut, Manama and Riyadh. It gives the brand’s Lebanese lineage a seafood-led address in Abu Dhabi rather than simply repeating the mezze house. If the next chapter of Hayek’s work is already visible, it is in that adjustment: ancient recipes kept active beside yellowtail, wagyu hummus and the seafood counter.