Sho Cho's

Sho Cho’s Dubai Marine Beach Resort
Reservations: +971 4 3461111
Web: http://www.dxbmarine.com

Sho Cho’s is a Japanese restaurant masquerading as a trendy nightspot, or possibly the other way round, but either way it does serve food.

It’s a hang-out for the hip. Being more hippy than hip I was a bit perturbed to learn that I was invited to dine there with a group of friends and family. I do however have a weak spot for Maki rolls, so I graciously accepted.

We sat outdoors on the terrace and the weather was perfect for it. The bar was modern and slick and lit blue, an eerie ambience strongly evoking memories of intensive care units. This is, of course, a touch subjective. We were surrounded by the cool and the young bopping to some club music. I was pleasantly surprised therefore to be offered a rather sophisticated and extensive menu.

We started with some salted edamame beans which were the best I’ve had. Drink selections round the table included Mango Margarita which was a tropical holiday in a glass and Berry Mojito – so packed with berries that it was practically virtuous.

Appetisers were selected. The prawn tempura was crisp and light and everything tempura should be. The Maki rolls disappeared in delicious fishy mouthfuls. Soon enough we were tapping our feet to the club beats.

My main of beef teriyaki was impressive. The beef was so soft it practically chewed itself. The flavour was subtle and perfectly balanced. One of our group ordered the shrimp and lobster with spicy lemon dressing. The name did not do it justice. The lemon was not overpowering and the chilli was a warm heat not a searing burn. The lobster was plentiful and the shrimp succulent. The young lady who had ordered the asparagus salad looked on enviously.

The music eventually became somewhat tedious and our foot-tapping gave way to a constant thumping in our heads. Our waitress smiled vacantly the whole night like a child that had been accidently dropped on its head. The food however was faultless. I am going back, but next time I’ll be armed with earplugs.

On the pocket side of things, not exactly bargain basement with mains coming in at around the Dhs95 mark, but hardly break the bank stuff either - middling, then...

This review courtesy Fat Expat Guest Contributor Shereen Habib.

Putting on the Ritz

Emirates
EK 903/902 to/from Amman from Dubai
Web: http://www.emirates.com

We've reviewed Emirates' food before. It's perhaps unusual to include a review of airline fare on a food blog, but when you're sitting 'up front' you have a certain expectation and our last review, some while ago, found EK's food to be worthy of note on a restaurant quality test scale. It's linked here, BTW.


So a recent trip gives a chance to compare then with now. And oh dear, but there's trouble in paradise.

Emirates' Business class service is nothing less than excellent. The staff are friendly, the purser's got a tablet PC with guest preferences noted and everything's handled with a personal touch, with ease and smilingly at that. A glass of something before we take off? Oh yes. A glass of something with a dish of nuts as we break the cloud layer? Sure - but cut out the macadamias, eh? Many of those turning left rather than right (Zuckerburgs excepted) are old enough to not necessarily want the saturated fat punch those things pack.

Outbound
The menu's straightforward and sensible: mezze or a lobster and crab timbale; Gulf style biryani, tenderloin, prawns in tamarind or rigatoni - dessert's a yoghurt panna cotta. That's really taken care of Arab, European and Indian tastes and gives everyone a nice mix and match. I took the timbale and the tenderloin because I was feeling, well, straightforward.

The timbale was good - a little heap of shredded lobster and crab meat moistened with a touch of Mary Rose, a few clear, sweet cubes of pineapple jelly dotting the dish. Served with a lovely Craggy Range sauvignon blanc, it's a really nice starter.

Seared tenderloin beef fillet steak, as it's described on the menu, had me a little confused, it's like serving a seared breast of chicken breast. Served with 'a wild mushroom sauce, accompanied with roasted new potato skin on with herbs and sautéed free cut vegetables in a chunky tomato sauce' it was an overcooked little dish of strong and clashing flavours. Who would be mad enough to roast new potatoes for a start? What a terrible thing to do to them, sweet and clean as they are. And the steak was 'grise', the sauce burned on and the vegetables overdone to soft squishiness. It was simply a dish of over-baked stuff and really didn't live up to the description. It came with a lovely soft Torbeck, though.

