Hattem Mattar was a child growing up in Egypt when he learned an important lesson: food and fire bring people together. He learned it from his mother, a master home cook who never got a title as fancy as ‘pitmaster’ attached to her name but probably deserved one. Every summer she would fire up the kind of feast that people come from far and wide to get a taste of.
For the Mattars, food was, and is, the great uniter. Aunts, uncles, cousins, sisters, nosy neighbours, even people on her husband’s side of the family would come to Mattar’s mother for advice, watching her every move, soaking up her every technique—traditional Egyptian food that would “bring the Egyptian truth,” as Mattar puts it.
Mattar loved the food, but he loved the people more. At those summertime feasts, he would look up around the table, his legs bouncing back and forth, unable yet to touch the ground, and see the joy on people’s faces—friends and enemies bending to the will of a great meal.
It’s no surprise, then, that at the lowest point in his life, as he sat at home alone with his two daughters after his marriage had fallen apart and his career in security seemed to be sputtering with it, Mattar turned to food to find a way back to joy, and to find a way back to himself.
“Barbecue has the magnetism of both food and fire. I’m going to tell you this—I pushed for Mattar Farm to become what it is during my divorce. It was the satisfaction of people giving me a hug because I made them a great sandwich, that was the little hit of dopamine and comfort that I needed over the two years I was getting divorced,” says Mattar.
Before Hattem Mattar became the Arab world’s greatest pitmaster, before he was picked to represent the UAE at the country’s embassy in the United States, before his delectable, authentic-yet-unique ‘third-culture’ brisket sandwiches had crowds in the hundreds lining up for hours at every weekend pop-up that the Mattar Farm set up around Dubai, Mattar’s biggest accomplishment was to not let the people telling him he was a failure seep too far into his psyche.
“During my divorce, everybody had their guns out. Everybody’s calling people names. They’re like, you’re not going to be sh*t, by the way. And if enough people tell you that—hundreds of people that were supposed to be your crew, telling you that you’re not going to be sh*t—it’s hard to hear,” says Mattar.
Instead, Mattar woke up every morning and said to himself, “no, I’m Wolverine. I have an adamantium skeleton,” again and again. He journaled every day, with each journal having a name to reflect his current state of mind. During this period, his journal was titled ‘adamantium heart’—the fictional metal of the X-Men universe that can never be broken.
And Mattar turned to the same thing he did when he missed his mother back at university in Windsor, Ontario, Canada—he cooked, and marvelled at the ability for the food he made to bring people closer.
This was not a cutesy Eat, Pray, Love situation, however—pit barbecue is gruelling. Smoke, sweat, blood and toil is demanded of the work that took Mattar years of trial and error to perfect. His shelves are lined with every book ever written on the subject, and Mattar devoured them with the same appetite as he did the food, soaking up every tip and trick, failing more often than succeeding to recreate the years of wisdom others gained in the smoky pits of Texas, before finally creating something he was proud of.
Let’s cut to the happy ending for a minute—the Mattar Farm is not just a brand name, it’s a real place in Dubai. It is the sanctuary in which Mattar, now 38, has planted his spirit and watched it bloom. Esquire Middle East went to visit it in February, and Mattar’s boundless energy reverberated off of every surface—a patch of heaven full of goats, chickens, ducks and rabbits, of still-growing vegetables that Mattar plucks from the earth so you can taste how they are supposed to taste.
Mattar welcomed us with open arms on the condition that we bring along with us a healthy appetite, to which we were happy to oblige. Currently, over one fire was a prime rib—that was for his family’s dinner—and over another was one of his latest projects, chicken wings. It’s hard to imbue the words ‘chicken wings’ with mic-drop energy, or make it feel as if there is a herculean effort involved that requires an encyclopaedic knowledge to execute properly, but trust us, there is, and they do.
Everything, Mattar explained, starts with the smoke. If you’ve got the wrong smoke, you’ve got nothing. Mattar burns only oak—which he has to source from woods in Romania, Texas, and England.
Sometimes his wood guy runs out of the right wood, and with that, Mattar loses his first ingredient.
“They’re like, ‘uh, we’ve got apple wood’. I’m like, ‘I know where you live!’ That changes the flavour of the brisket completely! It changes the flavour of everything!” said Mattar, who now has stockpiles of oak around his farm. Even when you have the right wood, it can get tricky.
“If it’s got bark on it, that’s acrid smoke. If it’s not white smoke, you’re in trouble. If you put a piece of wood on there and mid-burn the smoke changes colour, you take everything off. If the wood is contaminated, you’ll taste the contamination in the food. You’re constantly having to make sure,” said Mattar.
It’s a slow grind, and most of the food Mattar makes takes days. The wings, for example, took two. First, he brines them in honey, water, salt, sugar, some onion, and some garlic for at least a day. Then they have to go on into the smoker, instead of drying out, even though smoking them is by far the slowest option.
He has no choice, he explains—if you grill chicken wings, they get hard, and super dry. His are crispy and juicy because during the smoking process, they sweat out the brine, not their juice.
Then comes the homemade sauce—butter, vinegar, hot sauce, blended peppers, salt, a bit of sugar, garlic, all rendered down.
“How are they?” Mattar asked.
I responded with an exclamation not fit for print.
“That’s what I like to hear.”
Mattar then brought out some jerky he’s been working on, with the aim of selling them at petrol stations around the country.
“And how is this?”
“It’s good!” I say, in a tone slightly higher than normal. That response causes Mattar to furrow his brow.
“That’s not what I like to hear… Alright, I guess we’ll keep working at it,” says Mattar.
