Watermelon juice splatters in all directions as Girar Vouyoukas, the operations director at Fresh Express, enthusiastically hacks the sizeable fruit in front of him into pieces. "Twenty kilos arrived from Spain first thing this morning," he explains while happily handing around hunks of the pink fruit. While it's difficult to eat without the sticky, sweet juice dribbling down your chin, it is undeniably delicious - just as fruit eaten at the peak of its season should be.
Ask any chef worth their salt what it takes to produce great food and they will invariably tell you that it all begins with sourcing the best ingredients possible. "Seasonal", "local" and "sustainable" have become buzz words over the past 10 years, thrown about as liberally as certain famous chefs throw their weight around in the kitchen. While it is undeniably fashionable to wax lyrical about cooking with locally grown and sourced ingredients, for the most part it seems that there is a genuine desire to do so.
Certainly in the West it is almost expected that a menu will feature cuts of meat from an animal that once grazed on nearby land, it is applauded if the chef pays regular visits to his dairy supplier and there is cause for further celebration if the vegetable side dish was plucked from the restaurant garden mere hours before. Rene Redzepi's Copenhagen restaurant Noma (voted best restaurant in the world at the 2010 San Pelligrino awards) sets the standard for this ethos, with his chefs regularly beginning their days foraging for ingredients in the Danish countryside.
Much of this increased concern with produce and its origins has come about because restaurant customers have become more food savvy. Thanks to the surge in popularity of food entertainment (magazines, television shows and celebrity chefs) we are all that little bit more knowledgeable on the subject and consequently more demanding. Combine this with an increased desire to (most of the time) maintain a healthy lifestyle, with diet a major factor in this, and you come to understand why we want to reward restaurants that make that extra effort in this area.
While chefs shelling peas and tossing together salads of just-picked courgettes and broad beans all sounds like an idyllic rural dream, it is not entirely realistic here in the UAE. The success of the farmers' markets held at Souk al Bahar in Dubai earlier in the year, the growth of farms in Abu Dhabi and Ras al Khaimah and the recent announcement by the Farmers' Services Centre of a new line of local produce (along with a separate organic brand), do prove that there is huge scope for the home grown here and, of course, this should be celebrated whenever possible.
But the growing and harvesting season is limited and certain fruits and vegetables are simply impossible to grow here. As ever more restaurants open up in the UAE, each with a head chef accustomed to having access to a wealth of fresh ingredients and a desire to have their food recognised internationally, how and where do they get this all important produce? Born out of ex-chef Carolos Vouyoukas's frustration at not being able to get hold of the variety and quality of goods that he was used to, Fresh Express was established as a licensed food and beverage supplier in Dubai in 1997. Since then the company has played an important role in helping the standard of food available in restaurants in the UAE advance so rapidly.
Today, the firm sources the very finest ingredients from all over the globe and supplies kitchens, hotels and luxury yachts with their bounty. Crucially, they do so quickly. Multiple deliveries arrive from a host of different destinations on a daily basis and turnover is fast. Ingredients arrive directly from their origin, are inspected at the Fresh Express warehouse and a few hours later could easily be part of the lunch menu at one of the regions top restaurants. Of the 15 thousand kilo's of perishable food that was due to arrive on the day that I visited, Girar estimated that over 90% of it would be in restaurant kitchens by the next morning. The premise of this operation may well be simple, but the execution is exemplary. Fresh Express is a gem of a place. To enter the warehouse is to forget that you are surrounded by miles of desert and step into the edible equivalent of Aladdin's cave, the contents of which being, at least in my eyes, no less majestic. Renowned as one of the major seafood suppliers in the UAE, the company has scoured oceans from New Zealand to Alaska in search of the finest Dover sole, mussels, sea bass, halibut and diver caught scallops. In the meticulously clean and hygienic warehouse organic Irish salmon (with eyes clear and bright, skin glistening) is cleaned, filleted and portioned with the speed and ease of an old pro. In the lobster tank the majestic creatures snap their tails back and forth, as alert and feisty as the minute they were pulled from the sea.
Girar's excitement is palpable as he glides between ingredients, inspecting bundles of asparagus (a celebration of the short English season), sifts through piles of artichokes and reverently cradles a box of precious courgette flowers. He explains that the company's motivation is the same as anyone with a passion for food and eating responsibly; to seek out the finest seasonal produce from a sustainable, and where possible organic, source. What makes Fresh Express's unique is its dedication to not only doing this doing this but importantly to forming a relationship with their suppliers, be they farmers, fishermen or cheese makers. If a producer supplies the company then it is likely that somebody from Fresh Express has visited them, tasted the food at its origin and inspected their handling techniques.
With an expert flick, Girar opens an oyster that left Rungis market in Paris earlier that morning, says that he believes them to be the best in France and presses me to find out for myself. Despite being an unusual breakfast, they are delectable: sweet matured oyster meat with a fresh salty tang. But how did he discover them? From eating in the finest restaurants in France it seems, from tasting different varieties over and over again until he found his favourite (from a small family run business called Gilladeau) and then organising a way for them to be delivered to Dubai.
The success of this family-run business lies not only in a deep-rooted and very real passion for food but in the owners' refusal to become complacent. Fresh Express's mission, Girar explains, is to carry on evolving, to continually strive to improve the service that they offer and to keep discovering new produce to excite the minds and capture the imaginations of the chefs working in the UAE. With Madrid opening as a new Emirates flight destination later in the year, this offers a new opportunity to visit the area, sample more food and forge an additional new set of Spanish connections. Yes, I muse as I leave the warehouse, chefs over here certainly have a lot to thank the founders of Fresh Express for. But travelling the world in search of the finest cheese in Parma or the best truffles in Périgord? Well that sounds like a rather nice job too.
