Champagne vending machines. Caviar for breakfast. Beyoncé playing the opening gala. Sophia Money-Coutts went to Dubai’s new $2.1 billion hotel. So did she like it?
It sounds like the start of a weird joke: Ronan Keating, Jay-Z and Jodie Kidd walk into a bar. Except here in Dubai, at the launch of the world’s blingiest hotel, it is literally happening in front of me. Ronan Keating and his wife, Storm, are leaning on the beach bar drinking with a gaggle of other British celebrities. There’s TV presenter Kirsty Gallacher, TOWIE star Mark Wright and his wife, Coronation Street star Michelle Keegan. There’s Jodie Kidd in a kaftan, sunglasses on head, hair wavy from the sea, and Natalie Pinkham, the Sky Sports presenter once linked to Prince Harry, along with Marvin and Rochelle Humes, singers turned TV and radio presenters.
They are, I think it’s fair to say, steaming. The mood is jubilant; the volume high. It’s Gallacher’s birthday, she tells me, holding a bottle of (free) Moët champagne, so they’re celebrating. “Cheers!” someone shouts, as they knock back (free) shots of Kendall Jenner’s tequila, 818. Jenner is also here this weekend to celebrate the opening of the hotel but she’s not here right now. Maybe she’s upstairs in her suite having her eyebrows fluffed.
And all of this would be extraordinary enough, were it not for the fact that the world’s first billionaire rapper is sitting on a table beside the bar, drinking (free) Coronas while playing a game of backgammon. As a big backgammon fan, I wonder if I can go up and ask Jay-Z whether he plays the rule where you can put more than five counters on one point, because I hate that rule and think it ruins the game. (“Excuse me, Mr Z, can I just ask…”) It seems a good idea because I’m pretty steaming myself, having been on the (free) Whispering Angel all afternoon. But just as I’m on the verge of getting up to ask this important backgammon question, the boxer Amir Khan walks in and asks Jay-Z for a selfie.
By this point, if Lord Lucan strolled in off the beach and ordered a martini, I’d probably think, “Well, yes, obviously.”
Welcome to the launch weekend of Atlantis The Royal in Dubai, a £1.1 billion (NZ$2.1b) hotel that’s been eight years in the making, developed by the Kerzner hotel group. If you’re aged 23 and a major player on TikTok, you may think it a modern architectural masterpiece. The lobby has been entirely designed for social media: there’s a whopping metallic structure that looks like mercury drops in the middle of it, two huge fish aquariums either side, and glass walls that simultaneously run with water and burst into flames which, the hotel’s general manager, Tim Kelly, later proudly tells me, “are the first fire and water walls in the Middle East”. (Is this desirable? Should we all have fire and water walls in our homes now? It’s potentially quite annoying as I’ve only just finished my renovations in southeast London and didn’t think to include them.) There are more pink orchids and hydrangeas than you might expect at an oligarch’s wedding. It is… a lot.
Tomorrow night, Beyoncé is shimmying onstage for the big gala evening, her first live performance for four years, which is why her husband is here playing backgammon in the beach bar, and 1500 celebrities (of varying degrees) and influencers have been flown out, given suites and rooms, and encouraged to swallow as much free food and booze from any of the hotel’s 17 restaurants as they can.
No menu has a price on it so you can order whatever you like, whenever you like, and one of the hotel’s 3000 members of staff will ferry it over. Fancy Heston Blumenthal’s famous Meat Fruit, a golf ball of chicken liver paté disguised to look like a mandarin? There’s an incarnation of his Michelin-starred London restaurant Dinner here, and I perhaps unwisely eat seven or eight of the things at a cocktail party on the first night. There’s a Nobu on the Beach, so you can dribble black cod over yourself while wearing a bikini, and a vast outpost of Milos, the St James’s restaurant run by Greek celebrity chef Estiatorio Milos, where you can pick a Dover sole or sea bass from a mountain of ice and have it grilled, perhaps with a nice bottle of sancerre. All free. Breakfast is genuinely absurd, but we’ll come to that.
Beside one of the hotel’s 90 swimming pools, influencers in cut-out swimming costumes pick at burrata salads while drinking from mini bottles of Moët champagne, chosen from the Moët & Chandon vending machines on the lawn behind them. “Please enjoy the Moët & Chandon experience,” murmurs a robotic blonde woman as I walk past, proffering a glass bowl of golden coins. I take a coin, slot it in and pick a mini bottle of champagne as if it’s a packet of Monster Munch after swimming class at school. This is bizarre.
