Sharjah’s most talked-about fine dining room serves Korean fire and Japanese restraint beneath a 200-year-old wind tower, and it might just be worth the drive from Dubai on its own. Nomani means “in between” in Japanese, and everything about this restaurant lives between Japan and Korea, between Dubai’s dining circus and Sharjah’s more discreet ambitions, between a centuries-old merchant’s courtyard and an open kitchen turning out gochujang-lacquered chicken wings.
Tucked inside The Chedi Al Bait in the Heart of Sharjah, facing the creek harbour, Nomani arrived in 2022 with serious pedigree. It was launched by Reif Othman, the Singaporean maestro chef renowned for his Zuma years to the cult Reif Japanese Kushiyaki. It was, at the time, a statement of intent, an emirate better known for museums than tasting menus importing one of the region’s most bankable culinary names. Nomani quickly became the talk of the town, and the strongest single argument that Sharjah’s dining scene deserved the thirty-minute drive.
The Japanese-Korean pairing are natural sparring partners: where Japanese cooking leans on salt-curing, precision and restraint, Korean cuisine runs on fermentation, funk and heat. The menu plays the two off each other rather than blending them into mush. A nigiri here, a bibimbap there, and the greatest hits make the case. Fried wings tossed in gochujang, the fermented chilli paste, mandu dumplings plump with chicken and shrimp, a whole boneless baby chicken perfumed with barley miso. The showpiece is a bibimbap built around Chilean sea bass, brought to the table and theatrically folded together with rice, fried shallots, tempura nori and edamame. And because no restaurant with Othman’s fingerprints could resist, there’s a wagyu sando on the menu with its own house twist.
What no Dubai postcode can offer, though, is the room. The interior packs in Japanese artworks, comfortable booths, an open kitchen with its choreography of chefs, but the seats worth fighting for are outside in the courtyard, beneath the UAE’s only surviving circular wind tower.
Sharjah’s restaurant scene has long lived in Dubai’s shadow, and Nomani remains its most persuasive rebuttal, proof that the emirate can host cooking of genuine ambition without importing the neighbouring city’s volume. Prices sit at the upper end for Sharjah, a reflection of the ingredients rather than the postcode, but the value equation still lands favourably compared with the equivalent table across the border.
