instagram_icon.pngyoutube_icon_white.pnglinkedin_icon_white.png
episode #70

How Sultan Chatila Went From Supper Club to Dubai's Most Talked-About Burger Chain

In this episode, Ashish Tulsian speaks with Sultan Chatila about leaving a Fortune 500 career to build Eleven Green Burgers, from a wife's late-night Instagram post and a burger competition in Dallas, to four locations, zero freezers, and a brand built entirely on authenticity and compounding word of mouth.

Sultan Chatila
spotifyapple-podcastAmazon-Music
Sultan Chatila

Sultan Chatila

Founder, Eleven Green Burgers

Sultan Chatila is a Dubai-based entrepreneur and co-founder of Eleven Green Burgers, a homegrown burger concept with four locations across Dubai and Sharjah. A chemical engineer by training and former Chief Commercial Officer at a Fortune 500 company, Sultan spent over a decade building a parallel identity as a cook. Running a beloved Mediterranean supper club with his wife before winning Dubai's best burger competition and finishing third at the World Food Championship in Dallas. He founded Eleven Green in 2023 on a single principle: freshly ground beef, daily, until it runs out.

Read summarized version with

In this episode, Ashish Tulsian sits down with Sultan Chatila, co-founder of Eleven Green Burgers, for an honest and wide-ranging conversation about one of Dubai's most unlikely and compelling restaurant origin stories.

Sultan traces a journey that begins in a Saudi Arabian household where both parents cooked with extraordinary skill, runs through a chemical engineering degree at Tufts that was always a compromise, and winds through twelve years of corporate life at GE, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Honeywell, all while cooking quietly, obsessively, for anyone who would sit at his table.

He talks about how a supper club started by a late-night Instagram post from his wife grew into one of Dubai's most beloved dining experiences, running four nights a week while he remained a senior executive. He breaks down how a burger competition he entered for fun turned into a third-place finish at the World Food Championship in Dallas, and why that was the moment he finally had permission to leave.

The episode covers what it costs to build Eleven Green on a foundation of freshly ground, sell-out-daily beef with no freezer on the premises. Sultan is candid about the betrayal of a trusted kitchen employee who left to copy his concept, and what that episode taught him about culture over credentials. He talks about the invisible stress of a calm-looking entrepreneur, the discipline behind SOPs that keep four locations consistent, the fries problem he still hasn't fully solved, and why Five Guys' fourteen years in one state is the most underrated business lesson in the burger world.

At its heart, this is a conversation about what happens when a person stops performing a career and starts living one.