​Saudi Diaries — Part 10: — The Bites, The Sips, and 20 Kilograms of Dates (Foodie Adventures Pt. 2)

This blog is called Bite&Sip. Nine parts in, and I’ve barely stopped to talk about the food — which, if you know me, is a little absurd. So let’s fix that.
Because if I trace the shape of this trip so far, it runs straight through my stomach. The overwhelming breakfast spread that nearly defeated me in Part 4. The shawarma stand in Yanbu that I still think about, dripping garlic sauce down my wrist somewhere on the road to AlUla. The tiny cups of Arabic coffee that kept appearing — in shops, in offices, in the back seat of a car — like punctuation marks between one adventure and the next. And the dates. Always, always the dates.

I didn’t come here to eat. I came here to see the sights. But somewhere between the desert and the coast, I realized that the food was the sightseeing. You don’t understand a place by looking at it. You understand it by tasting what its people have decided, over centuries, is worth sharing.
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Jeddah vs. The Smaller Places
Jeddah is a food lover’s playground. In a few days there, we discovered Italian, Indian, Turkish, Japanese, American,... The city is cosmopolitan in the truest sense — it has absorbed the world’s cuisines and made room for all of them on the same street.
It was delicious. It was also, in a strange way, familiar. I could have been in London, or Dubai, or a dozen other global cities with good restaurants.
Then we left the city.
In Yanbu, at the roadside stops between towns, and later in AlUla, the options thinned out. No sushi. No fusion tacos. Just small, unglamorous Saudi restaurants — the kind with plastic chairs and menus on the wall above the cashier and no interest in impressing a tourist.
And that, that was the culinary gift of this country.
I found myself drawn to these places again and again. Not because I’m a food snob turning up my nose at variety — quite the opposite. It’s that this food doesn’t exist back home. You can’t order it on an app in Vienna. This is what Saudi families actually eat, on an ordinary weekday, with no one watching. This is what I’d flown seven hours to taste, and I wasn’t going to waste the opportunity on a pizza.

Saudi Cuisine 101
For anyone reading this who’s never had a proper Saudi meal, let me give you the basics — the building blocks I kept meeting again and again.
Rice is the foundation. Not an afterthought, not a side. Fragrant, fluffy, often perfumed with saffron, cardamom, cloves, and dried black lemons until the whole room smells like it before the plate even arrives.
Meat — lamb, chicken, goat, camel — is treated with patience. Slow-cooked, charcoal-grilled, or simmered for hours into stews that fall apart at the touch. I never had a tough bite the entire trip.
Vegetables — tomatoes, onions, eggplant, peppers — roasted or charred until their sugars come forward. Sometimes cooked in a stew or steamed.
Spices do the quiet work: cumin, coriander, turmeric, dried lemon, sumac, and warm local blends I couldn’t name but instantly recognized as home cooking, even in a place that wasn’t my home.

This is food designed to feed large families, hardworking people, and big groups. It wasn’t meant to impress a camera, but it still does. This is comfort food — the kind made with love, patience, and generations of practice. And you can taste every one of those years.

AlUla, On a Plate
In AlUla, we tried both ends of the spectrum. One lunch, a polished restaurant called Somewhere gave us a modern, elevated take on traditional Saudi dishes — beautiful plating, clever technique, the kind of place with pretty seating and a designed menu, a list for mocktails. It was excellent.
But the meals I keep replaying happened in the small corner restaurants, the ones where locals actually eat.

Maqluba: The Upside-Down Miracle
Maqluba means “upside down” in Arabic, and the name is the whole show. It’s a layered dish — rice, meat, and fried vegetables like eggplant, tomato, and cauliflower — all cooked together in one pot, then flipped, in one confident motion, onto a serving platter.
The reveal is theatrical. One second, it’s a pot. The next, you lift it away, and there’s a golden dome of vegetables on top, hiding the rice and meat beneath like a secret. There’s always a small pause at the table before anyone reaches for the food — a beat of admiration before the eating starts.
And then the eating starts, and it’s over. The rice has soaked up the juices of the meat and the char of the eggplant. The chicken underneath is falling-apart tender. Honestly, I could eat maqluba every day for the rest of my life and not get tired of it. I’ve said that about very few dishes in my life.

Mashawi: Fire, Meat, Nothing Else
If maqluba is theater, mashawi — the grilled meats — is honesty. Whole grilled chicken, kebabs of mutton, chicken, goat, even liver, cooked over open charcoal until the outside is smoky and charred and the inside is still juicy.
The smell hits you before the food does — charcoal, smoke, fat dripping and hissing. I’ve decided that smell is the smell of happiness. No fussy plating. Just good meat, good fire, thoum, shatta, honey and good company around the table. Sometimes the simplest food is the food you remember longest.