The pannacotta was nice enough.

Inbound
Once again, excellent service. I am a huge EK fan - have been for years - and this is just what it's all about. Relaxed and stuck in a book, somehow I miss the menu being handed out but that's just dealt with nicely. The choice this time is mezze or smoked salmon; lamb loin meloubeh, stuffed chicken breast, pan-drived pomfret or seafood pasta. Dessert in all cases is banoffee pie.

The salmon is served with triangles of feta and a green bean and 'sun-dried tomato salad along with celery heart and seasonal green leaves' - it turns out that 'seasonal green leaves' means some frisee but that's okay. The celery leaves are hardly a heart but I like celery. The salmon runs red when you squeeze lemon on it, which isn't a great sign - it's served as three thick tranches and they're moist enough, although hardly small smokehouse fare - this is farmed rather than artisanale, if I'm not mistaken. It's actually hard, up there, to taste the difference - but it doesn't scream smoked and salmon, as good stuff will. The salad's nice, though. The Meursault was lovely, but a bit warm.

I took the pomfret as a main. The hostie didn't recognise 'pomfret' as a fish and we settled on 'the fish course'. Served with a 'clear ginger sauce and spring baton, accompanied by stir-fried noodles and wok-fried seasonal vegetables', I should have thought my choice through and avoided. this.

How can you sensibly expect 'stir-fried noodles' to survive being dished up, cooled down, re-heated and served without becoming a mass of slightly soft stuff? Wok-fried seasonal vegetables should come from a wok - it's simply unreasonable to expect them to survive being stacked in containers and kept for hours before being lammed into a tray heater and banged out five miles above the earth. This was borne out by the dish of over-cooked fish, limp vegetable, over-salted gloopy sauce and soft, flaccid noodles. I'm not sure if EK is at fault trying to make this work or if I was at fault ordering it. Either way, I couldn't finish the dish.

The banoffee pie 'garnished with white chocolate shavings' was actually garnished with milk chocolate shavings and was heavy on the foamy cream stuff and light on the 'offee'. I'm not sure that banoffee pie needs to compete with a strawberry compote, actually. How about a créme Anglaise?

Both menus promise a cheese selection that simply didn't happen. It wasn't the end of my world, to tell you the truth.

So is reviewing business class airline food the work of a total twat? Probably, but you're paying the money and the food's a major differentiator - along with the legroom, fancy screen, funky electro-seat and the service - and you're paying double the cattle class rack rate for it. The experience is one of being diverted from the tiresome process of frequent flying by being well looked after and fed with a menu of things that delight. So it's worth bringing it under scrutiny, IMHO.

The trip, the service and the many creature comforts delivered. Sadly the mains didn't.

You don't win friends with salad

After many years wasting lunch hours on mean order-in meals from local malls and over-greased noodles from the sole, sit-down restaurant within walking distance of my office, respite was delivered in the form of Jones the Grocer.
Let me be plain: despite the friendly demeanor of the staff, the swank deli and grocery is overpriced, over hyped and over harried.
The last time I ordered a take-away sandwich, the staff took twenty minutes to pick the sandwich, cut the sandwich, put the sandwich in the box and charge me Dh32 for it. There was only one other person in line.
During another unfortunate lunch venture, I took my box lunch back to the office to find they had given me a beef and guyere on mustard instead of the mozzarella and tomato baguette. I hate mustard. I ate it anyway.
Oh, and don't be fooled by the artisan breads and fine quality ingredients. As my investigation of the chevre and sun-dried tomato has proven: Jones side-loads the sandwich.

