Where to stay

Travel Information

Currency is the rial. Muscat is four hours ahead of GMT. The average temperature is 28°C, with highs of 38°C in summer and lows of 19°C in winter. The best time to visit is from from late September to early April.

GETTING THERE - Oman Air (08444 822309; omanair.com) offers daily direct flights to Muscat from London Heathrow

RESOURCES - Oman Ministry of Tourism (omantourism.gov.om) the UK Representative Office can be contacted on 020 8877 4524, email oman@representationplus.co.uk

FURTHER READING - Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger (Penguin, £9.99). Classic travel memoir by one of the 20th century’s greatest explorers, about his journey from Sudan to Oman through Arabia’s ‘Empty Quarter’.

Where to eat

There was no restaurant culture in Oman before oil. The Western impact has been strong, with retail fast food chains flocking to the malls. In the big hotels too, the cuisine is global. Omanis are opening Arabic restaurants where seating is a mixture of segregated and family areas. Here, menus tend to be a blend of Indian, European and Arabic. Fish is always immaculate, but wellcooked. Meat is always cooked through.

Ubhar Middle Eastern fusion. The cuisine is creative and tasty. There’s a lightness of touch with dishes that owe much to chef Kenza’s skill. £63 for two people. Bareeq Al Shatti Mall, 00 968 24 699826

Kargeen More of an Arabic Hard Rock than a fine dining restaurant, this has indoor and outdoor areas. The latter gets crowded with shisha smokers in the evening; some of the shishas have an over-the-top exuberance about them, flavoured with melon and coconuts. Fresh juices and mocktails are excellent. Snack food from £3; meals from £31 for two. Al Wattayah, 00 968 24 699055, kargeencaffe.com

White Coral Seafood & Grills Although specialising in grilled fish, it has a private ‘tearoom’ where Arabic meals are served and, with notice, the chef will cook shuwa for parties. From £31 for two people. Azaiba, 00 968 22 020307, whitecoraloman@gmail.com

Food Glossary

Fattah

Casseroled meat with pieces of flatbread to soak up the gravy.

Gole

A pancake with Zanzibar origins, a popular post-Ramadan treat.

Halwa

Not to be confused with Greek sesame halva. It’s more jellylike and aromatic, with spices.

Kahwa

Omani coffee isn’t strong. It’s clear, lightly roasted and perfumed with cardamom or rosewater.

Makbous

Similar to pilaf, this is flavoured rice, mixed with the juices from the meat, fish or chicken with which it’s served.

Mashakeek

Marinated kebabs that are sold by hawkers.

Paplou

Mild, lightly spiced seafood soup.

Rukhal

Very thin flatbread

Shuwa

A generic term to describe a whole sheep, goat or even a bullock, marinated in a spice mixture and then baked for up to 48 hours underground.

Food and Travel Review

Masoud shows me a weather app on his iPhone – 50°C, warm enough to bake a molecular sheep. ‘When it gets this hot,’ he says, ‘they’re supposed to announce a public holiday, but they never do.’ He’s wearing an immaculate, tailored cotton dishdasha and embroidered cap, or kumma, to protect his head. Is he a guide, a farmer, an engineer, a property developer, a man from the Ministry? All of these, perhaps. He’s an Omani – his roles in life are fluid, shifting like desert sands.

The yellowish heat haze clings to the land and the flat Muscat rooftops cluttered with satellite dishes, dulling the minaret spires, beaches and jagged rocks beside the freeways out of the city. Nobody walks outside if they can help it. How Sinbad the Sailor, born in Oman, survived without air-conditioning is the stuff of which fairy tales are made.

Oil-rich it may be, but Dubai it isn’t. Oman’s Sultan, Qaboos Bin Said Al Said, juggles Bedouin values – faith, tribe and family – with mod cons. At the first hint of unrest in 2011 he sacked his government en masse. ‘What people would like to see,’ Masoud says, ‘is the corrupt ministers put on trial.’

