Est. 2019 — Dubai
The rub shelf
Four blends, ground in small batches, used on everything that touches the grill.
Everything that leaves the pass at Cravings has been through one of these four, ground upstairs in Dubai. No jar on the shelf is older than the week it was made.
Charred onion, black garlic, smoked salt
Onion skins charred black on the flat top, dried overnight, then ground down with the salt they dried on.
Three chillies, toasted over coals
Three chillies laid straight on the coals until the edges catch, cracked while they are still warm enough to smell across the room.
Long pepper and cracked coriander
Long pepper for the heat that arrives late, coriander for the edge that gets there first.
Reduced until it turns bitter, then stopped
Held on the heat past amber and pulled the second it turns. The window is about ten seconds wide and nothing saves it after.
Down the line
None of this is a finishing salt in a bowl on the counter. Each blend has one job and one moment on the line, and by the time a burger is wrapped all four have been and gone.
Black salt goes in with the chuck the morning it is ground. Nothing gets seasoned after that.
Night pepper hits the patty as it meets the flat top, so it toasts into the crust instead of sitting on it.
Ember chilli is dusted on standing, close enough to the window that it never has time to soften.
Burnt honey goes on last, while the cheese is still moving.
Kept upstairs
Grinding happens on a Tuesday, in batches sized to run out by the following Monday. A blend that sits for a month tastes of the jar it sat in rather than of what went into it.
Nothing is added to make a jar outlast the spice inside it — no anti-caking agent, no rice flour, no colour. When a blend runs out at Cravings it is off the board until the next grind.
Next
Every jar on this shelf is already on the board at Cravings. Burnt honey is the only one you taste on its own; the other three you find in the crust.
