- Over 3,000 flights were disrupted daily as regional conflict shook Dubai’s economy.
- Laila AlHorani is stranded in Istanbul managing a full restaurant rebrand over WhatsApp.
- Her husband Mohammad slept inside their restaurant just to keep the doors open.
- Abu Al Sawani is being reborn as a boutique concept, proudly keeping its original name.
In the first week of March 2026, Dubai faced something it had never truly faced before. Over 3,000 flights were disrupted daily, hotel bookings plummeted by more than 60 percent, and Dubai’s thirty billion dollar tourism industry found itself staring down one of the most serious economic shocks in the city’s modern history. Around 20,200 passengers were affected by flight cancellations and rescheduling across the UAE, with thousands more stranded at airports across the region as airspace closures rippled outward from the conflict between the US, Israel, and Iran. For Dubai’s business community, the question was no longer about growth or expansion. It was about survival. And nobody embodied that reality more honestly than Laila AlHorani, an Art Director with a UAE Golden Visa for Creativity, currently stranded in Istanbul with no confirmed flight home, directing the complete rebuild of her Dubai restaurant over WhatsApp video calls while her husband Mohammad holds the construction together on the ground alone.
Laila and Mohammad’s story with Abu Al Sawani, their traditional Shami restaurant, did not begin with the conflict. It began three years ago when Laila made what she describes without hesitation as the unthinkable decision to walk away from corporate life and build something of their own. For millions of expatriates in Dubai, the city represented not just a business decision but a life decision, built on the promise of stability, opportunity, and a quality of life that few cities in the world could match at comparable cost.
For Laila and Mohammad, that life decision came with the full weight of F&B reality attached. Three years of fighting tooth and nail to keep the restaurant alive through some of the darkest periods the industry has seen. When things got desperate enough that keeping the doors open required Mohammad to physically sleep inside the restaurant overnight, they could have walked away. They chose instead to gut the entire 70 square metre space and rebuild it completely into a boutique, curated concept. The name stays. Abu Al Sawani, meaning father of trays, remains on the door as a deliberate act of defiance and pride. Everything else is being rebuilt from scratch.
What makes their story land with particular force right now is the impossible circumstances surrounding the rebuild itself. The crisis severely disrupted flight operations at Dubai International Airport, one of the world’s busiest aviation hubs, leaving thousands of residents and travellers stranded across the region with no clear timeline for return. Laila is one of them. Grounded in Istanbul, she is the Art Director of the entire rebrand, overseeing every design decision, every construction detail, every visual choice for the new concept, all through a phone screen. Mohammad handles the brutal physical reality of the build in Dubai without her. Their office is a WhatsApp video call. Their project management system is trust, partnership, and an absolute refusal to let what they built quietly disappear because the world got complicated.
Across the UAE, businesses from boutique restaurants to multinational corporations have been rallying to ensure that Dubai remains open, functional, and resilient, and it is couples like Laila and Mohammad who represent the most human version of that resilience. Not the institutional kind with governance frameworks and contingency budgets. The kind that means your husband sleeps on the floor of your restaurant so it doesn’t close, and you manage tile choices over a video call from a city you didn’t plan to be in. Some days I question my sanity, Laila says with characteristic honesty. But walking away was never really an option.
Abu Al Sawani is coming back. Rebuilt across two countries, rebranded under impossible circumstances, and carrying every scar of the fight it took to get here. When those doors reopen, walk through them. Some restaurants earn their second chance. This one has earned every table!
