The Thermostat Wars of Dubai Dinner Tables

A day in Dubai in summer is spent doing everything possible to stay cool. Shade, water, the odd retreat indoors. By evening, the instinct is to want that same relief multiplied — an air-conditioned restaurant, blasting cold, no negotiation. This is where the trouble starts.

Outside, it might be 38 degrees. Inside, with the air conditioning running as intended, it becomes a different argument entirely, because someone at the table always gets cold. Not mildly cold — cardigan-and-blanket cold, arms-crossed, personally aggrieved cold. And so the war begins: one side wants the room cold enough to numb a fillet steak, the other wants the vents throttled back to something approaching room temperature.

There is no winning this negotiation. Ask for the air conditioning down and you're back to sweating through dinner, reaching for a lager purely to roll the cold bottle across your forehead. Leave it running and you spend the meal watching someone shiver through a starter in 38-degree heat, several hundred metres from the nearest ice sheet.

The asymmetry is the real issue. When you're too hot, there's a limit to how much clothing you can reasonably remove in a restaurant — international modesty norms and general decency put a stop to that fairly quickly. When you're too cold, the fix is simple: put another layer on. This makes the cold-natured half of any travelling party structurally better equipped to win the argument, every time, regardless of what the thermostat says outside.

The practical fix isn't heroic. Pack something light — a cardigan, a shawl, a jumper that folds down to nothing — for anyone prone to getting cold indoors. It solves the asymmetry before it becomes a nightly negotiation. It will not, however, stop the air conditioning from being the single most contested variable of any hot-climate dinner.

Some things about travelling with other people never resolve. This is one of them.