The Dates and Coffee Story
Now, the real reason I sat down to write this post:
We arrived at our apartment in AlUla late in the afternoon, tired from the drive. At the front desk, we were told there was a package waiting for us. A few minutes later, the receptionist appeared at our door — carrying six large white boxes. We opened them, a little confused.
Inside: dates.
Boxes and boxes of them. When we looked at the total, it came to over 20 kilograms of dates. We just stood there, staring at the boxes on the small table of our living room, completely stunned.
Here’s the story behind it. A mutual friend of ours is originally from AlUla but now lives in the UK. He found out we were visiting his hometown. So he called his mother and brother, who live in AlUla, and asked them to bring us dates — from his own family’s farm.
I have never met these people. They had never met us before that afternoon. And yet they welcomed two strangers to their town with 20+kilograms of the best thing their land produces.
The dates themselves deserve their own paragraph. These were nothing like the dry, slightly stale ones you find shrink-wrapped in a supermarket back home. These were soft, almost creamy, rich with a caramel sweetness that seemed to melt before you’d even finished chewing. I understood, in that moment, why dates are sometimes called the gold of this land. It’s not a metaphor. It’s a fairly literal description of value.
And then came the problem — a genuinely funny one. Twenty kilograms of dates. My suitcase was already over its weight allowance before this gift walked through the door. This extraordinary, overwhelming act of kindness had become, quite suddenly, a logistical nightmare.

So we made a plan. I packed two half-kilo bags — a small, precious ration to carry home and share with family, the kind of thing you portion out like medicine. Abdulaziz took some with him. And the rest, we decided, we would give away.
That decision felt less like a sacrifice and more like instinct once we were actually in it. Giving is simply the Saudi way. If you have more than enough of something, you share it with whoever might need it. It’s not unusual to see boxes of bottled water left outside in the heat, free for anyone to take. It’s not unusual to bring extra food to the nearest mosque and leave it for others. Generosity here isn’t a special occasion — it’s a circulatory system. It keeps moving, and everyone downstream benefits.

What I’ll remember isn’t just the taste of those dates, incredible as it was. It’s the chain behind them: a friend in the UK, thinking of us from thousands of kilometers away. His mother and brother in AlUla, dropping what they were doing to deliver a gift to two people they’d never met. All of it, for a stranger passing through.
This is Saudi Arabia. Not as a concept in a guidebook, but as a lived, everyday fact. I was simply lucky enough to be standing there when it happened to me.

And Then, the Sweets
Because apparently 20 kilograms of dates wasn’t enough sugar for one trip, let’s talk desserts.
Kunafa is what ruined me. Shredded phyllo dough, a layer of sweet, stretchy cheese, freshly baked, soaked in sugar syrup, and topped with crushed pistachios. The first bite is a study in contrasts — the crunch of the crisped pastry on top, then the surprising, elastic pull of melted cheese underneath, and finally the syrup, often laced with rose or orange blossom water, tying it all together. I have genuinely never had kunafa quite like it.
Beyond kunafa, there’s a whole world worth exploring: basbousa, a dense, syrup-soaked semolina cake; luqaimat, little fried dough balls drizzled in date syrup that disappear in about two bites each, amazing date-cakes or any French, Italian, world cake imaginable; and, tying it all together, endless small cups of Arabic coffee — bitter, warmed through with cardamom, the perfect sharp counterpoint to anything sweet sitting next to it.

What Food Actually Means Here
In Saudi Arabia, I’ve come to understand that food is not simply fuel. It’s connection. It’s community. It’s a language people use to say things they might not say out loud. Every meal I had was shared, never eaten alone if it could be helped. Every dish was offered with visible pride. Every single date, it turns out, was a gift wrapped in something much bigger than itself.
I came to Saudi Arabia expecting to see ancient tombs carved into rock and futuristic cities rising from the desert. I’m leaving with a full stomach and, somehow, an even fuller heart.
I may have arrived in Saudi Arabia as a tourist. But I’m leaving as someone who has been fed — not just by the food, but by the people who shared it with me. And those 20 kilograms of dates? They were never just dates. They’re a reminder that in this country, generosity has no limit.
In a country of endless deserts, I found endless generosity. And in 20 kilograms of dates, I found a story I’ll be telling for the rest of my life.