HIGH JOINT

Within the top 3 on most lists of top burgers in Dubai lies High Joint. Their tongue-in-cheek-named, iconic and photographic burgers are the talk of the town, the Internet and the world. With good reason: Their burgers are made from a mix of freshly ground 100% fresh, 100% GMO and antibiotic-free freshly ground ribeye, round and chuck. There are no leftovers or frozen foods here. You are basically eating a fresh steak, minced and smashed into a patty. Then garnished creatively with more or less exotic and decadent topics.

Each burger is in itself a masterpiece and the flavors are amazing in every bite. Their overnight success should be no wonder, had the location been prime, the marketing budget high, and the people behind the idea seasoned restaurateurs. The thing is, none of these things can be said about High Joint. Thus, the question beckons: How in the name of all things holy did a booming business, churning out 1.5 tons of beef alone each month, grow out of what is literally a 5x5 meter hole in the wall restaurant in a back alley of Dubai? Read on as the people who created it tell the story about one of Dubai’s only true hidden gems.

The unlikely success that is High Joint was started by three business partners with one shared, simple goal: To revolutionize the Dubai food scene. To do so, you need at least two basic things: a location and an idea - of which they had neither. Determination, on the other hand. Of that they had plenty.

Whilst brainstorming for an idea, the hunt for the perfect location went underway and it was eventually found at Al Manara. Why perfect, you ask? Well, presumably because it was available and the price was right. 

Now, imagine driving away from the hustle and bustle of Dubai’s skyline, all the light and the flash. About a couple of kilometers down twists and turns past the middle of nowhere until you eventually end up in a back alley. Here you find a generator and a small line of 5 x 5 meter shops. Here, directly hidden behind the generator, is your location. Now, imagine having to gleefully call your third business partner and say “we have found it, we hope you are in!” 

With location sorted, it was time to hatch an idea: “A japanese bakery,” suggested one partner. “Not a bad idea,” said the other, “that niche is booming, but competition is tough.” - “How about a sandwich place with sandwiches from around the world,” suggested another and it went back and forth from there for a while until a mutual agreement was made: Burgers!

At the time, Dubai had its fair share of burger joints, but the market was very much still in development. The business case seemed right, so the course was set. With a humble plan to be number 1 in Dubai, the interview process to find a chef for the new venture began. A lot of chefs were interviewed and all were told the dream of being number one and starting a new trend. A lot of passionate chefs bought into the idea and asked to see the location. They then saw it, only never to be seen or heard from again. Until one day, the current head chef showed up, and never left.

“I was not even here when he started,” recalls the owner, Dr. H., “but I saw pictures of his creations and thought no-no we do not want these gigantic burgers. But then again, he is fast and willing to learn. So yeah.” And that, since then, has been the mindset behind the High Joint hiring policy. Hiring people with the right spirit and attitude for the job and a willingness to learn, cooperate and work hard. This focus on character rather than matching skill set and experience from the world of burgers is what has helped them grow massively as a team.

But before we even get to talking about teams, we are now stuck with most of the basics for opening a burger restaurant. A few business partners, the owner doubling as front of house, a chef, and… Now, they, of course, needed a menu. 

From this need, the famous High Joint Development Process was created. It is still in use to this day, and it goes a little something like this: The owner jots down a few ideas and draws the burger, the chef makes changes without telling him, the owner changes something up again, they repeat and over the course of about four weeks, a new burger emerges. It is a meticulous process that has helped ensure the quality and taste in every burger from the humble beginnings and to this day.

Months eventually went into creating the perfect menu and opening day grew closer. With very little time and zero budget, they began developing what would become the High Joint word-of-mouth marketing strategy. Not willing to spend a dime on bloggers, influencers or famous foodies, they each called 30 friends. They said to them “hey, we are opening up tomorrow between 7 and 11, please come on down and see us.” They then went to bed and hoped for the best.

Opening Day chaos

High Joint opened October 10, 2018, with a full menu and just two people behind the counter - to a line of fifty people outside, all of them wanting ten burgers! And this was he defining moment when the struggle to the top started: With the owner in the front, taking orders by hand, and the chef in the back, flipping burgers, making fries, packing orders and everything else at breakneck speed, all while the line outside grew. When they mercifully sold out, they simply locked the door, collapsed on the floor and the chef turned his head, looked at his boss and said: “Boss, can I just sleep on the floor tonight?”