That's right. From the outside it appears to be generous and plentiful. It promises a messy expanse of creamy cheese and tart tomato. But take a peek inside. It's all rocket.
I spent Dh32 for a slice of bread and arugula.
And then I did it again.
And again.
Why? Why do I do this?
Because it's this, or the Lebanese bakery where I once found a hair in my Lebneh. Because it's this or the Chinese food restaurant where I'm sure I detected the faint hint of ketchup on the sweet and sour balls.
Afghanistan restaurant is always a cheap and plentiful option, just as long as you don't mind waiting for your roast chicken while staring at the floor to avoid the gaze of a very angry looking Pashto man who seems deeply unimpressed by your sartorial choice of a knee-length skirt. And I just can't face another meal in the "family section" of the tasty curry joint where the cab drivers take their lunch, cowering behind the laminated room dividers in the back of the windowless upper floor.
Oh, for the first year, I tried it all. They were all tiles in the beautiful cultural mosaic of my expatriate experience.
Now, I say: save it for the tourists. I want a baguette. And I'll pay three times its worth to get it from somebody who will look me in the eye.

Iftar at Baker and Spice

Baker & Spice, Dubai
Shop #16, Level 2, Souk Al Bahar, Old Town, Dubai (opp. Burj Dubai)
Tel: 971 4 425 2240
Open 08.00am to 11.00pm

I don’t ‘get’ vegetables. Or salads, come to that. Green things in general. My wife rails at me and describes me as the antithesis of a vegetarian. Fair enough.

So if I tell you that one of the things that impressed me most at Baker & Spice was the fruit, I’m not sure who was the more surprised, she or I.

But to backtrack. We were fortunate enough to have received an invitation to ‘Preview’ the Ramadan Iftar Menu – “Baker & Spice style” just before the Holy Month actually started, and as the event coincided with the last night of a UK-bound visitor, along we went. The location is certainly impressive, on Level 2 of the Old Town complex, front and centre on the lake and opposite the Burj Dubai. Between us and it is the Dubai Fountain. Sit on the terrace and you’ll have a ringside seat. You won’t eat a thing and conversation is rendered nigh-on impossible by the music and noise of massive quantities of water cascading back onto the surface of the Lake – that display is loud. No gentle relaxing water feature this.

That was outside. But I’m very happy to report that what was on display inside was every bit as spectacular, and a lot more edible. I can’t vouch for the regular offering, but this place presents itself with an engaging unpretentiousness, a refreshing antidote to the massively over-presented ‘international buffet’ found in so many of our 5-star establishments. There was food everywhere – big bowls of fruit so fresh they scented the air, great platters piled with lamb, quail, crab, chicken, salads. Waiters with trays of fruit juices and cups of lentil soup. The original feast for all the senses.

Baker & Spice is an operation with outlets across London, in Europe and now here in Dubai. The company produces what it calls ‘Soul Food’, and adheres to the mantra ‘organic / local / fresh / homemade’. On the evidence of this visit, they certainly achieve something radically different to the usual bland spread. Talking to manager Tim Hocks it is clear that their passion for ingredients runs deep indeed – it is a process that takes time, finding and supporting local suppliers that share the same obsession with quality and flavour. Tim was delighted to have found a chicken producer in Oman who understands ‘free range’ to mean his flock have their own field in which to forage and pens to rest in, a veritable chicken utopia.

There are elements of the Slow Food movement here, shades of locavore, a holistic, hedonistic approach that results in a style of food and presentation that is unashamedly homemade, rustic, substantial, singing with flavour, and above all, honest. It is the sort of food you would be pleased to have made at home on a good day, served up on shared platters and presented family style.

Reservations? I’d be happier if they managed to sort out a license and serve some appropriate oenological accompaniments. The central communal table is a bold statement of intent, but those it doesn’t suit will find plenty of more conventional tables for twos and fours. And this obsession with ingredients doesn’t come cheap. But the food we enjoyed on that night was some of the freshest, most flavoursome and satisfying I have had in this city in several years. Recommended.

NOTE
This review contributed by Fat Guest Jonathan Castle, AKA EyeOnDubai

Fitzpatrick’s Bar & Restaurant

Fitzpatrick’s Bar & Restaurant
Rockmarshall, Jenkinstown
Dundalk, Co. Louth
Ireland
Tel: + 353 42 937 6193
Web: www.fitzpatricks-restaurant.com

Eating in Ireland is truly a roller-coaster ride that lurches easily from (if you’ll excuse the term) feast to famine. When it’s good, it’s very, very good but when it’s bad it’s usually so bad that it’s an experience in itself. Sometimes the simplest things delight – bacon, cabbage and potatoes, the national dish, sounds awfully plain, but at its best it’s a revelation: a golden ‘floury’ spud, tranches of steaming pink, tender bacon and a pile of slightly crunchy, slightly salty cabbage cooked in the bacon water and running every gamut of green from the pastel light green of sun shining through winter surf to the deep green of the fresh fields in the spring. Parsley sauce is a love it or hate it experience, but I love it, curly parsley chiffonaded into a butter-rich creamy thick sauce that drops rather than pours.

