Zaid Kadhim Served Satwa Stories at Ravi for the Stroll Club

On September 6th, 20 chairs gathered around a table at Ravi, the Satwa institution that's been ladling out daal and karahi since 1978. The Anti-Doomscroll Stroll Club was hosting its first Casual Supper Club: a six-course meal spiced and plated by Chef Zaid Kadhim.

It had gotten too hot to stroll the streets of Dubai, but Faizal Razak - who runs Karak and built the Anti-Doomscroll Stroll Club, a club dedicated by getting people off their phones and on a walk outside - still found a way to get people offline. This time, they swapped the map for a route that ran through Satwa's food rather than its streets, with Kadhim turning familiar flavours into small plates and tasting-menu detours.

"The idea is that we do it in Satwa," Chef Zaid said. "Satwa food, Satwa people, told through a new lens. Small tastings, small concepts, small flavours. But big influence through storytelling."

And the menu delivered. Cups of karak came paired with kleicha, Kadhim's take on the Iraqi pastry resurrected from the bakery he shut down two years ago, before the courses moved into Wagyu short rib finished in Ravi's own nihari, and eggplant, charred and finished in eggplant jus and camel milk.

Nothing about oysters dressed in deconstructed amba and pickled green chilli, sourced from Dibba Bay, sounds particularly casual either. Most of the ingredients, in fact, were sourced locally: strawberries from Al Ain, a shaker of pop rocks poured on as heavily as anyone dared, crackling into marshmallows and landing everyone straight down nostalgia lane.

The storytelling trivia even lands with the bread. Khubz Aroog, which Kadhim's family used to send over to Shams Bakery to bake, until the bakery asked them to stop: the dough kept wrecking their ovens. They made it again for this one with Pakistani spices and served beside Ravi's own daal.

"The entire idea behind the club is to disconnect, get off your phone, go to something analogue, and actually digest it," Faizal said. Put that same crowd around a table and, apparently, the instinct just found a chair.