But then Dubai is used to throwing big parties. In 2008, at the launch of the Royal’s sister hotel, Atlantis The Palm, Kylie Minogue sang before “the world’s biggest fireworks display”. “It could be seen in space,” Tim Kelly tells me. An eclectic guest list that included Robert De Niro, Denzel Washington, Lily Allen and the Duchess of York ate 4000 lobsters and knocked back 500 bottles of Dom Pérignon in a Muslim country where residents technically need to have an alcohol licence to drink.
Fifteen years on, can they top that? They’re going to have a good stab. The new hotel, the Royal, is even sillier than its Disney castle relation down the road. A few numbers to impart its scale: there are 795 rooms, including 102 suites. One of the restaurants is supposed to feature the world’s biggest jellyfish aquarium, but sadly that isn’t ready for the opening weekend. (Perhaps the 4000 moon jellyfish got held up by the scowling guards surrounding the hotel’s perimeter? When I arrived, I was given a bracelet allowing me in and out of the security cordon and told, very strictly, not to lose it.) The mile-long beach is the longest stretch of private beach in Dubai. The hotel has been built with 150,000sq m of marble which, I grant you, is a hard number to imagine, but it feels like a lot more than the Parthenon. The floors are so shiny that I worry someone is going to fall into the water features spread across the ground floor, and in fact I’m later told a journalist did fall in on the first night. The hotel has a Graff boutique flogging diamonds, and a Picasso and a Chagall hang side by side in another shop (POA) in case you fancy a quick browse after a day on the sunbed. Always nice to take a present home for the office.
The rooms come equipped with gold-plated combs, gold-plated toothbrushes and a pillow menu which offers a pillow for your feet, one for your pregnant stomach, a “buckwheat” pillow and a “cool down” one stuffed with gel that will soothe your sunburn. If you fancy some winter vitamin D, a night in a “normal” room starts at £800 a night. A night in a suite with its own infinity pool (44 suites come with their own swimming pools) clocks in at £6500 a night. A night in the Royal Mansion suite, where Beyoncé is staying with her husband and their children, will set you back £80,000. It comes with Hèrmes shampoo and conditioner and 100-year-old olive trees in its foyer. Don’t you just hate it when your hotel suite doesn’t come with trees?
It’s funny timing, this opening.
In 2008, when the last Atlantis hotel opened in Dubai, Britain was struggling with the credit crunch. Now, as we shiver through recession and strikes they’re showing off again: opening an “ultra-luxury” hotel with a party that would make Jay Gatsby blush.
What exactly is an “ultra-luxury” hotel, I ask Kelly, the GM, slick in a pinstriped suit and Italian loafers.
“I believe it’s the pillars we’ve created,” Kelly says, in smooth corporate patois. In brief, these pillars of “ultra-luxury” include posh rooms, a posh spa, posh retail and posh entertainment, all combined to create, as Kelly explains, “an ultra-luxury experiential resort”. “Nothing compares and nothing competes,” he adds. Might some consider it tasteless to talk about the “ultra-luxury” pillars of a posh hotel in a country where the religion is based on pillars too? Not for me to say.
But then Dubai has never really minded being called tasteless. Since oil was first struck in 1966, it’s grown and mushroomed and boomed and shrugged off all the criticism. And despite the odd crash in house prices, and moments when growth has slowed and expats fled, abandoning their cars at the airport, its trajectory has mostly been upwards, as is the rest of the Gulf’s right now.
Qatar is congratulating itself after the World Cup and there’s speculation that it might put in a bid for the 2036 Olympics; Saudi Arabia has engaged Norman Foster to design the world’s biggest airport in Riyadh, to boost visitor numbers to 100 million by 2030; Dubai is also aiming to boost tourist numbers and has started handing out “golden visas” to those who want to come and live tax-free in the city for up to 10 years, without a sponsor, providing they bring just over £400,000 with them. According to Knight Frank, house prices have more than doubled in two years. I know a couple of Brits in finance who are mulling a move there from London. “No tax. Sun, sea, plus staff for the kids. Why wouldn’t I?” says one.
Hmmm. I lived here for two years, from 2008 until 2010, so I understand the lure of the sun and the tax-free salary. I was 23, offered a job by a newspaper in Abu Dhabi (an hour or so’s drive from Dubai), while all around me in London people were losing theirs, and thought, “Why not?”