And then there are the awful disasters – these days from Irish chefs treading the same well-worn paths of wretchedness that the Brits have already blundered along - stupid cack-handed melanges of ‘Thai-style’ spices imposed on ingredients that deserve more respect, awful attempts at food with ‘molecular’ influences and, unforgivably, ‘nouveau Irish’ food – piss-poor attempts to serve classic Irish dishes in plates of clashing flavours and colours that revolt rather than delight.

This, then, is the gastronomic wilderness that is Ireland post ‘Celtic Tiger’ - it’s a dangerous place, people, a country in transition...

You will always find Cork’s Ballymalloe, the mother-lode of Irish cookery, a place of wonder. But I found an almost equally wonderous thing near Carlingford – a pub that looks so cod-Irish from the road that anyone but an American would shudder and pass it by. And yet the locals flock there in their hundreds, Les Routiers has slapped its mark on the place and so many awards decorate its walls you can almost see them in the sea of mad memorabilia that covers every surface – horizontal and vertical alike. And I include the ceiling – you have to duck at times to avoid being brained by low-hanging beams festooned in brass pumps, irons, cameras and, well, just stuff really.

Fitzpatrick’s pub should be a disaster. It’s famous, bang on the tourist trail and decorated outside with flowerbed jokes, bicycles, baths and bedsteads. They pour Guinness with a flourish of shamrock on the ‘head’, for God’s sake.

Eat there. It’s expensive (you’d better be ready to shell out €30 for a main) but I loved it. When food makes me laugh, I know I’ve ‘arrived’ – and I laughed my way through dinner at Fitzpatrick’s.

We ate in the restaurant (a small area to the back of the huge, labrynthine pub) which has its own separate kitchen and a ‘local’ chef. The main kitchen had a chef from Newry, but we decided not to take the foreign food. Service to begin with was a bit patchy – our Sancerre came warm and with a lot of mucking about with the glasses, but eventually things settled down and the Fleurie that followed was a delight. The wine list is basic, smartly compiled and good.

Breads were offered around, Irish brown, white, garlic and others – and then the kitchen sent out a tiny bowl of vegetable soup as an ‘amuse geule’ – a little taste of warm, mushroom-dominated thickness that was just right for the rainy night.

I took a starter of pan-fried scallops and black pudding, purposefully courting disaster. I have always hated ‘surf and turf’ dishes, believing (perhaps perversely) that if God had intended beef and shrimps to be in the same place he’d have arranged that rather than separating the two environments quite so effectively.

It was really good. It would have been stunning and world-class if the scallops had been slightly less cooked, had spent a couple of minutes less on the pass under lamps. But the black pudding was rich, crumbly and served with a creamy slightly sharp sauce that did it proud, almost a béarnaise but not quite. I was grinning by now, and it wasn’t the excellent Sancerre alone. Other starters taken included breaded mushrooms with garlic mayonnaise, which were pronounced good but would have been better fried and served dry rather than buttered as they were. Odd that you could get a black pudding scallop starter right and muff a breaded mushroom dish, but there you go.

My main was classic stuff – an 8oz fillet steak served on a celeriac mash (note no horseradish addition to the mash, thank God. Horseradish mashes are an invention of the devil) with a black truffle sauce and foie gras. I thought I’d go for the light option, obviously.

It was impeccably executed – a delight. The steak beautifully done and the little decorations of foie gras were fried off so they were crisp outside and yet wobbled, the sauce was rich and dark, pungently contrasting the rich, buttery mash and it was all topped with crisp onion rings in a light batter. The fries that came along with it were fat, crisp and floury when cut. A bowl of crisp, green spring vegetables with a rich cream sauce and another of new potatoes in butter arrived for each pair of diners. Others had sirloin steaks, a plainer serving of huge and beautifully cooked steak and then there were plates of fresh sea-bass.

