MENA’s Three-Time No. 1 Restaurant Is Coming to Ramla the North Coast

Mohamad Orfali’s career began with the sort of academic mishap that acquires a certain glamour only in retrospect. At 14, with grades that had closed off the conventional route through school in Aleppo, he entered culinary school instead. He would later hide his restaurant job from friends, mortified by the social implications of being seen serving tables. Three decades on, the correction is almost comically complete - Orfali Bros, the Dubai restaurant he founded with his brothers Wassim and Omar, spent three consecutive years at No. 1 on MENA’s 50 Best Restaurants.

This August, however, it is their younger sibling, Three Bros, making the trip to Egypt.

From August 20th to 25th, Three Bros takes up residence at beachfront restaurant Moga for the final chapter of WHEN WE EAT at Ramla by MARAKEZ, the North Coast residency series that has spent the summer temporarily relocating notable restaurants to Ras El Hekma. José Luis Hinostroza’s fire-led Arca arrived from Tulum first; Dubai ramen institution Kinoya followed. Three Bros closes the procession.The restaurant is, appropriately, difficult to assign a passport. Syrian memory runs into Japan, France and Spain, while one of its signatures is the OB Cheeseburger, the product of the brothers’ characteristically serious pursuit of an exceptionally good burger. It is food with little interest in observing the usual hierarchies between the pedigreed and the pleasurable.

That sensibility belongs to a chef who spent years travelling away from Aleppo only to become increasingly preoccupied with understanding what he had left behind. One decisive moment came in Seville, when a journalist asked Orfali to explain Aleppian cuisine and, despite years of culinary training, he discovered he couldn’t. The question sent him back into his own history.

Three Bros is what happens several chapters later - less concerned with culinary borders than with what becomes possible once you stop treating them as particularly sacred.

For five days at Moga, that kitchen lands beside the Mediterranean for WHEN WE EAT at Ramla. Bookings are available through Moga.