Lebanese Chef Lynn Hazim Opens an Eatery for Dubai’s Middle Children

Lynn Hazim has been obsessing about salt. 

Not the good flaky kind you scatter on a finished dish like a glittering crown, but the silent, invisible kind that builds flavour slowly, the difference between a plate of food that feels alive and one that falls flat.

“Salt,” she shares with SceneNowUAE in mock seriousness, “is the secret to life. It’s my love language. If I ever under-salt something, just know I’ve given up.” In a way, this fixation says everything about Middle Child, the new restaurant the Lebanese chef is about to open in Dubai.

Before Lynn was a cook, she was a data analyst at Google, spending a decade parsing numbers, shaping insights, living the kind of professional life that looks impressive on LinkedIn but left her creatively starved. While she built a career in tech, she hosted dinners on the side, events that grew from intimate gatherings into what became Dinner Mondays, where strangers bonded over deliciously curated meals.

The pandemic was a great, grim clarifier. As the in-person get-togethers, and therefore her culinary exploration, were removed and life was stripped down to her actual job, she knew that "this is not how I wanted to spend my time." A sabbatical offered no solace, only confirmation.

This isn’t just a hobbyist gone pro; it’s a story of synthesis. The Google strategist, the woman who built narratives from a billion search queries, did not disappear; she simply applied her rigorous, obsessive toolkit to a new medium: food. Ask her about her process and the analyst emerges, sharp and focused. “I get a bit obsessive, and I over-test,” she says. “I take one ingredient and one recipe and I try it a million different ways." Is this the methodical mind of a data scientist or the innate curiosity of a born cook? “I don’t know if it’s the job that made me this way, or I’m naturally this way,” she concedes. But the connection is undeniable. Her old role was to find the human story in the data stream. Her new one is to back the emotional instinct of cooking with the ruthless logic of technique.

Her real education, however, was in a Beirut kitchen ruled by her mother. This was no quiet household; it was a vibrant, opinionated ecosystem of taste. A family of five required three different salads at every meal to cater to exacting palates. Young Lynn would only eat tomatoes; her younger sister would only accept iceberg lettuce. Her mother, a great cook, happily obliged. “It was never, ‘Just eat for the sake of eating’. It was like, ‘I need to make sure Lynn can eat the salad that she loves’.” This was where she learned that food is, at its heart, an act of meticulous, loving intention.

This intention is the bedrock of Middle Child, the eatery, cookbook shop, and gourmet grocery she is launching in Dubai. The name is autobiographical—she is literally between two siblings—but the concept is the physical manifestation of her mind. “I like the in-betweens,” she said. “The middle is where the interesting stuff happens.” It is the kind of place she wishes existed for her. A “tiny food emporium” for the obsessives.

At first, Middle Child was going to be a cookbook shop. Lynn imagined a cosy, chaotic space where people could browse titles, swap recipes, and talk endlessly about food. But the idea evolved. What if there was a small pantry too, stocked with ingredients she loved—salt, of course, but also oils, spices, and the kinds of condiments you can’t find in supermarkets? And then, inevitably, food itself entered the picture. “The thing is, once you’re talking about cookbooks and ingredients, you kind of need to eat,” she said. “It felt incomplete without a table where people could actually sit down together.” 

Her menu will change often, shaped by the seasons and by feedback. Nothing is set in stone. “I don’t want to be trapped by my own ideas,” she said. “Middle Child should evolve, just like people do.”

To understand the ethos, one must scroll her Instagram, ‘No Soup For You’, a handle stolen from the Soup Nazi of Seinfeld, a character whose tyrannical standards she relates to with a wink. The photos are not always the most aesthetically pristine but the captions are the main event. They are recipes. They are opinions, fiercely held and generously given.

She offers a recipe for Spicy Tomato Jam with a precise, chemist’s formula. She shares her secret to making a sage and white chocolate cake that does not overpower your non-sweet tooth. She marvels at the prowess of grape leaves (wara'a 'enab), wondering aloud why the gastronomic titans of France, Italy, and Spain, for all their worship of the grape, have entirely missed the leaf. “If you know why I’d love to hear your thoughts. And, no, I don’t want to ask ChatGPT.” It’s a throwaway line, but it reveals everything: a mind that prefers human messy, cultural nuance to algorithmic certainty.

This is the spirit of Middle Child. It is a place designed to spark that same curiosity. The shop is a physical extension of her feed, a space to break creative blocks. “You go through books or you see grocery items that you might be like, ‘Ah, if I use this sauce in my pasta, I might make it more delicious’.”

Community is central to the vision. Lynn sees the space as a gathering point for curious home cooks, aspiring chefs, and anyone who just loves to eat and talk about food. “I’ve always been obsessed with the conversations that happen around a table,” she said. “The food is the excuse, but it’s never the whole story.”

And what of the future? The data analyst in her might crave a five-year plan, but the cook, the artist, knows better. “I don’t like to plan too much because plans change all the time,” she says. “When you plan too much, you’re less open to new opportunities.” She is open to whatever comes next. It might be just her and this one place. It might be ten.

So, what does the data-analyst turned chef want at the end of it all? "Craveability," she says. "I want to share food you think about the next day, food that makes you text a friend like, ‘We need to go back there.’ Not because it’s complicated, but because it feels like home.”