Desserts came with an attendant cardiologist. I passed and selflessly ordered an Irish coffee (yup, a shamrock of brown sugar was dusted on it. I forgave them) but others took silly things like a walnut and banana crumble tart: rich, warm and gloopy, swimming in a crème Anglais, apple tart and ice cream and the ‘special’, organic strawberries and strawberry ice cream served in a little brass bucket alongside strawberry compote and cream. It looked outre, chi-chi and crass and tasted divine.

We went off to the bar for icy glasses of Tyrconnell (Ireland’s finest single malt and a whisky that eclipses much that Scotland offers, IMHO) afterwards. Because if you’re going to be this indulgent, you might as well go mad.

Good wine, outstanding food and the insanely opinionated Carrie - part entertainment and part expert guide to the menu, womens' hurling and the delights of working in a restaurant with the boyfriend (‘the boyfriend’, the barman, was of course stopped and shown off to us to his horror) meant that we all agreed our evening in Fitzpatrick’s was a one-off, a memorable evening of excellence in a convivial, warm place filled with laughter, cheer and delight.

Dim Sum

Dim Sum
Sing Woo Road, Happy Valley Hong Kong
Tel: +852 2834 8893


If you ever have the great fortune to find yourself in Hong Kong, Pearl of the Orient, then you absolutely must head down to this incredibly popular and renowned restaurant.

Located in Happy Valley, a short walk from the racecourse, this little restaurant serves dim sum all day and all night. Dim sum is traditionally eaten at lunchtime so it is pretty rare to find a place in Hong Kong serving it all day.

The restaurant was very popular when we lived in Hong Kong and on a return trip eight years later it remains as full as ever so they are doing something right. The restaurant does not take reservations, you have to turn up, give your name to one of the girls running around and then wait your turn. On a Saturday or Sunday lunchtime you may have to wait for up to an hour.

Inside this small restaurant tables are packed in whilst booths run down one wall. There are lots of carved rosewood tables, panels and chairs and old Chinese cigarette adverts adorn the walls. It’s all very 1930’s Shanghai.

Gweilos are given a big picture book with all the dishes in it and you place your order by filling in a little card by ticking the numbers that correspond to the pictures you like! The food is absolutely fabulous; the dishes probably lean more towards northern Chinese cuisine but all the old favourites are there, and they are very, very good.

They have a good selection of teas, though Gweilos tend to be served a pot of jasmine unless you ask for something different. You should try the ‘bo lay’ or the ‘tie guan yin’.

The food comes at you pretty fast and furious, lots of little bamboo steamers filled with divine morsels or little plates with their fried pastries or dumplings. Once you have managed to get your table you can sit and linger as long as you want, and you can keep ordering more if the mood takes you. Even though this is considered expensive for dim sum you will be very pleasantly surprised how cheap it is, certainly compared to eating out in Dubai.

This place is one of my most favourite restaurants in the world, a trip to Hong Kong would be wasted if you didn’t stop in here for lunch. Trust me on this!

The Stockbridge Tap

The Stockbridge Tap,
2 Raeburn Place
Edinburgh
T: 0131 332 6345
Map

Eating out in Edinburgh is something of a blinfolded dance through a culinary minefield – gastro-pubs and ‘fun’ restaurants sit side-by-side with 1970s-era Chinky and curry joints, the Karachi Kitchen nestled snugly next to the Fuk Yew, both inviting you to a nice dose of last night’s rubbish and last week’s fatty sauce.

The city also has more than its fair share of dodgy looking Italian gaffs, nasty whitewashed jobs with red, white and green everywhere, whitewashed walls, terracotta tile floors, red gingham checked tablecloths and wax-dribbled Chianti bottles with candles jammed in their reluctant necks.

