What The Food by Alserkal is a leading cultural platform exploring the future of food – connecting a community of chefs, thinkers, farmers, artists, and innovators through critical conversations, curated experiences, and collaborative learning, with an aim to interrogate the forces shaping tomorrow’s food systems.

Disrupting the Table

Our curatorial lens moves across scales—from the intimate to the infrastructural—and brings together voices that challenge hierarchy, celebrate emerging practices, and experiment with new formats for thinking, making, and sharing. We embrace contradiction and complexity. We value critique as much as joy. We honour tradition without being bound by it. And above all, we treat food as a medium of cultural, environmental, and creative urgency. This is a festival for those who are not only working with food—but working through it.

Disrupting the Table positions What The Food 2025 as a space to rethink the systems, values, and assumptions that underpin how we eat, cook, and connect through food.

This edition takes a clear stance: we are not here to preserve the status quo. We are here to ask harder questions — about who holds knowledge, what defines innovation, and how food can respond to a rapidly shifting world. Food is no longer just about taste or trend. It is about systems, supply, storytelling, and survival.

This edition of What The Food is supported by Dubai Calendar. Our partners also include Emirates NBD, Jumeirah, WISK, Rikas and Stellantis.

10AM_10PM | October 25_26