Depending on your stance, the art of chivalry is either dead, or very much alive. The concept of being courteous, polite and kind has very little middle ground, it either makes up a central part of your values or it is for suckers. As the name would suggest, for Chivalry Gentlemen’s Salon, the former mentally is very much part of its founding ethos.
Located in Dubai’s high-rise haven of South Ridge, Chivalry was one of the city’s original independent high-end barbershops—marrying a sleek contemporary aesthetic with the service-obsessed mentality of an old-school British barber shop. While that field certainly has become much more fiercely competitive, over the years Chivalry has remained true to its principles and adapted.
“Since I was a teenager, I always wanted to create a barbershop where men could come, hang out and leave the place happier than when they walked in,” says founder Mustafa Abbas. It is unsurprising that a man who created a salon called ‘Chivalry’ would cite community and customer satisfaction as the driving forces behind his business, but seven years down the line remains constant. “We have one rule: nobody leaves Chivalry unhappy,” he says.
The salon is not somewhere that you are likely to stumble upon, in fact most people not living in Downtown Dubai will only have heard of it via word of mouth, but once you’ve experienced it you are unlikely to forget it. The dark wood paneling, brickwork interior, Belmont barber chairs, Chesterfield sofas, and waist-coated barbers all hark back to elements of a traditional upmarket British barbers—but with the added value of world class Dubai-adapted service culture.
The greetings are genuine, the advice is honest and the hospitality is detailed. The books of salon may include celebrities and high-ranking politicians, but Abbas insists that once you walk through the doors, every customer is treated like a VIP. Because if Chivalry is dead, no one told that to these guys.