Edinburgh also has a smattering of posh, contemporary fine dining eateries, many located in the new, uber-funky Leith area, a docklands reclamation project that includes the oddly-sited Royal Yacht, Brittania – a must-see piece of tourism if you’re in Edinburgh. This is reached, for some mad reason, by walking through a shopping mall. Both the Wedgwood and The Kitchin beckoned, serially lauded high-end plate decorators par excellence but when the chips were down, we couldn’t be arsed with getting dressed up and taking the risk of encountering cookery ring arrangements decorated with flavourless sauce bottle coloursplashes. I'm not saying that's what's on offer, just that there's always that risk lurking in the background of every funky website's promise of the best produce treated with respect.

So we went out for a meal to The Stockbridge Tap, a modern, bare-wood bedecked pub in the New Town area of the City. Edinburgh New Town, prosaically, is something like 200 years old.
They keep a good selection of ales at the Tap and you can’t help noticing that many local customers are digging into steaming bowls of mussels – an obvious favourite. A couple of excellent pints from the good selection of ales later and we’re sitting down in the rather sparse dining area and ordering from the helpful, pleasant staff.

Cullen skink. Oh dear, oh dear. Traditionally a rich soup of cream, smoked mackerel, lardons and potato garnished with parsley, my skink arrived laced with olive oil, piping hot, thick with flakes of moist, perfect fish - a complete treat and a cardiologist's nightmare. Sod 'em - it's brilliant. Other starters included a ham tortilla which looked more like a frittata but which was pronounced excellent by the startees.

The mains were straightforward, good food, a pan-fried sirloin steak with chips, two orders of fish and chips and a cassoulet. The sirloin steak was decorated with nothing more or less than pepper, salt and parsley butter, was pronounced cooked to perfection and was enjoyed thoroughly. My fish and chips was excellent, a crispy batter and fresh, perfectly cooked fish complemented with the Tap’s heart-attack inducing chips, fried in beef dripping and perhaps a little less crispy than a search for chipular perfection would dictate, but good for all that. I couldn't resist dipping into my fellow-diner's cassoulet and it, too, was excellent stuff - rich, thick and generous.

I took the cheese board and was stunned to find three generous chunks of excellent cheese (a Cheddar, a Wensleydale and a grin-inducing Stilton), wodges of bread and biscuits, a chutney and two big slabs of butter. Accompanied by a sneaky scoop of Lindisfarne mead, it was all simply too much food and I actually left some. Other finishers included custard ice cream with shortbread biscuits, chocolate fudge cake and cheesecake ice cream. All of these provoked grins of delight. And then a round of coffees and a couple of whiskies – the perfect finish to a meal that would have Weight Watchers tutting and frowning, waggling their fingers and making altogether too much fuss about things.

The whole evening, drinks included, came to less than £100, Dhs 550, for four. I heartily and unreservedly commend this most excellent public house to anyone visiting Edinburgh.

Fogo de Chão, Santo Amaro, SP, Brazil

A composite review of many visits, more of a commentary on a type of restaurant. This is a top of the line chain of Brazilian style churrascarias, or barbecue places. Quite different from any other style of barbecue. This particular enterprise is my personal favourite for this style of restaurant. The style is called "espeto corrido", roughly "running skewer" The deal is that you pay one fixed price, all you can eat. Drinks and desserts are extra. Every type of salad imaginable is available, so there are options for vegetarians and even vegans.Some of these churrascarias have sushi available, but I can't imagine why anyone would come here for sushi. It is made beforehand, and is sure to be a couple of hours old by the time you get to it.I would not advise a strict vegan to eat here, it is a bloody business.

When you pull up to the front door, the first thing that hits you is the array of whole racks of beef ribs grilling slowly around a hardwood fire on the floor. This grilling setup is enclosed by glass, so that the smoke does not bother anyone. Everything else is cooked on gas-fired grills in the back. Fogo de Chão means "Fire on the floor" Pronounced "Fawgu dee shong" (swallow the g), and it the traditional gaúcho way of barbecueing.

A nicely dressed young lady, will show you to your table. White tablecloths and proper cutlery are provided, not the bendy type you sometimes find in Brazilian restaurants. 

The servers are dressed in gaúcho getups, with bombachas (pleated trousers with buttoned cuffs), wide belts and slippers, yes slippers, long-sleeved shirts and red scarves (a red scarf is a gaucho trademark). They are quite happy to explain what all the paraphernalia on the belts are for. 

