Marina Mall Abu Dhabi

This guide to Marina Mall Abu Dhabi centers on the revolving restaurant atop its Sky Tower, and the question restaurant manager Georges Chehwan faced when it opened in 2019: how to show diners a city that no longer exists. You'll hear about the five-month hunt for eighty old photographs of pre-development Abu Dhabi, tracked down through libraries and the family albums of elderly Emiratis, and how the mall itself rose along the breakwater in 2001. Watch for the room's slow turn between the corniche skyline and the bare coastline in the photographs.