Recipes for success: Chef Alejandro Castro offers advice and a hearty pilau recipe

DUBAI: An Ecuadorian chef might not be the obvious choice to lead a kitchen serving food inspired by the cuisine of former Soviet republics in Asia, but this is Dubai, after all. And if you’d expect to find that weird kind of cultural mix anywhere, it’s here. 

Chef Alejandro Castro — who heads up OSH Restaurant in Dubai’s La Mer development — says it came as something of a surprise to him when he was approached by OSH’s then-head chef to work as a sous-chef at the restaurant, which bills itself as serving “a modern twist of Central Asian and contemporary Uzbek cuisine.”