What’s the score?
Sandwiched between the twin arteries of Electra Street and Al Falah Street, the area surrounding the Madinat Zayed Shopping Centre is a bustling landscape of shopkeepers, mobile watch repairers and curiosity shops. Yes, people literally park in the middle of the street – this is Abu Dhabi after all – but venture away from the main shopping centre and gold souk and you’ll find a fine produce market and plenty of local colour.
The centre
The Madinat Zayed Shopping Centre is a cross between a souk and a mall – it certainly feels a bit more traditional compared to the other malls as the prayer calls echo around its floors. Certainly, if you want a ‘local’ football shirt, Stars Sports here are a good place to look – not to mention if you’re after a pair of pink Converse trainers. Reshie Handicrafts has a particularly eclectic selection of interior items worth scouring, particularly if you’ve always secretly hankered after an African giraffe statue.
Elsewhere, well-known names like Nine West and Charles and Keith, home to handbags, shoes and all manner of accessories, as well as clothing stores like G2000, Giordano and Hangten, represent a small Western influence. However, these are outnumbered by the vast majority of jewellery, perfume and pashmina shops and stalls, whose owners will loudly celebrate your arrival from a minimum of 40 feet away and often tolerate hagglers.
The gold
Around 65 gold, jewellery and watch stores mean that you could cheerfully blow a year’s wages in just a few minutes at the Madinat Zayed Gold Centre (or souk). There’s no haggling for gold (prices are fixed), but you can barter over quality. Just as importantly, there are also places here to get your jewellery fixed, which is likely to win over many a punter during a credit crunch. However, the hidden jewels are to be found upstairs.
A branch of Homes R Us offers a reliable choice of furniture and interior decoration at a decent price, but the addition of a massive Daiso is a delight for lovers of kitsch homeware – our hugging salt and pepper pots remain the prize in our budding collection. Every-thing from dumpling makers to cheap underwear can be found here. We find it perfect for when you run out of birthday ideas – it’s dirt cheap and you can tell someone you spent hours hunting down Abu Dhabi’s only musical ashtray!
The market
For those not blinded by malls and the glitter of gold, perhaps the best reason to visit this area remains the bustling produce market. But where you might normally expect to find meat, fish and veg in separate buildings, no such organisation exists here, where the triumvirate live in healthy, noisy disharmony under the one roof of the Madinat Zayed Market. For the visitor, casually catching the eye of a vendor somehow materialises into a magical bond of kinship, which generally ends with you walking out of his stall clutching fruit you can’t even name. Nevertheless, it is worth a visit to escape the anaesthetised feel of the supermarkets.
Meat alley is a chilly walkway of independent (largely hilal) butchers, each window advertising a different dangling carcass. At the far end, a door leads to the icy haunts of the Abu Dhabi Fisherman’s Co-op society, while the fruit and veg market hides a great date shop in the far right corner in the form of Al Shajra Tafiba Trading Est. The shop basically consists of one man dwarfed by heaving mounds of black, brown and yellow dates – even he seems a little overwhelmed.
The streets
Directly opposite the Gold Souk is the terraced façade of Al Sultan Bakeries – we love the date brioche – while the central post office lies a little further up. Alternatively, head in the direction of Al Falah Street and the landscape reveals an eclectic mish-mash of butchers, grocers, Chinese restaurants and more specialist purveyors. Asghar Khan Nature Herbs caught our eye in particular; its shop window boasts a collection of terrifying dried objects. A sign on the door proclaims, ‘We have medicine for the following diseases,’ before listing a fearful litany of ailments including ‘gas trouble’, ‘oil for hairs’, and weirdest of all, ‘sugar’.
Next door is the Star of Market Bookshop, an Islamic bookshop, which sells everything from beads and rugs to ‘zam-zam water’ – ‘it’s water from Saudi, Mecca’ – we were told. Certainly, the giant Shoemart opposite and the slick Saudi Opticals, with its collections of designer brands, looks a little out of place amid all the ‘everything stores’. These usually announce themselves with an assortment of mattresses, rugs, knick-knacks and gaudy blankets piled outside, but are always worth a curious browse.
On 12th street the geography tends to focus on Arabic tailors, usually boasting a half-dozen shelves overflowing with fabrics. However, head a little further along and you’ll stumble across the Modern Colour Coffee Shop, a lazy spot for a bit of outdoor shisha in the evening. Meanwhile, heading back up past Shoemart, passing the two schools on your left, you’ll find two giant furniture stores, Golden Furniture Centre and Pan Furnishings.
Neither are likely to break the bank and both offer a decent selection. Or if you have something sweeter in mind, it’s worth popping in on Al Dar Sweets, a reliably good purveyor of Arabic pastries, usually displayed on huge steel dishes and glistening in syrup. English isn’t their language of choice, but you can always point.
Where to eat
A prospective little Chinatown could emerge here – the presence of the Chinese Foodstuffs store and a traditional Chinese medicine shop, Corniche Herbs, suggest it could happen. More of a giveaway is the growing collection of decent Chinese restaurants, the best of which remains Beijing, which you will find next to ShoeMart, followed closely by the rough-and-ready Red Castle. Alternatively, the 2.35 restaurant at the nearby Cristal Hotel on Zayed First Street is a good, cheap buffet, or a popular local favourite is Al Ibrahimi, the budget Indian, Chinese and Pakistani buffet restaurant opposite the Madinat Zayed Shopping Centre.
It’s criminally cheap, which might put some off (as does the sign offering ‘chinies specialties’), but the food is authentic and decent. Otherwise, if you head towards the outskirts and Al Falah Street, you’ll stumble across Ma Wa Weel, a more-than-decent Lebanese joint that has a truly unusual collection of raw meats on its menu.
Need to know…
Taxi: Just ask for the Madinat Zayed. They will usually drop you off on Old Airport Road opposite.
Daytrippers: On a Friday night in particular the fountain and concrete area around the mall is always bursting with people. It’s worth visiting then just for the atmosphere. Families will probably not want to traipse the streets; instead, little ones can be suitably entertained at Madinat Zayed Shopping Centre’s many play areas, for which the rides and arcade games will keep moans to a minimum. Mall cafés offer a brief reprise from hunger pains, but we advise heading for a Chinese once you’ve perused all that the gold souk has to offer.
