As with most people who go there, my first two years in Dubai were spent in giddy and relentlessly sociable excesses. Of all the binge temples that we favoured with our dubious custom, the one I think of most warmly is Ginseng.
I’ve never had a bad time there – whether casual evenings with close friends, unwieldy nights with too many friends of friends, misguided bonding events with colleagues or my best friend’s hen night, with all its potential for emotional disasters. I should try a New Year’s Eve there to see if the magic is strong enough to neutralise that minefield. The Irish Village has not done too badly in that respect, unlike Jimmy Dix or Double Decker – to name but two – that always turned out to be not such a good idea, any night of the year.
So many places came and went, some changed identities so fast, so many times, it made one’s head spin. Remarkably, in a city that changed almost hourly, Ginseng remained the same.
I made one last visit shortly before I left. It was nearly three years after the last one, since we moved on to the new and the trendy with everyone else. But I instantly felt myself regress, in the nicest way. The dumplings were as I remembered, the Caipirinha, divinely unchanged. Being older, more decrepit and marginally wiser, I didn’t attempt to mix it with shots of the Moon Goddess, but I’m sure that was still on the menu, ready to beguile newcomers into making inadvisable phone calls.
Boudoir taught us why free champagne was free. Zinc taught us how not to dance. Le Plage gave us important life lessons about absinthe. El Malecon made us respect the insidious Marguerita. Serai introduced us to the wondrous world of Arabic clubbing. But Ginseng forged friendships. These were the relationships that not only survived but strengthened through the disruptions of age, shifting priorities and job crises. This is a rare and wonderful thing in a transient gold-mining town.
And though we now savour red wine at the right temperature and prefer to team it with paté rather than spring rolls, the Moon Goddess still glows within us, not very far beneath the surface – yes, the relationships built there continue to flourish, even when we’re all in different countries.