Two months before I moved out came the sex-on-the-beach scandal, where two British residents were sentenced to three months in a Dubai prison for shagging in the sand after an all-you-can-drink brunch. This made me nervous. Not because I planned to do the same, but because I wasn’t sure how strict its Islamic laws were. I messaged the one person I knew living in Dubai, a Brit working for an American bank. “Hey Nick, I’m moving out to the desert! Quick question, should I read the Quran first?” On my first night, I landed and caught a taxi to a downtown bar to meet Nick for a drink and wore long trousers and a long top, careful not to reveal any flesh. From my taxi, I was agog to see two women walking along the pavement wearing cut-off Daisy Dukes and vest tops. Practically naked! In a Muslim country! What was this place?
Having lived between Dubai and Abu Dhabi for two years, I came to understand its contradictions. I drank more and partied harder in the United Arab Emirates than anywhere else I’ve ever lived. Weekends were spent drinking on boats, or drinking in hotels, or drinking around a pool at someone’s villa. It felt like a modern-day White Mischief (James Fox’s book about the exploits of the Happy Valley set in Kenya), albeit murder-free. I was a single woman who wasn’t allowed on any of the paperwork for my apartment because I was living with two unmarried men, friends from the UK, and that was technically illegal.
But it was a sunny life, so long as you watched your back, didn’t do anything too outlandish in public when drunk, or ask difficult questions about human rights and the Ashok Leyland buses that clogged the motorways every morning and evening, ferrying Indian and Pakistani labourers to and from the skyscrapers they were building and the “camps” where they lived in the city’s dusty outskirts. So long as you never crashed into an Emirati on the chaotic roads, where foreigners instantly had to accept blame. So long as you didn’t question the absolute authority of Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed, or “Sheikh Mo” to expats. So long as you weren’t gay.
This remains the paradox of Dubai: they want Westerners to come, to Instagram the world’s tallest building and the world’s biggest waterpark, to visit the world’s biggest mall and fly down the world’s longest zipline, but they still won’t tolerate some of the behaviour that comes with it. There is talk of a Steve Wynn casino opening in the city since another one is being built in the neighbouring emirate, Ras Al-Khaimah, even though gambling is haram, or forbidden, under Islamic law. An American journalist also covering the hotel opening tells me she was stopped on the way through Dubai airport because she was wearing a Beyoncé T-shirt, and the official decided that Beyoncé was too scantily clad. Beyoncé has been paid a reported £20 million to be in Dubai this weekend but certain parts of her on a T-shirt are less acceptable than others. Like I said, bizarre.
Anyway, the hotel. On both Friday and Saturday nights, guests are allocated different restaurants for dinner. The VVIPs– Kendall Jenner, make-up millionaire Huda Kattan and, er, One Direction’s Liam Payne – are in the celebrity restaurants; the less exalted in the buffet area, called Gastronomy. I say less exalted but we manage; there are silver platters of lobster tails, four different types of oyster, wagyu beef bresaola and a tin of caviar the size of a tractor tyre.
There’s a separate Nobu section where I pile my plate with sushi; there are bowls of ceviche; there is truffle pasta rotated in a hollowed-out wheel of parmesan so every strand is coated in cheese. I’m three Gaviscons down by this point because of all the Whispering Angel and the Moët and the chicken live paté, but I load my plate like Billy Bunter.
In 1971, the Shah of Iran threw a party in the ruins of Persepolis to celebrate the country’s 2500th anniversary. He flew in 18 tonnes of food, 250 Mercedes limousines and 50,000 songbirds to twitter prettily over the heads of guests that included Haile Selassie, Grace Kelly, Prince Philip, sultans, sheikhs and prime ministers from 69 countries. Unfortunately, all the birds froze to death in the desert at night – but frozen bird tragedy aside, it was up there with the most excessive parties ever thrown.
Until now, perhaps. On gala night, watching collagen and hair move along the blue carpet (it’s not red because this is Atlantis, named after the lost empire, therefore the colour scheme is blue), I collar former Made in Chelsea star Hugo Taylor, who’s out here with his wife, Millie Mackintosh. “I am sick of caviar,” he tells me. “I’ve had it for every meal.”
You haven’t, I reply; how can you possibly have had caviar for breakfast? Hugo whips out his phone and shows me a photo of his breakfast that morning: avocado on toast, crowned with a lump of caviar the size of a plum, alongside scrambled eggs that have turned almost black because they’re covered with truffle shavings.