The service works like this: You visit the salad bar, order side dishes, then the array of meats start arriving. Most of the cuts here are Brazilian (similar to French) and arrive on a large skewer, to be sliced off onto your plate. The waiters are quite skilled in manipulating the tip of the skewer on a small saucer, so that no juices fall onto the tablecloth or your clothes. You have to assist by using a small pair of provided tongs or your fork to catch the slices as they come off the skewer. The large knives they wield are very sharp, and they are careful with them, tips always pointing down, except when cutting.  Ribs and several other cuts not suitable for skewering are brought to tableside on a carving board, much the same as in a carvery.(Do those still exist?) Several side dishes will be brought to the table at the same time: fried bananas, farofa (toasted manioc flour), which I call sawdust, manioc fries, fried potatoes, delicious hot pão de queijo (cheese bread), fried polenta and so on. And they just keep coming until eventually you holler uncle. You are provided with a small disk, red on one side and green on the other. The idea is that when you want a break, you turn the disk red side up, but this is usually ignored by the wait staff, don't know why they bother to have these.

One of the big differences between meat in Brazil and Argentina is that the Brazilan beef is not aged. It is cooked fresh, and seasoned only with salt (a liberal coating, removed after cooking) The picanha has a superb mineral taste and is best on the rare side of medium. Thin slices across the grain are the way to go, it can be quite chewy.

The cuts I recommend are picanha (tip of the rump, sometimes called tri-tip steak, seen in the photo), fraldinha (skirt steak), lamb chops (my friend John Muir goes just for the lamb chops and was last seen finishing his 18th chop, that's all he eats there), cupim (the hump of Nelore cattle) and beef ribs. Many others are available. If you don't speak Portuguese, some of the servers now speak English, which was not possible just a few years ago.

Many people start with a Caipirinha, but better to go straight to the wine. the cachaça will numb your palate.You need a fairly bold wine to go with this. They have a house brand available, but forget it. I recommend a Luigi Bosca Reserva Malbec. This is a jammy, tobaccoey, peppery Argentinean, long in tannins and perfect with meat. Unfortunately Brazilian wines (with very rare exceptions) are deplorable. Don't think of going for french wines,even mediocre ones; the price will knock you off your seat. $200 for an undistinguished red Burgundy - high import duties and price gouging is the reason. Anyway, better to drink wine from the same hemisphere, no?

Must-have desserts are the Creme de Papaya (pawpaw whipped with vanilla ice cream topped with Creme de Cassis) or Creme de Abacate (avocado whipped with vanilla ice cream and topped with Kirschwasser)

The staff are superbly trained, polite and attentive. These places can have a high volume level, the only disadvantage. Eating at a churrascaria is essential for anyone visiting Brazil, as long as they are not vegan, but would a vegan be reading these pages? Despite being a chain, the quality is probably the best in Brazil, certainly the best I have been to. The bill for 4 with 2 bottle of good Argie wine and desserts all round should be around $350, which is R$800 in local currency (Reais) Remember it is "all you can eat", a bargain.

There are 6 locations in Brazil, and branches in Atlanta Austin, Baltimore, Beverly Hills, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, Miami, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Scottsdale, Washington and Kansas City. i would guess that the exported versions are slightly localised.

American Peking

American Peking
Lockhart Road,
Wan Chai, Hong Kong


If restaurants can become ‘institutions’, then this mad, frenetic, chaotic eatery certainly fits that description. This place is great fun, packed with gweilos on a night out, lots of noise, lots of laughter and heavenly smells as the food wafts by. Exactly what a great local Chinese restaurant should be.

The American Peking has been serving very decent northern Chinese cuisine to the masses of Wan Chai since the end of the last World War and is absolutely packed every single night of the week so I guess they are doing something right.

The restaurant sits on two floors, the locals tend to eat downstairs and the rowdy gweilos upstairs. Downstairs is very ornate, lots of golds and reds, upstairs is very basic, no frills at all which I think suits the slightly mad atmosphere of the place.

