Interiors · Dubai
Reading time: 6 minAt the centre of Of The Earth, in Alserkal Avenue, there is a living tree. The whole café is built as a circle around it, fourteen arches gathered like an amphitheatre, because the idea behind the place is simple and literal: everything begins with the earth. And here, for once, that is not a slogan. The produce comes from the founder’s own family farm.
Most restaurants put something impressive at their centre. A bar, a grand table, an open kitchen. Of The Earth, the farm-to-table café that has quietly opened in Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue, puts a living tree there instead, and builds the entire room around it.
That single gesture tells you what the place is about. The tree is the still point, and the café gathers around it in a circle of fourteen sweeping arches, each three metres high, arranged like a small amphitheatre. The philosophy of the restaurant is that everything begins with the earth, and rather than print that on a wall, the design simply makes it true: the room literally centres on something growing out of the ground. It is a lovely, unliteral kind of literal, and it is why Of The Earth is more interesting than the many cafés Dubai opens every week.
But the tree is only the visible half of the story. The other half is who planted the idea, and where the food actually comes from.
A genuinely Emirati story
This is the part that lifts Of The Earth above a pleasant interior, and it deserves to be told plainly.
The café was founded by a young Emirati entrepreneur, Alia Khalid Abdulghaffar, and it grows out of a conviction that the UAE has a local food story worth telling. The wider world tends to imagine this country as desert incapable of growing anything, a place where everything must be flown in. That picture is wrong, and Of The Earth is a quiet correction to it. Much of the produce comes from the founder’s own family farm, and the menu is shaped by what UAE farms actually provide through the seasons.
That fact changes how you read everything else. This is not an imported European farm-to-table aesthetic dressed up for Dubai. It is an Emirati narrative, one that “has always existed,” being re-expressed for a contemporary audience by someone with a direct, personal stake in it. When the design reaches for the silhouettes of dunes, of vernacular shelters, of the old souk, it is not decoration borrowed from the region. It is the founder’s own heritage, made into a room. The authenticity is not a marketing claim here. It is literally where breakfast comes from.
Tom Rutt, and the meaning of the circle
To build the space, Abdulghaffar brought in the British architect Tom Rutt, a Spear’s 500 designer whose studio has a real feel for sculptural, material-led hospitality interiors. His response to the brief is disciplined and single-minded, and it all comes back to one shape.
Rutt organises the whole café as a circle. The fourteen arches curve around the central tree, their forms softened and tactile, recalling the dunes and shelters of the region rather than any hard geometry. And the choice of the circle is not only aesthetic, it is symbolic, and unusually apt. A circle is continuous and whole, a shape with no beginning and no end, which is exactly the right emblem for a place about the cycle that runs from land to table and back again. Seed to plate to soil. The building is a diagram of its own philosophy, and it never once has to say so.
Around that central ring, light filters down onto the tree and sweeps across marble details and curved surfaces, giving the café a serene, almost gallery-like calm. In a district defined by its art spaces, that quiet is not accidental. Of The Earth is designed to be read with the same attention you would give the galleries next door.
The souk, reimagined
There is one more borrowed idea in the room, and it is handled with real subtlety.
At the centre, near the tree, sit curved display tables carrying pastries, produce and a few lifestyle pieces. The reference is the Emirati souk, the traditional market, but stripped of its noise and crowds and rebuilt as something minimal and sculptural. Instead of bustling stalls, there are quiet, elegant displays, so that browsing and choosing become part of a gentle, design-led performance. Guests seated beneath the arches are not just customers. They are, softly, part of the scene, watching and being watched in the oldest ritual of the marketplace, slowed right down.
It is theatre without volume, and it captures what the whole café is trying to do: take something deeply familiar from Emirati life and present it again, calmly, for now.
Part café, part shop, part gallery
The edges of Of The Earth blur in a way that suits its home.
A curated lifestyle corner offers homeware and merchandise that echo the interior’s clean, natural aesthetic, so the boundary between café, concept store and gallery quietly dissolves. In most places that would feel like a retail add-on. In Alserkal Avenue, Dubai’s cultural district of galleries and studios, it feels exactly right, a natural extension of a neighbourhood where art, design and daily life already run together. The menu, meanwhile, stays deliberately short: precise speciality coffee, fresh juices from local fruit and vegetables, a small selection of pastries, and seasonal dishes led by the farms. The restraint is the point. Of The Earth refines rather than expands, and treats a short menu as a design decision as much as a culinary one.
Frequently asked questions
What is Of The Earth? A farm-to-table café in Alserkal Avenue, Dubai, founded by Emirati entrepreneur Alia Khalid Abdulghaffar. It is part eatery, part coffee and juice bar, and part lifestyle shop, using produce largely from the founder’s own family farm.
Who designed it? The British architect Tom Rutt, a Spear’s 500 designer, whose interior is built around a central living tree and a circle of arches.
What is the central design idea? A circular room of fourteen three-metre arches, arranged like an amphitheatre around a living tree, symbolising the cycle from land to table that defines the café’s philosophy.
What inspired the look? The dunes, vernacular shelters and traditional souk of the UAE, reinterpreted through soft, sculptural forms and an earthy, calming palette.
Where is it? In Alserkal Avenue, Dubai’s cultural district of galleries and creative studios.
Final thoughts
Dubai opens cafés almost daily, and most of them reach for spectacle. Of The Earth reaches instead for meaning, and finds it in the simplest possible image: a tree at the centre of a circle, with the whole room turned towards it.
What makes the place resonate is that its beautiful, calm design is not a costume over an empty idea. Behind the arches and the marble is a real Emirati story, a founder serving her own family’s harvest, quietly insisting that this land grows things and always has. Tom Rutt’s architecture does not sit politely around that story. It completes it, turning a philosophy into a shape you can walk into and sit down inside. In a city that so often mistakes loudness for luxury, a café built around a living tree, telling the truth about where its food comes from, feels like the more confident gesture by far.
Leave a Reply