Exploring Delicious MIDDLE-EASTERN & ARABIAN CUISINE in Abu Dhabi, UAE (City Food Tour)

In this video we are exploring Abu Dhabi, the capital city of the United Arab Emirates. It is Diana's and my first time in the city and we previously spent only one day layover in Dubai. So we are excited to discover the feel of this famous country and of course the amazing cuisine of the UAE. And spoiler alert, we found some new personal favorites. Good morning. So we are starting our food tour off here today with some tea. This is Karak tea. You can find this all over. It's a tea with milk and sugar in it. It's 150 dirham. Usually it ranges from like one to two. Let's give it a try. Oh, that's quite nice. It's very herbally. It's definitely a black tea and it has this like herbal and citrus almost flavor to it but it's definitely a little more spiced. We're in this very central area, Corniche area, and it's right next to the water which is really nice and the sun is finally out. I love it. This tastes like no other tea I've ever been drinking before but I like it a lot. It's sweeter, it's milkier, it's just very flavorful. Not just like a typical black tea. I see why they do that. Very sweet. It's a nice start to the day and I think you get your caffeine sugar kick. So that's what we're doing and then we're gonna head out and see what else we can find here to eat. First morning out, first sunshine, wearing shorts, having sunglasses on is such a nice feeling. I like the warmth. We arrived last night. It's pretty late but things were still popping at like 11 p.m. So we just stepped out in Abu Dhabi for the first time and it's so nice to finally be like in a different world again. First stop is the supermarket over there which is nice because our hotel is just right there. I'm on the hunt for food. There's something we don't see in Europe, Jollibee. I can't wait. I'm gonna eat one later. Jollibee is a Filipino fast food chain. It's super popular there. So my first impression is this city compared to Dubai feels really more like a livable city. Like Dubai felt very artificial in the center. Maybe this is more like the banking district but it feels nice. I compare it to the Frankfurt of UAE and Dubai is the Munich. One surprising thing, it's not as hot as we thought. It's only like 23 degrees right now but that's maybe a nice like in between, you know, coming from Europe and then we'll go to will be hotter and Thailand will be hotter. So nice step-by-step increase. That building looks cool. Pretty tall. Might be the tallest. They definitely have a bit of a skyline here. So that's the prayer. It happens multiple times a day. Also during the night. It's like church bells in Europe that ring. True, man. If you live next to a church, they start at 6 for a service, I would go crazy. But check out the nice area. They have this long boardwalk all the way through along the seaside and every now and then they have these little oasis like this. Palm trees, shade, little cafe there. You can take a break. Super nice. Yeah, I like how every tree has water around it. See this piping? Oh yeah. Didn't even notice. We recommend walking along this boardwalk at the seaside and just taking the weather and chill vibes in. Especially if you come from cold northern Europe like we do. We stopped at this little plaza where I had my first Tim Hortons experience. It's pretty good. It was okay, eh? But afterwards, our hunt for Arabian lunch led us deeper into the city. So once you get off the fancier area, the main streets, it looks a little bit more authentic, like a little more traditional here. Like these tighter streets. Everything's still though for cars to ride through. But this is kind of the vibe we're getting from the city, which is not bad. There's a good mix of restaurants and everything and it's fairly walkable as well. And just as we walk around the corner, there's another mosque. Like these traditional mosque styles like that, they look very cool. They're everywhere in the city. Like every second block you go around and oh there's another one, which is quite nice. A lot of big buildings. Looks fairly impressive at times. It's just so large. Like everything is spaced out. It's made for cars. These streets are huge. Three, four lane, just normal roads. Our restaurant of choice is called Al-Mandi and Al-Maddi House. I ordered a dish called Chicken Mashboo or Kabsa, which is a one pot dish made using rice, a choice of meat or fish, in my case chicken, onions and vegetables. Many spices like cumin, cardamom, nutmeg, cinnamon, saffron, turmeric, chilies and many more gives it its authentic Arabian strong flavor. So good, dude. Everything is so strong in flavor. It's so much better than just plain rice. It's right here is a soup. Then you put a little bit of this tomato paste in there like that. You set, then you mix it and you try it. Super nice, man. Everything is so flavorful. So nicely seasoned. I like that a lot. And then I think this is a yogurt sauce, which you probably put on these rice dishes. And all you get is a spoon because there's a lot of hand eating. So I'm just going to grab this chicken here. Wow. Oh my God. It's so tender. Wow. Look at that. How that just came off of that. The chicken falls off the bone, man. That's so good. Clean bone just comes out. It's like the most tender chicken I've ever eaten. This thing is my first really authentic Arab food experience and I like it. I ordered the Laham Hanit, which is a dish originating from Yemen and is popular throughout the rest of the Arabian Peninsula. It is this flavorful spiced rice dish served with meat. I