Emirates Woman and Aurōm mark Emirati Women’s Month with a celebratory experience

Lifestyle

Aurōm’s space at the JW Marriott Marquis Hotel Dubai filled with the scent of Arabic coffee and cardamom on Thursday, September 17. Emirates Woman had gathered an intimate circle of notable women from across the UAE’s creative landscape, among them artists, fashion designers and entrepreneurs, to mark Emirati Women’s Month with an afternoon that felt closer to a shared ritual than a straightforward meal. The timing gave the gathering an added edge of discovery, arriving only weeks after Aurōm itself had opened as one of the most distinctive new concepts to emerge from JW Marriott Marquis Dubai’s property-wide enhancement project in Business Bay.

Aurōm describes itself as a transformative botanical beverage lab and specialty coffee destination, developed in collaboration with The Herball and the internationally acclaimed botanical innovator Michael Isted. At its core sits a practice of botanical extraction and fermentation, the slow, deliberate processes through which the brand draws flavour and character out of raw ingredients before precision coffee ever enters the picture, positioning Aurōm as something considerably broader than a café.

The name draws on Aurum, the Latin word for gold, a choice that folds in ideas of prosperity and transformation while quietly nodding to Dubai’s own history of pearl diving. That same instinct for turning heritage into something newly made runs through the physical space, where earthy botanical tones meet brushed gold and pearlescent finishes, and where mirrored surfaces and translucent glass give the room an atmosphere that reads as mystical without losing its sense of precision.

That same instinct for reinvention extended to the menu, which was curated by Emirati chef and restaurateur Faisal Naser, known regionally for his career spent tracing the evolution of the UAE’s culinary scene from the shawarma shops of his childhood to the sprawling, internationally minded food culture Dubai has become. Naser has spoken often about what draws him to Emirati cuisine in particular, pointing to the way it carries Indian and Persian influence alongside a Bedouin instinct for minimalism, resulting in food built for comfort rather than spectacle, and that same sensibility shaped his approach to the Aurōm lunch.

The afternoon began with a welcome drink chosen for scent as much as taste, an Arabic coffee infused with saffron and cardamom served alongside its own coffee scent, or a citrus hydrosol built from mandarin, lemon, lime and bergamot leaf. The food that followed brought Emirati home cooking through Aurōm’s fermentation lab, with poached eggs and whipped fetta shakshouka served over the venue’s own house-fermented sourdough pitta, a Shirazi salad brightened by zaatar croutons and a tomato and fennel consommé, and a black garlic and loomi samoon that worked tamarind aioli and loomi chimichurri into something distinctly local.

Dessert continued the same thread of reinvention, from a chocolate mousse finished with cacao nib crisps and honeycomb to an Aurōm cookie built on dates, fennel and tahini, while the beverage list offered a non-alcoholic take on ritual drinking through a sumac and pomegranate botanical spirit, a Luban soda scented with frankincense and sea salt, and an Arabic coffee soda layered with saffron.

Midway through the afternoon, guests took part in a perfume workshop built around Aurōm’s signature botanical elements, before settling in for a conversation between Michael Isted and Jessica Michault, senior editor at Emirates Woman, who spoke about what it means to build a space for mindful socialising in a city more often associated with speed.

For a venue only weeks into its life in Dubai, the gathering offered an early and fitting introduction, bringing together the UAE’s foremost tastemakers around a table built on the idea that ritual, when done with enough intention, can hold both heritage and invention at once.

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Images: Supplied