On my first morning in Dubai, I stepped onto the balcony of my friend’s high-rise apartment and looked down to the massive construction site below. Beneath me, a new but empty highway led to a half-completed bridge spanning a deep manmade gorge. The plan was to divert the city’s main waterway through the gorge and back out to the Persian Gulf. It would turn this apartment building — which at the time felt like a space station on an inhospitable planet — into waterfront property. The scope of the project boggled my jetlagged mind.

Dubai is, without question, the weirdest-looking place I’ve ever been. Hundreds of towers, many under construction, define the skyline, engulfing what once was a drab, sleepy fishing village. Imagine, if you will, a couple of Hong Kongs smushed together, then dotted with Dallases. That is Dubai.

The vastness and disorder of this place begged one more question: How on earth could I, the kind of tourist whose travel agenda starts with a pair of good walking shoes and a map, explore this city? I couldn’t even find sidewalks half the time.

I knew to follow my first rule of successful tourism: make dinner reservations. Or, more precisely, make a couple of reservations, go off on a few half-cocked food quests, and be prepared to drop everything to follow a tip.

Photo: Along the beach in the Dubai Marina. Note the padded jogging path, just beyond the palm tree. John Kessler

The next day we took a car excursion down the Sheikh Zayed Road, the highway that parallels the UAE coast. We drove out to the Dubai Marina, a towering mini-city by the beach that is popular with English ex-pats. Then it was a short drive to the Palm Jumeirah, that manmade archipelago that looks like a palm tree from the sky. How weird to drive up the spine of it and see the “fronds” peeling away to the sides. Our destination: the Atlantis resort situated at the top of the outer crescent.

After ogling the astonishing 60-foot-high Dale Chihuly sculpture that looked like a tower of blue eels, we had lunch at a newly-opened restaurant that everyone in town was talking about — Bread Street Kitchen from chef and television star Gordon Ramsay. An outpost of his London restaurant by the same name, it trafficked in a glamorous vision of British comfort food with international stylings.

But the kitchen seemed like it hadn’t yet found its footing. Shreds of potted salt beef brisket arrived ice-cold from the fridge. Lobster fettuccine was salty and clumped in a way that required two utensils to pry the strands apart. Fish and chips with mushy peas was fine in a standard-issue way. This was the kind of expensive meal we could have had in any hotel anywhere.

After that meal I vowed to stay away from this kind of ubiquitous faux jet-set food and focus on the regional cuisine. That would require some research.

The next day I met with Samantha Wood, an Englishwoman and the self-proclaimed “FooDiva” of Dubai who manages an influential restaurant review blog of the same name. The 10-minute walk from the metro station to our meeting place inside a luxury hotel involved dodging construction barriers and following an ant line of pedestrians through the hot sand of an empty lot. It was strewn with thousands of cards advertising masseuse services.

Samantha seems more a creature of new Dubai, and her bailiwick is international fine dining. (You can find “Dine Around Dubai” tours on her website.) Still, she was a font of knowledge on everything from where to find the best native Emirati food (“it tastes a bit like underspiced Indian food — a lot of rice and meat”) to the best beach-side fish fry (“Bu Qtair — they open at 6 p.m., and you should plan on getting there at 5:30 to beat the lines.”)

She implored me to make room for dinner at Qbara, a creative, upscale Middle Eastern restaurant (the playful name is “Arabic” backwards). “It’s really the one restaurant not to miss — the kind of modern take on Arabic flavors you won’t find anywhere else.” Who can argue with a FooDiva?

I’m glad I saved Qbara for my penultimate night in Dubai. Not only was it a great way to thank Joe and his wife for hosting me, but by that point I knew some of the local flavors and could better understand the smart riffs on chef Mohannad Alshemali’s small-plates menu.

Here, instead of chicken livers, there were nuggets of crisp foie gras bathed in tangy pomegranate syrup. Eggplant moutabel arrived as a base for tuna tartare and lacy black rice crisps. Makanek sausages were stuffed with bursty little sour cherries. Even trendy dishes like octopus with smoked potato foam and zhug (a spicy Yemenite herb sauce) rang true.

And the cocktails — my first in Dubai — were among the best I’ve ever had. Gin infused with the flavor of fresh za’atar made the base for a French 75 with champagne and lemon juice. Months later I can still summon the soft surprise of its flavor in my mind.

For the last night, though, we made our pilgrimage to Bu Qtair (pictured, photo courtesy Dubai Tourism) near the beach in the coastal community of Jumeirah. Joe, the FooDiva and even Anthony Bourdain hail this Indian fish shack as the one restaurant not to miss.

We were lucky: the line into this small shack wasn’t too bad. When we reached the front we chose from the daily catch — whole pomfrets, hammour fish (a kind of reef cod) and others scored and slathered with a russet paste of chili, turmeric and lime juice. They weighed our fish as well as some marinated prawns to price them and into the frying pan it all went.

When the food was ready, they set us up at a picnic table in the front yard with folding chairs and bring the crackle-skinned fish on paper plates. There we ordered naan bread, rice, salad and a thin lentil sauce/stew. The plastic cutlery was of little avail; soon we were tearing into the fish with our hands.

And then it was off to the airport for my redeye home. I slept like a fish-stuffed baby.