In 2015, after Mattar finally reached a point where he felt he’d perfected the art of the smoke, he went back to Texas, the same place he tried the brisket sandwich that changed his life, to put himself to the real test—an apprenticeship with a true Texas pitmaster, Bryan Bracewell of Southside Market, a smokehouse founded in 1882.
“God bless Bryan 10,000 times, I asked him if I could and he asked, ‘when can you start?’ I said, ‘are you joking?’”
Mattar was nervous—this wasn’t in cosmopolitan Houston, this was in Bastrop, a place where the double-duty Ford F-350s had stickers on the back that said, ‘We don’t call the cops, we have our own guns.’ Mattar was suddenly extremely aware of his non-whiteness as an Arab guy from the other side of the world. He didn’t know if the only smoke he’d smell would be from the end of a gun barrel.
In that moment, he remembered, once again, what his mother taught him—food and fire bring people together.
“I was introduced to a man named Carter Jennings. He said ‘howdy’, gave me a big handshake, asked me if I knew what I was doing, and I said ‘yes, sir.’”
They smoked “everything under the sun”, from four o’clock in the morning until nightfall. Then, when they finished, with their hands covered in soot and ash, with the smell of smoke in so deep you couldn’t wash it out, Jennings, Bracewell and company took Mattar out to their secret spot on the Colorado River.
“We hung out, they drank, we talked religion, we talked culture. They asked me to tell them about Egypt, I asked them to tell me about where they grew up. Our linchpin was barbecuing, and because of that everyone was disarmed. There was no awkward small talk. We were eating, we were high-fiving, we were telling stories. Wallahi, I swear on my children, it was life-changing for me,” said Mattar.
Until COVID-19 hit, Mattar would go back to Houston often, making sure to spend a week with them each trip, bringing them baklava and dates. Some days they would paddle the Guadalupe River, them with a hopsy beverage in hand, him with a cherry coke. Some days they’d just cook. Mostly they’d talk family. It’s friendship that lasts to this day.
Back home, however, there was still a hole in his life he was still fighting to fill. The part of him that was ‘husband’ filled so much of his mind and heart that he ramped up the number of events that Mattar Farm appeared at, just to see the same familiar faces return to eat his food, just to know he’d made someone’s day.
“Someone would come and say, ‘oh my God, I miss you!’ and I would think, ‘phew, somebody cares’. I was asked once what my secret is, and the truth is, it’s that I remember every single person that comes to eat my food. The point of this is the connection. If we didn’t have our events, consistently, parts of me would wither. It’s an addiction.”
Even before his divorce, Mattar was the type of guy whose ‘love language’ was ‘words of affirmation’—a need he now knows the terms for and is able to articulate. In previous incarnations of himself, he was an undefeated professional fighter who fought on the undercard with George St. Pierre, regarded as one of the greatest of all MMA fighters. Before that, he was the captain of the swim team, wrestling team, and track team, with records at his university that stood until 2010.
“We weren’t a family that says, ‘I’m proud of you’, so I was always chasing that,” said Mattar.
Mattar Farm fills that need like nothing ever has before.
“This gives me that in metric tonnes. Digitally, analoguely, in person, in the press. All I hear is, ‘I’m proud of you, I’m proud of you, I’m proud of you.’ It makes it easier to sleep.”
Through his food, he’s even been able to reconcile with some of the people who told him he’d never amount to anything, including an old boss at a major security company who once fired him on his birthday, when he was at his lowest point eight years ago. That manager knew that he had the uncanny ability to connect with people, but at the time, that that power wasn’t being channelled into something productive.
“He said to me, ‘I’m letting you go just because your attitude reflects on your peers and your peers look up to you. And because they look up to you so much, it’s a detriment to follow you because of how you’re behaving. If you were a better leader, you would have gotten promoted. But now because what you’re doing, we have to let you go’,” said Mattar. “Now he comes to my events, and he shakes my hand every time.”
Mattar has since retired his ‘Adamantium Heart’ journal, and for the last four years has written in one with a different title—Kintsugi, the Japanese art of putting broken pottery pieces back together with gold, making them stronger and more beautiful for having been broken. The gold that’s filled his cracks are the barbecue and the joy it’s brought both him and everyone who’s tried it, and he’s stronger than he ever was without it.
Perhaps most importantly, he’s found that his new life, and the space he’s built for himself and his family, have made him a better father.
“They live an analogue life on this farm, climbing the trees, scratching their hands, getting eggs, doing chores, mucking about in the tables. I don’t have to lecture them about gratitude, because they saw how long it took to make each egg. They feel it. When I say ‘Say alhamdulillah’, they say ‘alhamdulillah’. The lesson is right in their hands,” said Mattar.
When he first started rebuilding himself, he had a mantra—father, fighter, farmer, flyer.
“Father first, and then fighter, not in the physical sense. I’m fighting for all of these things that I want and that I need. Farmer, as you can see, I’m cultivating that literally and figuratively. And then flyer because when I first went skydiving, I thought I couldn’t do it. I just thought of all the people who told me I couldn’t do it, and I said I can, and I did it. I repeated this over and over—father, fighter, farmer, flyer—until I became that.
And that’s who I am now,” said Mattar.
Now, Mattar has a community behind him.
“I will say with extreme humility and gratitude. I am Dubai’s native son. I’m from here, I’m by here. I’m for here. From the city, by the city. When they think of the best brands to represent Dubai, they call us first.”
Now, with each accomplishment, Mattar feels he’s completed his goal, and become the person that deep down he knew—and at some points maybe just hoped—he could become. With each new milestone, he showers, he prays, and he says to himself—alhamdulillah, if I only get this, I’m happy.
Food and fire.
Photos: Ajith Narendra
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