Masoud has learnt the trick of resolving Islam with the West. At 4am he wakes his 10-year-old son for prayer. In the afternoon, he lets him go and see Kung Fu Panda 2. When one favourite aunt had a stroke, his family sent her to India for treatment. When another was temporarily possessed by a genie, they called in a mufti exorcist.

At Old Mutrah Souk, he buys frankincense. Burnt over charcoal, its scent masks cooking smells, freshens robes and perfumes the elevators at the luxury Al Bustan Palace hotel. Chewed, it forms a white, sticky gum. The quality ranges in price from a few rials per kilo for the lowest grade to a small fortune for the finest greenywhite pebbles of Hojari. Equivalent to extra virgin olive oil, it’s the first resinous sap extracted from a gash in the trunk of boswellia sacra, a tree that grows in Dhofar to the south.

In the souks, most women are clad in black abayas, by choice and as a fashion statement. In shopping malls like City Center, a Middle Eastern Brent Cross, they are just one form of garb among many. Masoud reads clothes like a code he has cracked: ‘She is from Iran. She is from Syria. She is from Lebanon. She’s Indian. He is from Zanzibar.’ Different nationalities buy the same groceries from Carrefour, eat the same Big Macs. At Marble Slab or Cold Stone creamery, they mix and match designer ice creams scooped by ‘crew members’ who behave like baristas.

There’s a historical inevitability to this cultural fusion. Conquered by Persians, Ottomans and Portuguese, Oman’s identity hasn’t changed since the dawn of Islam, when it became home to Ibadism, a sect distinct from the two main Sunni and Shia branches. Western colonial powers never carved out artificial frontiers here as they did for Iraq or Saudi Arabia. Whether trading in copper or slaves (run from its Zanzibar dependency) Oman has been an independent state ruled by its Sultan for the past 270 years.

Oman’s past and present collide in the deep water of Mutrah Harbour. The Royal Yacht, built in Bremen, flags up the purchase power of fossil fuel. A cable-length away a porter runs his barrowload of fish along a jetty shouting ‘Yallah Yallah Yallah!’ – ‘Let’s go!’ He’s taking the catch to the fish market. The Sea of Oman is ultrarich in its own way: yellowfin tuna, kingfish, albacore, red mullet, bream, grouper, garfish, prawns and abalone are landed, sparkling fresh. They change hands for very little – a bagful of crabs with another bag of crushed ice to keep them fresh sells for a couple of rials (about £3).

Masoud’s wife curries them with garlic and ginger. With turmeric, they flavour paplou, a fish soup prepared at Ubhar restarurant by Moroccan-born chef, Kenza. Based on a light red onion, tomato and turmeric broth, it’s simmered until the vegetables cook out. Cubes of prawn and fish are added just before serving. Its secret ingredient is Omani lemon: ripe limes that are slightly salted and then dried till the skin turns brittle and the flesh charcoal grey.

Kenza’s menu includes three separate camel dishes. Fattah is a stew layered with shards of flatbread. As a kind of Lebanese-inspired fusion, she combines a bowl of hummus with minced and glazed camel meat. Her third recipe is a flaky pastilla packed with shredded, spiced meat and dried apricots.

At dusk, Masoud takes us to Azaiba beach for what he rates the best mashakeek in town. BMWs, Maseratis and Jeeps park on dead ground between shore and promenade. He spots a relative with a fistful of the kebabs: ‘See the fat man over there? He’s related to my wife. He’s a racing driver. I don’t know how he gets inside the car.’

Saleh, the hawker, stands behind a tray of hot coals, fanning bamboo skewers of lamb and splashing the fire with water to smoke them. Marinated in chilli and tamarind, they are delicious. The squid ones are, if anything, better. There’s a bowl of peppery soup with potato, onion and falafel to accompany them.

