Highway-side eatery in UAE feeds hungry one meal at a time

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Taj al-Islam, 50 year old Bangladeshi carwash worker (left) receives his free food at a restaurant in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. (AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili) Auto ...

At a highway-side restaurant in the industrial outskirts of Dubai, workers methodically assemble packaged takeout meals of biryani rice, dal and brightly colored chicken curry for people in poverty and desperate to eat.

It’s not a soup kitchen or charity drive, but an ordinary hole-in-the-wall Indian restaurant alongside a busy motorway in Sharjah, one of the seven desert sheikhdoms in the United Arab Emirates.

When other kitchens close for the night, Biryani Spot springs into action.

The cooks collect leftover food and repurpose it into free, hot meals for underpaid or out-of-work migrants, largely from Southeast Asia. Those in need filter through the cramped restaurant at 10pm to receive dinner — no questions asked.

“The current situation is you have a lot of jobless people, a lot of people who are struggling here because of their low salary,” restaurant co-founder Mohammed Shujath Ali said.

As small businesses across the UAE shut down this spring due to the coronavirus pandemic, Ali and his wife were getting ready to open up theirs.

A former mechanical engineer, Ali long dreamed of running his own restaurant, a place where the migrant workers who power the plastic and fabric factories of Sharjah's dusty Industrial Area 13 could savor familiar Indian, Pakistani and Bengali food at an exceptionally inexpensive price.

Instead of thwarting his plans, the pandemic-induced economic collapse created an opportunity. Tens of thousands of people working in the shadows of Dubai's economy lost their jobs overnight, as hotels, restaurants and families fired their low-wage service workers in response to the lockdown.

Unable to draw on state support in a country that links their residency status to their jobs, many turned to charity to survive.

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