How Mohamad Orfali Went From Hiding His Restaurant Job to MENA’s No. 1

Before Mohamad Orfali became one of the region’s most decorated chefs, he was a teenager in Aleppo trying not to let his friends discover that he worked in a restaurant. The deception held until a waiter failed to turn up one evening and Orfali was sent into the dining room. Among the guests waiting to be served were, unfortunately, his friends. His chef gave him a choice - stop being ashamed of the work or find something else to do.

Orfali chose the kitchen. It proved consequential. He studied cooking, left Syria, worked across the region, became a familiar face on food television and eventually opened Orfali Bros in Dubai with his younger brothers, Wassim and Omar. The restaurant would go on to spend three consecutive years at No. 1 on MENA’s 50 Best Restaurants. Their latest proposition is Three Bros — though it was actually the brothers’ original game plan — and from August 20th to 25th, it is leaving Dubai for Moga on Egypt’s North Coast, closing the summer run of WHEN WE EAT at Ramla by MARAKEZ. The residency follows Tulum’s Arca, led by José Luis Hinostroza, and Kinoya, Dubai’s celebrated ramen house.

Three Bros makes considerably more sense once you know Orfali’s history. He trained in classical European cooking before discovering an awkward hole in his education at a conference in Seville, where a journalist asked him to explain the cuisine of his native Aleppo. Orfali couldn’t. The embarrassment prompted a deep study of the food he had grown up around, including the cooking of the grandmother he calls his “first school.”

What emerged was not a desire to preserve Syrian cooking behind glass. At Three Bros, Aleppo can happily share a table with Japan, Spain and France — and with the OB Cheeseburger, proof that an acclaimed chef can pursue a burger with the same seriousness afforded to haute cuisine.

It is this looser, omnivorous restaurant that arrives at beachfront Moga for five days: the final act of WHEN WE EAT at Ramla, and another stop in Orfali’s long, circuitous journey back towards the food he once left home to understand.

Bookings are available through Moga.