“I haven’t got any underwear on,” I hear a blonde woman in a gold dress say behind us. She looks familiar. Is she famous? I wish I had Shazam for faces. There’s a Black Panther actress in bright pink; there’s Mindy from Emily in Paris in flame red; there’s Chef Nobu, a charming 73-year-old now, who grins at me – he gave me a sushi masterclass earlier that day and politely explained that I shouldn’t dip my rice in my soy sauce, only the fish. There’s someone I later discover is a former Neighbours actress in a fuchsia ballgown so large she has to pick up the hem with both fists to move.
There are big lips and big eyelashes, kohl as thick as car tracks, and skintight dresses, which I personally wouldn’t wear if I was about to stagger up to a buffet bar, but each to their own. Actually, I later realise, while watching a woman in a blue negligée and thick diamond necklace self-consciously hurry past me with a plate of hummus, slice of pizza, two pieces of salmon sushi and a sliver of brie, there’s something very levelling about a buffet. No matter how glamorous you are, you still feel like a dick as the hummus juice on your plate runs into your sushi rice.
A couple of hours later, 1500 guests are gathered in front of a stage waiting for Queen Bey. The most important sheikhs have front-row seats and Valentino scarves to protect them from the evening chill, while the rest of us are largely standing, our phones zipped up in the individual Atlantis-branded pouches we have been given in order to “respect the artist’s performance”. I’m standing near a German singer called Mandy (698,000 Instagram followers), who’s fizzing with excitement as a Beyoncé superfan. “I consider myself the fourth member of Destiny’s Child,” she says solemnly.
On Beyoncé comes, dressed like Big Bird in a yellow feathery costume. “Are y’all ready to celebrate?” she drawls, before launching into Etta James’s At Last, which she sang at Obama’s inauguration ball in 2009. Mandy starts crying. Someone else chips in that the headline act was going to be J-Lo, but the hotel’s opening date was pushed back, so now we have Beyoncé instead. Mandy claps her hands with glee.
Beyoncé sings for just over an hour, changes twice and brings her 11-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy, on stage to duet on her track Brown Skin Girl. There are writhing dancers, menacing figures in gold masks that make me think, almost wistfully, of the less flamboyant sex parties in Eyes Wide Shut; there are branded gold goblets of Moët champagne. After that, another fireworks display which can presumably be seen and certainly heard from the moon, then a couple of almost naked dancers, rolling around in the water in front of the stage, then Swedish House Mafia set up their decks for a session and a laser show. More champagne. More noise. Then comes… Christ, dunno. I have to go to bed, physically and mentally sated by it all. I’m almost out of Gaviscon.
The following day, there’s a Nobu brunch for the hungover at the hotel, and a backlash on Twitter from those who don’t understand why Beyoncé has been applauded for performing in Dubai when David Beckham was cancelled, or faced attempted cancelling at least, for promoting Qatar during the World Cup. The human rights record of both Qatar and the UAE and their attitude towards homosexuality (potential death penalty) is largely the same. But if Beyoncé is criticised, then Rebel Wilson should presumably be similarly ticked off for flying out here first class with her girlfriend and their baby, as should everyone else involved in this 72-hour champagne and caviar marathon?
I’m not sure it will make any difference to Dubai. The city will continue to drive growth, build more hotels (what next, an ultra-ultra-luxury hotel?), and attract tourists who come for the sun and the food and a holiday in a place where they know they’ll be safe, so long as they don’t have a fumble on the beach. Occasionally, I wonder how much of the criticism towards this city is based on snobbery. I’m not saying it’s unjustified; its human rights record is grim (it sits in 131st place on the most recent Human Freedom Index, just above Ethiopia). And its ruler, Sheikh Mohammed, has been accused of kidnapping and confining two of his daughters who’ve tried to escape the country, and last year was forbidden by a UK judge to see two children from another marriage after his sixth wife, Haya, also fled Dubai. But human rights issues and the criminalisation of homosexuality also apply to countries like Morocco (134th on the Human Freedom Index) and Sri Lanka (112th), places where the middle classes go on holiday and there are fewer Premier League footballers kicking back between seasons. Yet you don’t hear quite as much shrieking about their LGBTQ laws, do you?
Three days was enough for me, though. Shortly before heading to the airport, feeling like I’ve been hallucinating for three days, I order a salad, desperate for something plain, perhaps with a vitamin in it. Ten minutes later, the salad appears at my table covered in truffle flakes. Wearily, I buy another box of Gaviscon from the hotel pharmacy.
- Looking Out for Love by Sophia Money-Coutts is published on February 2
Written by: Sophia Money-Coutts
© The Times of London