Teatro

Teatro
Fine Dining
The Rotana Towers Hotel, Dubai
Bookings: 04 3438000

The hotel is a horror, more like three star than lala and also home to the appalling Long's Bar, which is supposed to be a faithful copy of the bar at Raffles in Singapore. The faithfulness of the reproduction is perhaps questionable: Long's Bar is underground, dark, dingy and odiferous.

So to find a restaurant here that is so regularly packed to the gunwales and so highly thought of by a huge universe of regulars is something of a surprise. But you ain't seen nothing yet.

Theatro is an eccentric restaurant, to say the least. The menu's a bonkers mix of Italian, Thai/Chinese, Indian and 'International'. The Maitre d', one of Teatro's great assets, juggles guests with an expert eye that instantly differentiates a regular from just a difficult random and bills, coos, flatters and teases at the same time as taking no BS from anyone. Which is about everything you could ask for.

The food's good: not brilliant, not startling but fine. Mixing and matching menu items is quite fun, but then Teatro is quite fun. And like any piece of theatre, it's as much about the atmosphere as anything - and Teatro is a hubbub of conversation and clinking holloware, laughter and chatter. It's a warm, convivial place to eat together, drink together and laugh together.

The hotel brands Teatro as 'Fine Dining' and we've stuck with that in the label for this article. But it's more like 'fun dining' to be honest...