ordered the lamb, which was wrapped in bamboo leaves and slow cooked with spices and potatoes, tomatoes, and peppers. And this is what looks beautiful to me. There we go. You have this fall off the bone lamb meat here. This is the definition of fall off the bone. Look how effortless this is. That is a beautiful bite. You've got some lamb meat on there. You've got rice, onions. That is amazing. What I really like about it is just the meat is so tender. It's falling apart. There's also a decent amount of potatoes in here. That's always nice. So it's cooked together with these tomatoes and potatoes. That is awesome. And the beautiful thing about this is just eating everything with your hands. There's just something about eating with your hands that really connects you with the food experience. I absolutely love it. Also sharing is caring. So Phil divided some of his chicken for some of my mutton and potatoes. That might be one of the best chickens I've had. I absolutely love the potatoes and this lamb. It's awesome. I honestly can't tell which one's better. That was so good. We destroyed these dishes, finishing up as much as we could and filling our stomachs to the brim. So we just came out of the lunch thing and it's a little quiet, very intimate, but damn, that was good. I think that was one of the best chicken that I ever had and I had a lot of chickens and the lamb also was very, very good. A lot of chickens. Yeah, the lamb was so good. It was like fall off the bone. I think I preferred that meal actually more. I really like it with the flavor of rice and there's a lot of garlic in the rice that I had, which is... Even though the rice didn't look as flavorful because it was white, I think the rice was even better than the yellow one, but that one already was so good, man. Yeah, it was awesome. No, I'm very satisfied with this meal. I'm so full. I don't know how we're going to continue eating, but we're going to make it. I also think this is absolutely my cuisine, man. Rice, chicken meat, lamb meat, flavorful. None of these flavors you find in Europe, anywhere in the Western world, this much at least. Everything is so flavored. The spice combinations, ooh, so good. Yeah, I feel like there's a minimum of like five spices in every dish and that's really nice. It's more than just salt and pepper. Man, I need this food in my life. After that meal, we really needed to walk it off. Making our way around the city, we passed some outdoor parks ready for the school day to end. It was getting pretty hot in the afternoon, so we hopped into a fancy mall to feel some air conditioning. After cooling off, we continued to one of the historic landmarks of the city, the Qasr Al Hasan. It's one of the oldest stone buildings in Abu Dhabi and it was built in 1761. This wave on the screen was so cool to me. It feels like modern meets historic. At this point, we've walked a bit and made some room in our stomachs for something sweet to eat. It's dessert time and this is my favorite time of the day. We decided to get something that's very common in the Middle East in general. We went to the shop called Ligmat and Gag. I hope that's right. I don't know. I'm so sorry for my pronunciation, but we had to get something. They look absolutely beautiful. These are called lukumat. Look at them. They're these beautiful deep-fried balls covered with this syrup and then topped with sesame seeds, but we decided to get cheese-filled ones. They're fresh there. They fry them immediately and then put the syrup on there. It smells a little like dates, so I'm curious if it's going to be like a date syrup. Let's give it a try. Oh my god. Explosion of cheese inside of there. Holy smokes, that's so good. You can see here it is filled with cheese and it is a soft cheese that is warm exploding in there that is a date syrup around it. It tastes so good and with deep freshly fried outside is just a perfect crisp with this nice sweetness to it and also savory from the cheese. This might be the best thing we've eaten all day to me. This is so good. 10 out of 10. Seriously, like this is amazing. So these are very similar to like lukumat. These things that I had in Greece. If you ask Greece or Turkey, they will fight over where the origin was. I think it's during the Ottoman Empire, but this is the first time I've ever had cheese filled inside of it. You taste it? Yeah, dude, the cheese is so nice. It tastes really nice. What kind of cheese is that? It's a very soft cheese, but it's a little salted, so it gives this like nice salty flavor to it. Reminds me of like string cheeses, so. This is so good. The date syrup is okay, I think. For me, it's not the best, but the cheese inside with the ball, that's awesome. And this is 16 dirham, so four euros-ish. Not too bad for this volume. This is small, by the way. It's a big, big portion. So good. Look at that. Yeah, and it's the smallest portion they had. Oh, I'm happy. I'll eat it all. We got one more dessert dish, and it's called Balalit. It's this little nice omelet, and you can lift it up, and underneath there are like vermicelli noodles. There's some cashew nuts in there, and some candied raisins. I think this can be sweet or savory. And let me just try a chunk of omelet first. You're missing the noodles. Very nice fried egg omelet, and here we go. Neon green vermicelli style noodles. They are sweet. Yeah. Oh, this was a bit of a spontaneous buy, so these are noodles, but then all together, a little bit of omelet on there, cashews and the noodles. Very interesting. Also, very new flavor palette for me. We don't have anything similar to this, but