You can't judge a book by its cover; nor can you judge the provenance of a restaurant dish buy its name. As The National reported yesterday, Peking duck is a popular menu item in Abu Dhabi, with some excellent variations of the dish available across the capital. But our report also revealed that, despite its name, Peking duck did not originate in Beijing, but 1,000 kilometres to the south in Nanjing.
It doesn’t stop there. Britain’s favourite “Indian” dish, chicken tikka masala, was probably invented in Glasgow; chop suey was first served in the United States, not China; and beef Wellington has nothing at all to do with the hero of Waterloo, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington.
New Zealanders and Australians still both claim the meringue-based dessert called pavlova, and in this part of the world at least, it’s wise not even to inquire about the similarities or otherwise between the Arabic shawarma, Turkish doner kebab and Greek gyro.
In the end, the name doesn’t matter, as long as it tastes good. With the wide availability of ingredients, you can adapt any cuisine to your taste. And a cosmopolitan city like Abu Dhabi should be able to come up with a unique creation of its own. Camel ketchup pilau anyone? Don’t rule it out; they scoffed when the Scots added masala sauce to chicken tikka, too.
