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I Paid About a Dollar for Lunch in Muscat. The Best Part of the Day Cost Nothing at All.
The plastic chair wobbles slightly when I sit down, and nobody in the restaurant seems to notice or care. There is no English on the menu, no laminated photos of the dishes, just a handwritten board in a language I cannot read and a room full of men on their lunch break who clearly already know what they want. I point at the table next to me instead of trying to read anything, and a few minutes later a full plate of biryani lands in front of me for about one Omani rial, which works out to something close to two and a half dollars.
I had not planned the day around food at all. It started in one of those glossy, air conditioned malls along Muscat’s coast road, the kind that could be dropped into almost any Gulf city without anyone noticing the difference, and for a while that is exactly what the day looked like it would stay. Then somewhere between one errand and the next, the plan quietly shifted toward something smaller, a Pakistani restaurant tucked a few streets back from the mall crowds, plastic chairs and all.
The biryani was good, but the price is what actually stopped me. I looked around the room and did the math on who was eating there, and it was almost entirely working men grabbing lunch between shifts rather than anyone with a guidebook in their bag. Muscat’s…