it's sweet. It looks like noodles, and you expect like Asian noodle flavor, but it's literally sweet taste, and it's really good. Well, I'm surprised, and I would have not thought that this is like a dessert dish in the beginning, but it is really good. So this is something I was excited to try because it looks very unique. I definitely taste the sugary cinnamon aspect of it, and that's really good. They hold so nicely together. Look at that huge chunk. Dude, I just love these canyons of buildings. I don't know. It's very impressive to see this man-made stuff that we as humans build. I like it. Sun is setting. Looks pretty epic. As the sun begins to set and the city lights come out, there is one dish that we cannot leave this country without trying. We went to one of Abu Dhabi's most popular street food places for an evening snack, and this one is an absolute must try. For this street food snack, I'm most excited. We went to this place called this. It's actually called Beit el Ketia. It's a grill in the middle of the city, and we got one thing that I absolutely love. It is basically the emirate or the Arab equivalent of the German döner, and of course, that is the shawarma. So this place seems to be like a big institution in the city. It is absolutely packed. On one side, they have a full restaurant, people sitting there eating. Then there's a takeaway counter. They're cutting the from the skewers fresh there, and the interesting thing, this is not how I usually know the shawarma. Usually, I know it as a rolled one, like a durum kind of thing, but here they do it in this more pita style of bread, and there's chicken meat in there. There's pickles. There's some sauce, and this whole thing, I think, was 11 dirham, so very cheap and affordable, but I'm gonna shut up now. It's so nice. It has absolutely the good old shawarma taste, even though in a different shape. I would say it even equals the German döner more in this shape. This is one of the best shawarmas I had. The meat is nice and tender. There's this nice garlicky herbal sauce in there. It all comes nicely together in this meat mix. The pickles give it a little bit of a fresh taste, but overall, it's a very hearty thing, but I love it. By the way, we're eating here in this little park right next to the biggest intersection. And there are cats everywhere. You'll find them all over the city. This one is great. There's also a couple of fries in there, which I really love. Potato always enhances the döner. For after your meal, they give you a little bit of a small assortment of pickled... Pickled veggies. So there are pickled carrots. There are pickles in there. You have pickled radishes and some peppers in there. It's nice. They're always on the side of a shawarma, I noticed. It's a little bit of fiber, whatever, after your heavy meal, to help you digest. So pickled carrot. He's gonna have to run to the toilet after this. Oh, it's nice. Really pickled. Pickled pickle, I guess. Just pickle. And then they always have this. I'm not sure what this is. It's a radish. It's a radish? You might be right. This one is the most pickled one. So pickled food, I don't know, for your digestion. What I got is stuffed falafel, and I feel like falafel is one of the classic dishes in the Middle East. A lot of countries here love these falafels, and I do too. This one is unique because I'm not used to the sesame seeds on top, but they look awesome, and I love sesame seeds. It's this beautifully deep-fried chickpea-based ball. Oh, and it's stuffed. It looks like it's stuffed with some type of meat that's red. I think it's shawarma meat, but it smells so good. It looks so good. I love the contrast. The green versus the red. Yeah, it is beautiful, but because we got the plate, they gave us these beautiful breads. I just made a nice, beautiful plate here. We have three halves of these falafels with the sauce on it, and I'm gonna roll it up and try it this way. This right here is the best price, thanks for helping us, best price-value ratio. I haven't even tried it yet, and I'm looking at the amount here. It was 12 AED. Cheers. Got a little bit of this falafel. The sauce is quite nice. It smells very mayonnaise-based, but a little hummus in there. There's a little bit of a kick to it, which is really nice. It could be spicier, but this is awesome. Look at this wrap, and I have three more to eat. No, no, no, no, no. I have three more to eat. At least two, okay? Two, two. So good. I love falafel. I've never had stuffed falafel before. Inside of here, the spicy meat, that is where the spice flavor is coming from, because usually falafel is pretty mild. It's not too spicy or anything. And vegetarian. Yeah, and vegetarian, but we got some meat on here. I can't believe this is only like four euros, four dollars, and you can make four mini rolls of this. Seeing how busy that place is, how good this falafel is, how good the shawarma was, I think we might have found one of the best price-performance ratio spots in the city. Maybe if you're on a budget, looking for like a good hearty street food, good place to go, definitely. Yes. All right, so that was our quick food tour here from Abu Dhabi, eating all the Middle Eastern food. It was very nice, very quick layover. We have to continue our travel, so it was a very nice experience. Yes. Let us know in the comments what your favorite dish that we had is, or if there's another dish that we should try. As always, thank you so much for watching. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Bye. I'm gonna get a pasta green donut. You go to the UAE, get a donut. Why not?