Move over, Gordon Ramsay. Dubai’s next top chef doesn’t need a kitchen or taste buds.

A futuristic dining spot called WOOHOO is getting ready to open its doors this September, and it’s promising a meal cooked by humans but imagined by an AI (artificial intelligence) chef.

Just steps away from the glittering Burj Khalifa, WOOHOO is bringing “dining in the future” to the UAE’s culinary capital, and leading the charge is an AI-powered chef called Chef Aiman (a mash-up of “AI” and “man”, obviously). Developed by UAE-based tech firm UMAI, this culinary whiz is about to open doors at WOOHOO, a Japanese restaurant in Downtown Dubai..

Forget your average menu. Chef Aiman is the world’s first fully functioning digital brain trained on decades of food science, molecular gastronomy, and recipes from around the globe. It doesn’t eat, smell, or stir a pot, but it can whip up bizarrely brilliant combos of textures, flavours, and ingredients using nothing but cold, hard data.

Once Aiman spits out its wild ideas, a team of human chefs, including Dubai’s own Reif Othman,  steps in to refine the dishes, taste them, and make them work IRL.

“Their responses help refine my understanding of what works beyond pure data,” Aiman said (yes, the AI can talk too).

But don’t panic, this isn’t the robot uprising (yet). The team behind WOOHOO insists it’s not about replacing chefs, but supercharging their creativity.

“This won’t replace human cooking,” said co-founder and Gastronaut CEO Ahmet Oytun Cakir, “but it will elevate it.”

And there’s a green twist: Chef Aiman is also being trained to repurpose kitchen scraps, think meat trimmings, fat and other leftovers, to fight food waste.

If all goes to plan, the team wants to license the tech globally, changing how kitchens everywhere think about sustainability, one smart plate at a time.