Multi-national team for new Safir Deira Hotel

An Irish national, Smiddy trained in Ireland and Switzerland, moving to the United States in 1996, working at several hotels in the Cape Cod area before returning to Ireland as food and beverage duty manager at the Imperial Hotel Cork.

His colleague and executive chef, Jonathan Pratt is a fellow Irishman whose most recent posting was as senior sous chef on the Norwegian Sun cruise ship, based in the Caribbean.

On board, Pratt was in charge of speciality restaurants, including French, Italian, Japanese, sushi, tapas and healthy-eating outlets, and also performed weekly cooking demonstrations for passengers.

Trained in Dublin, he worked in a variety of restaurants in Ireland, moving to the Shelbourne Meridien in 1997 as sous chef and later to Le Meridien Penina, Portugal, mastering Portuguese as well as looking after the dietary requirements of visiting football teams in training.

Heading up the sales and marketing department at the Safir Deira is Wael El Behi, hailing from Tunisia and fluent in Arabic, English, French and Italian.

Four years with the Corinthia Hotels group in Tunisia, El Bedi was responsible as sales and marketing manager for the launch of three new resort hotels in Sousse, Hammamet and Gammarth.

Prior to this, he spent five years with the Abou Nawas group in that country, training in sales, food and beverage, finance, guest accounting and purchasing.

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