Thus, humbly and chaotically, began what is now the colossal success called High Joint Burger. With a little luck, a lot of spirit, hard work and entirely new ways of doing things, they got off to a rocky but successful start. They did not always know what they were doing from the start, they willingly admit. But they learned quickly on the job, made a few mistakes along the way and learned a lot from them as well as they soldiered on in high spirits.

And that is the beauty of the story of High Joint Simply because they did not know how to do things, they did a lot of things differently; and that, in their own words, more than anything helped them grow.

From chaos to international success story

Still, getting off to a good start is one thing, but how do you piggyback on such an initial success. The answer is deceptively simple. They took the strategy they knew would work and they replicated it on a grander scale. For starters, the owner reached out to his inner circle of chef friends and asked them to drop by, not knowing what they would say. Yet, when even Dubai’s darling star chef Reif Othman tasted it and said that it was good, things started to pick up, and the internet was buzzing. 

Thankfully so for the boys at High Joint, the internet was and still is is their one and only marketing platform. All marketing is done via Instagram and most posts are socially curated reposts from customers. Very little money, if any, is spent on marketing. Everything is achieved through clever use of social media and through use of cunning gimmicks.

Take the secret menu concept as an example. Every 6-8 weeks, a secret menu item is announced only via Instagram. It will pop up, be available upon request, then disappear as silently as it came. Until one day, that is, when a female customer looking for a High Jam burger only to find it taken off the menu literally broke down in tears on the restaurant floor. Then it was decided that the true genius creations should make it onto the main menu. 

Such shareable word-of-mouth marketing gimmicks are, essentially, the perfect recipe for going viral which is exactly what happened next.

In March 2019 all hell broke loose when the extremely popular Instagram account Lovin Dubai released their annual “Best burger in Dubai” list. To the shock of everybody, especially the crew and owner, first spot on the list went to “The new Burger King of Dubai, High Joint”. 

Not immediately prepared for the success, they had two chefs and two front of house on for the next day when, just like opening, all hell broke loose all over again. Waiting time was an hour and a half, but people loved what they got and found it worth the wait. And from that day on, they grew a lot. Quickly. And they learned a lot. Quickly. The staff was increased and restaurant basics like an operation manager were put in place. Since then, awards from all over the world have been pouring in and the small, humble hole in the wall has taken every measure to keep up with the building pressure.

Today, a team of 8-10 chefs pump out 1.5 tons of beef alone every month. On any given weekend, the eating space is packed, the lot outside is packed and the car park is jammed. All while takeaway orders are flying out the door. Development and growth over the course of only a few years, some of them in the shadow of a global pandemic, seems nearly unbelievable. Ask the people behind, though, and they will tell you that the reason behind the success is quite simple:

There are other places that are bigger, have better funding. But we are completely our own. We have never looked left or right and we were always the underdog. Until today. 

The difference between us and industry burgers is character. We want burgers with character and we want staff with character. When we interview people there is no corporate feeling. We ask them questions like what movies do you watch. Our guests here watch Netflix, they watch football. They are all very approachable, and we want our staff to be as well.

What we do not like about many other places is the extra cheese, the extra patties, all of that. We want to keep our burgers at a point where they can compete on an international level and we want to keep our menu fresh.

We want our  team to always be on edge, always creating new stuff. Neither of them ever had a chance to create anything in their previous jobs, they just followed suit. So here, we try to kill that.

 Call it The High Joint manifesto, if you will. Or call it the world’s simplest plan to success: Just add the right people, the right attitude and the diehard feeling that if you work hard enough and believe in something strongly enough then you, too, can be the best at your game.

Granted, this is simple to say, yet nearly impossible to achieve. It takes a perfect storm to get this far, but over the course of a few months in 2018 and 2019 in a back alley in Dubai, the perfect storm of the century occurred. The High Joint Team, like their burgers, are the perfect mix of perfectly complementary, sometimes unusual, ingredients and that is what makes High Joint the perfect, unusual success story.