Winner of the Icon Award as part of the Middle East & North Africa’s 50 Best Restaurants 2025, restaurateur Omar Shihab changed the face of dining in Dubai when he launched Boca in 2012, a homegrown concept that leads the way in local ingredients and sustainable practices.
Food has always played an intrinsic role in Omar Shihab’s life. Some of his earliest memories are of foraging for wild greens in Dubai’s desert dunes, and digging for clams in the sandy flats of Ras Al Khaimah, in the country’s north.
“My parents moved to the UAE from Jordan, which is a landlocked country, so they didn't grow up eating fish or seafood,” Shihab explains. “My dad was adamant that we integrated into the culture here, so to develop a palate for seafood and to understand how to cook it, we’d visit the fish market every week. Our weekends always revolved around food – planning, cooking and eating together, whether it was a barbecue or a massive stew.”
Sowing the seed for Boca
It was family and food that also saw Shihab make the jump from business consultant to the hospitality industry in 2012. “I’d taken a gap year from my career and my in-laws asked me to help them assess their restaurant from a business perspective, to try and understand where they could make improvements.”
The Boca restaurateur started out as a business consultant, making the switch to hospitality in 2012
At the time, Dubai’s restaurant scene was dominated by imported brands, franchises and celebrity chefs who’d make an appearance at the pass once a year. Through the work for his in-laws, Shihab recognised a gap in the market for a restaurant that celebrated the unique culinary landscape of the UAE.
“It was a time when I believed we had enough creative and capable people living and working here that we could come up with a world-class concept to rival any imports, to create our own narrative with a truly homegrown restaurant,” says Shihab.
At the heart of Boca, a modern Spanish restaurant in the bustling Dubai International Financial Centre, was the desire to showcase local ingredients. “I started with, ‘OK, what grows here?’ We know we live in the desert but there are 1,400 kilometres of coastline overlooking the Indian Ocean and the Gulf, so surely there’s a type of fish or seafood we can introduce?”
What came next was a period of education and exploration. Armed with a list of sustainable fish from the Ministry of Fisheries and a handful of cash, Shihab sent his chefs out to Dubai’s markets to familiarise themselves with the local catch and build relationships with suppliers. It’s a practice that continues in the award-winning restaurant today.
One of Boca's local producers makes camel milk Italian-style cheeses
“It’s exciting for our chefs because it allows them to step out of the kitchen and get in touch with the ingredients, to understand the varieties and the seasonality, rather than always having an intermediary between them and the produce,” says Shihab. “We give them the space and time to experiment and come up with recipes, and they really value that.”
Blueprint for the future
When Boca first opened, the local shopping list was limited to seafood and vegetables from small-scale farms. Today, innovations in agriculture have seen an increase in organic farming as well as agritech producers using hydroponics, aquaponics, greenhouses and vertical farming.
Boca now sources an array of homegrown ingredients, including tomatoes, leafy greens, herbs, edible flowers, mushrooms, berries, Dibba Bay oysters and Italian-style cheeses made with camel milk from a producer in Sharjah. Yet for all the advancements, Dubai residents and restaurateurs still rely heavily on imported goods.
“At at a certain point, we wanted to really understand what grows in the UAE and what can withstand the extremely harsh conditions we have here, where less than two per cent of the country is arable, the soil is poor quality and we have a lot of water scarcity,” Shihab explains.
Shihab hopes his sustainability work is creating a blueprint for the future
This sent Shihab down a new path of discovery. He sought advice from the International Centre for Biosaline Agriculture (ICBA), a group of Dubai-based scientists that has been working since 1999 to identify plants that can grow naturally in the UAE, without cross-modification. One such find is the halophyte, a salt-tolerant plant that is high in essential amino acids, antioxidants, fibre and plant protein. “It has the potential to become a superfood,” says Shihab.
Together with ICBA and Emirates Nature-WWF, Shihab is working to promote the benefits of halophytes to chefs and restaurateurs, showcasing the health benefits and ways it can be used in the kitchen.
The propagation of climate-resilient plants is not only pertinent for the UAE, but the wider world, Shihab says. He cites experimental philosopher Jonathan Keats, whose Tasting Tomorrow project looks at global food security in the face of climate change. Keats found that with the current trajectory of climate change, in 50 years’ time Spanish cities such as Seville and Valencia will have the same climate, soils and overall conditions as the Gulf cities of Riyadh, Muscat and Abu Dhabi today.
There's an array of homegrown produce on the menu at Boca, including local seafood
“I like to think we are living in the future – that we are creating the blueprint for a lot of places that will end up with a similar climate to what we have today,” says Shihab.
Sustainability journey
Food security is just one part of Boca’s story, which received the Sustainable Restaurant Award for 2025. “Everything we do is grounded in sustainable sourcing, waste reduction, energy and resource consumption, measuring and reporting, and community,” says Shihab.
The restaurant runs on 100 per cent renewable energy, thanks to a dedicated solar panel that feeds the grid, and it measures all waste that leaves the restaurant. After realising glass was the largest waste item, Shihab installed a water filtration system and worked with suppliers to implement a bottle pick-up programme.
Omar Shihab is the winner of the Icon Award as part of the Middle East & North Africa's 50 Best Restaurants 2025
Used oil is converted into biodiesel, and organic waste is composted. The kitchen and bar teams are incentivised to use every ingredient, so citrus peels are turned into syrups, tomato water goes into mixed drinks, and dehydrated fruit and vegetable skins become seasonings.
Boca’s fifth pillar is community, which Shihab admits is harder to measure, but vitally important. “We are in the business of people, so our focus extends to staff welfare, charity work, creating an environment where our team can thrive, and supporting the community around us.
“I'm extremely proud of the connections I've made within the hospitality world, but also the local farmers and scientists, those people who've done the groundwork so that we could create our own narrative on what it means to run a sustainable operation here in the UAE.”
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