Omanis echo medieval Arab culture by eating large amounts of meat at large parties. Banqueting and feasting is more natural than restaurant dining. aidat Al-Naman, a caterer, farms goats, sheep, cattle and young camels to meet the demand. He feeds as many 20,000 covers for some events. During Eid, the three days following Ramadan, feasting centres on shuwa. ‘In our village,’ Masoud says, ‘we kill six or seven sheep and a cow and bake them in the earth.’ Restaurants have latched on to the tradition. Order a sheep at White Coral and the chef will smear a mutton carcass with spices and vinegar, wrap it in banana leaves, pack it in a basket made from dried grass, bury it a metre deep over hot charcoal, seal it and leave it to bake for 24 hours. It results in a crusty, savoury surface with tender, reddish, slightly corned meat.

In a country that lived at a subsistence level until it struck oil, rice still is the staple. Boiled and sprinkled with crumbled, sun-dried whitebait (baby sardines) and a squeeze of fresh lime it’s a meal. Makbous may contain spices, tomato or saffron. Biryani, imported from India, is more elaborate.

Rukhal, flatbread, is a skill a mother teaches her daughters. Slapped on a griddle by hand, it sets within seconds. She scrapes off any uneven bits and flips the disc onto the growing pile. Scrapings aren’t wasted. Stewed with date syrup, they’re a cook’s perk or offered to guests along with dates before a meal.

The perfect accompaniment for these wafer-thin galettes is honey. It’s both rare and precious. The cheapest costs about 25 rials per kilo and the finest over 60 rials (£100). It comes from native bees found in the mountain villages around Rustaq, an hour’s drive from the capital. Beekeepers make their hives from hollowed palm logs. There are two short harvesting seaons, during one, the bees collect nectar from acacias, during the other, from cedar. The honey is sold in recycled Vimto bottles. Pouring it on bread or the popular Zanzibar pancakes, gole, calls for patience. It’s dark, viscous and malty.

In classic Arab cuisine, honey was an ingredient of the sweet known as halwa. Nowadays, sugar has replaced it. Making halwa in a copper maslin pan takes two hours of unremitting stirring. It’s flavoured with a blend of nuts and spices. In a lighter version, it’s tinged with Iranian saffron; a dark one contains molasses sugar.

‘No halwa, no party’ is a double-edged proverb. One part is obvious; it’s essential to the enjoyment. The other is less so. When guests arrive in a home the first things they are offered, even before coffee, are halwa and dates.

Of the latter, Masoud says that an early variety, Naghal, is in season. The fresh ones turn from cream to brown as they ripen. Some cognoscenti like them underripe when they are still astringent. Others prefer them like toffee. Naghal isn’t the most desirable kind, though; Al Khunaizi is sweeter and Al Khalas tastier. Masoud has 120 date palms on his family farm. Each year he auctions the crop to bidders who buy a tree that may yield up to 200kg. A palm that dies is like a loss in his family. Following 15 years of drought in his region, he has lost five.

Ritual forms an integral part of Arab greeting and hospitality. Coffee comes in small eggshell cups. When empty, a host continues to refill them until the guest shakes his from side to side. It’s a sign of politeness to drink three. Omani coffee, kahwa, isn’t strong however; it’s fragrant, scented with cardamom and sometimes rosewater from pink-petticoated Al Jabal al Akhdhar roses (they’re a key ingredient in the famous Muscat perfume, Amouage, too).

There should always be more food served than everyone can eat: ‘If you have one guest prepare enough for two, two guests enough for four or four guests enough for eight,’ Masoud elaborates. Eat using the right hand and try everything that’s offered. If conversation languishes, it’s a compliment to the host, a sign that the meal is being relished.

Muscat isn’t an oasis of skyscrapers, with restaurants sponsored by jet-lagged star chefs. Nor is it time-warped, fundamentalist or aggressive. It’s a city with a trading history going back 5,000 years, when it exported copper, so it knows a bit about travel. As a host it’s courteous, but on its own terms. It demands and warrants respect. And it’s a place to which those who visit it would, insha’Allah, happily go back.