Hattem Mattar Takes Arab Barbecue From Dubai Around the World

Hattem Mattar was still awake at four in the morning in São Paulo, peeling garlic with hands that had stopped feeling like his own hours earlier.

Mattar had been going for the better part of two days: deseeding chillies, squeezing oranges into a paste, wrapping a leg of lamb in cheesecloth, the Omani way, before lowering it into a pit dug into the earth of a country that had never smelled his mother's kitchen.

Thousands of people were coming to Churrascada, where Mattar was cooking alongside dozens of pitmasters from Brazil and abroad. He had never cooked at this scale before, in this country, and there was a version of that week where the whole thing fell apart in the dirt. So he set up a camera and let it run, because some part of him already understood this might be the only time he got to do it.

Mattar travelled to São Paulo in 2019 and says he was the first Arab chef invited to Churrascada, the Brazilian barbecue festival. So he simply cooked, in his own fire language.

"Barbecue is the reason we are who we are," he says. "The human brain only got to be this big when we started eating meat cooked over fire. It's hardwired into the human consciousness. The most recognised smell on the planet is fire. After that, it's coffee."

He says this from behind a résumé that once read oil and gas executive, running the Middle Eastern office of a multi-billion dollar company out of Toronto, with no idea Houston was about to hand him a brisket he'd walk up to already convinced he had nothing left to learn.

"When I signed the contract, the guy said, let's go celebrate. Let's have barbecue. Have you had barbecue before? I'm Arab, of course I've had barbecue. Also, how different could it be from barbecue back home?"

He laughs telling it now, at the version of himself who didn't yet know what was coming.

"I had no idea what I was talking about."

Kebab and kofta are the sprinters of Arab fire cookery, in and out of the flame inside 20 minutes. Brisket keeps entirely different hours, and the first bite of it in Texas rearranged something in him that never settled back.

Mattar flew home with it wedged into his suitcase. Airport security in Houston and Dubai unzipped his bag expecting the worst and found only a slab of smoked beef, and each time he had to explain, patiently, that this was dinner.

"I'm a self-respecting member of society, and I can't keep doing this," he says. "I was like, man, I'd better learn how to make this myself."

He spent the next two years cooking for free in his own backyard in Dubai, feeding anyone who turned up, changing one variable at a time and logging every result, the engineer in him refusing to leave even as the rest of his life rearranged itself around the smoker.

Too much salt, too little air, the wrong cut of wood, grass-fed instead of grain-fed, water in the pan or nothing at all, wrapped in butcher paper or left bare to the smoke.

Each choice cost him a day, sometimes three or four, before he knew which variable had made or broken the meat.

"People started calling my work phone. Hello, is this Mattar? And I thought they were asking about me. I'm like, yes, this is. They're like, yes, okay, I'd like to order two pounds of wings, one brisket. I'm like, who is this? They're like, oh, this is Nadine. Where did you get my number? I got it from Mahmoud. Mahmoud got it from Steven. Steven got it from Nadia."

He shakes his head at the memory of it, seven degrees of separation deep before he understood his own hobby had become a business without his permission.

"I would show up to random strangers' houses with barbecue, and they'd be like, this is the guy who made the brisket, man. Can I get your number? And I'm thinking, this isn't a business. I'm an engineer with a laptop."

Mattar turned the backyard operation into a business in 2015. His brisket now has a permanent home at Time Out Market Dubai.

He's cooked at Churrascada in São Paulo twice, at major barbecue festivals in London and Glasgow, across Australia and on a 60-city US tour, and worked as a culinary diplomat with the UAE Embassy in Washington, D.C. A return to Egypt is already in motion, though he's not ready to say more yet.

In Egypt, that return is being built around an introduction with one of the country's most respected hospitality names. Mattar calls the project game-changing and won't say more, grinning at how little that gives away.

He calls what he makes third culture barbecue.

"A third culture kid is a superhero power," he says. "Third culture barbecue is your capability to adapt your upbringing onto a dish."

He was born in Egypt, raised in the Emirates, trained in Texas, and what comes off his smoker now is brisket laid over roz ma'amar, the rice dish his mother made him as a boy.

Mattar lived two lives at once for six years. "My alter ego was Wolf," he says. "During the day I was Hattem Mattar, professional. At night I was Wolf, saving people one brisket at a time, Batman by night and Bruce Wayne by day."

Eventually the balance tipped for good. "Now I'm just Wolf, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week."

Not everything worked. He opened a trial outpost in Marassi, on Egypt's North Coast, cooking through its punishing summer humidity, and eventually closed it.

"Any loss is a lesson," he says. "You cannot give up."

São Paulo invited him back in 2022, and he chose tarb for his second appearance: an Egyptian tarb of smoked Wagyu, pickled green pepper and rice, unmistakably his own.

"I think the new wave of Arab cuisine is us championing our own food abroad, instead of importing someone else's," Mattar says. "How come every compound in Sahel is named after Marseille, or Nice, and nobody's named one after Cairo? Food is the easiest way to change that."

Underneath the scale and the swagger sits a definition of hospitality he learned long before he had a restaurant to practise it in.

"I learned hospitality at my mother's table," he says. "If you're in the restaurant business, you won't succeed. If you learned how to be a hospitable person, you're a thousand steps ahead."

Mattar has become widely known as the Arab world's first pitmaster, a description he carries the way an athlete carries a national shirt.

"When Mohamed Salah plays football abroad, he's carrying Egypt on his shoulders. I feel the same responsibility every time I travel to cook. What do you tell people about home? Are you inviting them in?"

What comes next is a return to Egypt, in motion and serious, built on an introduction with one of the country's most respected hospitality names. He calls it game-changing and won't say more, grinning at how little that gives away.

Mattar mentioned almost in passing at the start of the phone call that became this story that his favourite thing in the world is a dark, cold weekend with the lights off, nobody around, nothing but his animals and the quiet.

A man who has fed thousands of strangers in a foreign country, built a career from a Dubai backyard and carried his food across four continents spends his own weekends alone in the dark on purpose.