Shock, awe and flip-flops at Emirates Palace

Capital Letter is Frank Kane’s weekly series on Abu Dhabi’s money, power and ambition

A previous excursion into Abu Dhabi’s power hotels took me to the St Regis, which I concluded was a top-notch forum for the movers and shakers of the UAE capital’s economy.

But there are power hotels – and then there is Emirates Palace.

Drive west along the Corniche, past the St Regis, and eventually it looms into view, dominating one end of Abu Dhabi’s main beach strip. It is part presidential palace, part imperial monument and part extraordinarily oversized hotel.

From a distance Emirates Palace simply looks enormous. Up close, it looks larger still. Enter, and it expands again, into domes, marble, gold and seemingly endless corridors stretching towards a horizon somewhere kilometres beyond reception.

This is no accident. Emirates Palace was conceived around the turn of the millennium, when Abu Dhabi was enormously wealthy on the back of decades of oil exports. But it was nothing like the international, political, financial and cultural presence it is today.

Its designers were not really asked to build a hotel. The original brief was for a government “guest palace”, capable of receiving visiting heads of state and hosting the conferences and delegations that came with them.

John Elliott, the architect who led the project, was unapologetic about what they were trying to achieve. “We want people to be overpowered. We want them to say, ‘wow’”, he was quoted as saying at the time.

Well, it’s mission accomplished. The complex stretches for around a kilometre from wing to wing, sits in grounds of about 100 hectares and contains nearly 400 rooms and suites, including accommodation specifically designed for visiting heads of state.

Construction began in 2001 and the Palace opened in 2005, just as Abu Dhabi was beginning the transformation that would produce Etihad Airways, Yas, Saadiyat and Al Maryah islands, the Louvre and (soon) the Guggenheim.

Bill Clinton and Benazir Bhutto were among the speakers at a World Leadership Summit there in its opening year. Since then it has hosted GCC summits, Opec meetings, presidents, prime ministers, royalty and assorted masters of the universe.

There is a particular Gulf institution that is not quite a hotel and not quite a palace: somewhere the state receives the world, conducts business and occasionally makes history. Riyadh has the famous Ritz-Carlton, Muscat the Al Bustan Palace, and Abu Dhabi has Emirates Palace.

It is probably pointless asking whether such places make commercial sense. It was reported at the time that it had cost an estimated $3 billion, but architect Elliott waved away suggestions that was too much: “Everybody would be stunned if you said that Buckingham Palace wasn’t cost effective.”

Twenty years on, some of the grand state events have migrated elsewhere in Abu Dhabi’s expanding power ecosystem, while Emirates Palace is also very much a hotel.

Kempinski has given way to Mandarin Oriental as manager, and heads of state must coexist with holidaymakers heading for the beach.

That creates one of the building’s more obvious incongruities. You can wander beneath a vast gold-encrusted dome designed to impress presidents while following a family in flip-flops looking for the pool.

For dinner, I headed to Hakkasan, the Michelin-starred Chinese restaurant which has occupied a discreet corner of the Palace since 2010.

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After the intimidating scale of the public spaces, Hakkasan is dark and intimate, with excellent service, (graçias Camilla). There is an 18-metre bar and the kind of menu on which luxury ingredients are piled upon one another with abandon.

Soft-shell crab comes with red chilli, curry leaf and chicken floss. The dim sum involved Wagyu beef, abalone and caviar. This is probably not the place to come if you want to shed a few pounds.

My host, a communications strategist in the energy industry, was enjoying his second dinner of the week there. Somebody has to do it.

Emirates Palace belongs to an era when Gulf governments were beginning to think very consciously about how they presented themselves to the outside world. Airports, airlines, museums, financial centres and hotels all became part of the architecture of national ambition.

It may be the purest example of the hotel as an instrument of statecraft, and it has lost remarkably little of its original effect. The great Gulf power hotels were built to produce something approaching shock and awe.

Emirates Palace still does.

Frank Kane is Editor-at-Large of AGBI and an award-winning business journalist