Dubai: This Ramadan club tells stories linked to recipes from different countries

On a pleasant Ramadan evening in March, a villa in Jumeirah, is bustling with lively conversations, tempting aromas of baked fish and tales weaved around ancient legends. Seated across each other on elegantly laid iftar tables, the guests, many of them strangers, are breaking bread together for the first time. As the evening progresses, the invitees at the Ramadan Sagra Supper Club, are treated to animated tales performed by story tellers, linked around recipes from the Middle Eastern and Italian menu of the day.

“There is nothing more joyful in bonding communities than exchanging stories. At the core of our supper club, is the celebration of shared cultural heritage. And what better time than the holy month of Ramadan to sit together and savour stories,” says Paola Balbi, co-founder of the Sagra Storytelling Supper Club, Dubai and a renowned storyteller. This unique supper club began in 2023, when Balbi, an Italian and her Indian friend Debanjana Chaudhuri, collaborated to blend a storytelling experience with a traditional Italian Sagra ritual. Sagras are food fairs held open-door in rural Italian villages during the summer. Each Sagra celebrates one specific ingredient or a recipe and is always cooked fresh by the elders of the village. Through the supper club, the founders want to revive the age-old tradition of opening doors to strangers.

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Representing the essence of UAE’s multiculturalism, this Ramadan sagra had brought together guests from 18 nationalities. As they bit into crescent-shaped Palestinian Eid Eras (olive oil soaked breads), served with Italian Zimino soup, made from chickpeas, spinach, fresh herbs and calamari, Balbi regales them with an old Palestinian tale of a woman who used to bake bread and keep some on the window sill to share with others.

“The stories, we tell, are multi-layered, most often with messages. Sometimes,  they are real life incidents and anecdotes. Each person would infer the meaning from the stories in their own way,” reveals Balbi.

As guests take generous helpings of the fresh tabouleh on the table, yet another storyteller Lorenzo Caviglia begins telling an old Italian tale centred around the herb parsley. In an engrossing theatrical performance Caviglia, a storyteller from Italy, stands with a mortar and pestle narrating the ancient legend of a young mother who had to give up her daughter to witches when her husband was caught stealing parsley from the witches’ garden. This riveting retelling keeps everyone glued to their seats.

Dubai resident and Lebanese expat Zeina Bachir heard about the Sagra Supper Club just a few days ago from her friend and is attending it for the first time. “I read stories to my daughter every day, but now I am inspired to add emotions and hand gestures to make it more fun.” This is the second Sagra story telling event for Sana, a Syrian, who shares that listening to the stories always make her reflect on her life. “Whatever background you come from, you’ll be able to connect to the folk stories and their lessons and to your own lineage. They always take me back to my childhood when I heard stories from my grandmother,” she says. For Indian expat Sonya Jose the Sagra supper club is a great way to discover other cultures. “It’s always fascinating to get a glimpse into the food and stories from around the world. Plus, I get to meet so many new people.”

Each Sagra has a theme, that mostly aligns with the season and ingredients available at that time. “Some of our past Sagras have included seafood, Pesto pumpkin to coincide with autumn, Carnevale, in time for the Italian street carnival, Pistachio Truffle to celebrate the emotion of love during Valentine’s Day. This is our fourth Ramadan Sagra and this year we have an Italian-Palestinian menu,” tells Chaudhuri, co-founder of the club.

Along with the Zimino soup, the Palestinian bread and Tabouleh, the Ramadan Iftar has Parmigiana Napoletana (fried eggplants topped with tomato sauce, mozzarella and parmesan cheese), Pesto Lasagne, Gazawi baked fish and Pastiera, a Neapolitan tart for dessert.

The Ramadan Sagra was a collaborative effort with the Palestinian bread baked by Dalia Arja, who runs the Karmiyeh bakery in Dubai, and the Gazawi baked fish recipe collected from old Gazan ladies recreated with seasoning from Sumac Cooking. Similar to the Italian sagras, the food is never prepared by a professional chef, but by Balbi and her collaborators.

Like its name suggests the Eid Eras are baked around the time of Eid with freshly harvested olives. For Arja, a Palestinian, baking the bread is a nostalgic experience. “I grew up in Jordan and have never visited Palestine. Food is now my connection to my family and my heritage,” she says about the bread infused with sesame, fennel and anise seeds.

The last course of the meal, the dessert, paired with herbal tea and coffee is served in the garden’s majlis. “We wanted to recreate the story majlis, that was common during Ramadan of the olden days in the desert,” explains Balbi, who has collected a series of Kharareef fables from the UAE.  As a passionate storyteller, she has spent the last few years researching and collecting extensively stories from the UAE that are part of the local oral tradition.  “Although now lost, the figure of the full time storyteller existed in the UAE, at least until the seventies. Several of the elders, I interviewed remember with great affection, a woman, named Mariam, who would visit their homes in Bur Dubai, to narrate stories, when people would gather in a courtyard or a souk during the midday break and also during Ramadan between iftar and suhoor.”

In most of the Kharareef stories, shares Balbi, animals with magical powers help characters overcome difficulties. “In the Emirati fables, the magical fish would replace the fairy Godmother in the local Cinderella version. In other stories, it would be the talking rooster or a Saluki dog that would come to help people.”

At the Ramadan supper club majlis, the stories turn out to be ice-breakers between guests, who are now immersed in conversations. “Adults tend to hang out with people from their own community, so we need storytelling to break the pattern,” Balbi says. “And you can witness at this majlis how beautiful it is to see people from all backgrounds celebrating cultural diversity and understanding.”