A good chef for Micheel is one who has his heart in the right place. “It is not only for a chef, it applies to everyone. If you read a newspaper or magazine, you will know if the writer has a job or a passion. It is similar in cooking, too,” he explains.

“You have to cook with passion. That is the reason why most in the world will say the best chef in the world is a mother or grandmother. You know the reason why? Because she is cooking for the people she loves most. So she puts all her heart into what is she doing.”

I ended up not having the usual lunch at the Capital Club with Micheel for a very simple reason. Take a chef to a restaurant and you can be sure that you don’t get his full attention. Micheel is no different. At a restaurant he spends his time watching people to see whether they are being treated well by staff, Micheel tells me as we sit down for a chat about him, his food and his views about an industry that has grown exponentially since he first arrived some 17 years ago.

The food industry in Dubai has changed dramatically in the last few years. And for good reasons, says Micheel. “I think I can put it in very few words. When I came here, I was sent by my general manager at that time to Singapore, Hong Kong and New York to look at concepts of restaurants. Now people from Singapore, Hong Kong and New York are coming to see what we are doing. So this is, in short, the change.”

He says the past five to six years have been the best for the restaurant industry in Dubai. “The advantage that we had was that there were so many investors. Money was not really the main issue. So people could bring, could build whatever possible. For architects it was a dream,” says Micheel, adding that the economic slowdown had hit the industry hard as clients stayed away or moved to lower-priced alternatives. “Everything has slowed down. If you want to buy new table cloths, people will ask if we need it.”

Micheel expects things to turn around because people like to eat, but the overall spending trend had changed after companies cut down their entertainment budgets. “So all the restaurants with higher spend have major challenges. But mid-class level and bottom-level restaurants are picking up quite well,” says the man who manages nearly 140 chefs and 14 restaurants.

Regular guests are coming back to high-spend restaurants, but instead of coming three times a week they are returning once in 10 days because money is still a little bit tight, explains Micheel, who has been the head of the culinary guild for many years and has his own way of sifting the good ones from the bad while hiring people.

“If I look for people who I want to grow, I want to see that the guy has got passion, and has got the ability to learn.  In young people, you don’t look at what they know; you look at their ability to learn. I do not believe in CVs, when they walk towards my office and by the time I shake hands, I have done basically 60 per cent decision on whether to take them or not,” Micheel says, adding that the remaining 40 per cent depends on their willingness 
to learn.

It is important, says Micheel, to quickly understand how fast people can learn their art and if they have what he calls taste. “If I have got somebody who has worked all the time in an Indian restaurant, even if he cooks western food it will be more spicy because it is what he has grown up with. You can adjust that. You have to see if the guy has got taste or not. Some people if you see them, they could work in a petrol station or in the kitchen, it is the same.”

Micheel does not obviously prefer to work at a petrol station. He loves working with the classical French cuisine. Eating is another matter altogether. He prefers eastern cuisine — Chinese and Japanese because it is light, tasty and healthy. And like a good German, he can’t live a full week without sausages. “I think it is whatever you have grown up with. You can eat so many different things, but whatever your mother gave you, it has to be there. I think you cannot replace a good sausage with anything else.” Given his penchant for Chinese food, his favourite restaurant in the city is the China Club at his own hotel.

The chef of many years says that eating habits reflect a person’s characteristics and I couldn’t agree more. “Food is more than life; it is more than lifestyle. When you watch people eat you can tell a lot about how they do business, a lot of how they work and how they treat their family and people,” Micheel explains, adding that most chefs would like simple food largely because they are around good food all the time.

“When I was a kid, I used to die for ice cream, but then when I finished my apprenticeship I was working for one year in Germany where everyday I made 20 types of fresh ice creams, every morning. It took me five years to start eating ice creams again,” he says with a 
big smile.

There are only a few occasions when he is not thinking about food, says Micheel, who spends time promoting his profession and training and promoting the juniors through the culinary guild that holds the annual Middle East Junior Chef competition. This year there were more than 800 competitors, he tells me proudly.

Micheel doesn’t see himself leaving Dubai in a hurry. Normally you change places because you want to see new things. But if you have seen Dubai in the last 15 years, there is no need to change places. You just stay still and everything around you will change so fast.”