The staff are famous for being really quite rude and I am delighted to report that after an eight year absence they still remain as surly and uncommunicative as ever.

This is probably one of the best known ‘gweilo’ friendly Chinese restaurant in Hong Kong; there are very few unrecognisable dishes on the menu and meat dishes are from the cuts preferred by westerners and not Chinese.



As soon as you sit down little bowls of a kimchi like cabbage dish, peanuts and sweet pickled cucumber slices are thrown on the table, followed very closely by large bottles of Tsing Dao and a pot of jasmine tea.

The dishes not to miss are the Peking Duck, which it is very famous for, fried or steamed dumplings, spicy aubergines with minced pork, onion cake and their amazing Szechuan sizzling prawns.

The prawns are very lightly battered and arrive at the table on a red hot cast iron platter. The spicy sauce is then spooned over which creates the most unbelievable fug of cough inducing steam which sends the whole table, and those in the close vicinity, into fits of spluttering. Riot police tear gas has nothing on this stuff but my gawd does it taste fantastic.

Other popular dishes to try are the dry chilli beef which is served with little pockets of sesame bread that you stuff the meat into. Minced pigeon served with iceberg lettuce leaves and hoisin sauce. The hot and sour soup is hugely popular as is the ubiquitous crab and sweetcorn soup. Also try the Chinese mushrooms with bamboo shoots and one of their noodle dishes from the quite large selection. It’s all good!

Frankie's Revisited

Frankies
Oasis Beach Tower,
Dubai Marina
Tel: 04 399 4311





Listen up people, this is important.

We ate at Frankie's down in Dubai Marina last Thursday and I have to tell you how impressed I am with this place.

I really liked it when I last visited it and I really liked it this time too. This is, I reckon, one of the best places to eat in Dubai at the moment.

The food is very, very good, the wines are not at completely stupid prices (a lovely Oyster Bay ay Dhs285), the service is efficient, friendly and professional and the whole place has a great atmosphere, full of people really enjoying themselves.

The only one drawback of the place is the smoking. There is a bar area at the entrance where smoking is allowed, despite contravening local regulations, and the place is packed, and I mean packed, with smokers who leave their tables in the restaurant bit, have a quick puff and then return to their seats. Unfortunately there is no real separation between the two areas and so as a result the whole place stinks.

Put that aside, and this restaurant is the tops!

Paris Match Report

In the summer (which is further back that I care to think about) Lovely Wife and I gleefully abandoned our children and took ourselves off to Paris for a long weekend and it were fabulous.

Being the very careful, spendthrift people that we are we booked ourselves into Le Meurice, an incredibly opulent hotel on Rue de Rivoli right beside the Jardin des Tuilieres in the 1er arrondissement. The location quite simply couldn’t be bettered. We were slumming it obviously.

The hotel is very, very grand, five star over-the-topness everywhere and it is really rather lovely. This is Parisian belle époque at its height.



In fact the hotel is so lovely that Dubai’s very own Mohd Al Abbar had taken over the whole of the two top floors for his family and entourage and had rather commandeered the place which was pretty annoying. Given that we were paying EUR500 a night I dread to think what his little stay cost. Beggars belief. There were very large chaps with badly fitting suits loitering around everywhere and whenever His Emaarness Al Abbar came into the lobby there was a frenzy of activity, all of which left the Parisian’s looking on in mild bemusement and of course no one had a clue who he was.



The hotel rooms are very chic, but very old-worldy, which I really like and you certainly have a sense of great luxury staying here. The hotel boasts a Michelin 3 star restaurant in one of the most beautiful rooms I have ever sat in (inspired by Le Salon de Paix at Versailles apparently); it’s all gilt-edged mirrors, beautiful frescos and stunning paintings. We decided not to eat at this restaurant as we wanted to explore further afield. With hindsight I wish we had but that’s another story.

The hotel is awfully proud of its long and prestigious history but one thing that it fails to mention is that it was used as the German Army headquarters throughout the occupation. In fact General von Choltitz, the military Governor of Paris signed the document of the surrender of the city in the Hotel Le Meurice on 24th August 1944. Von Choltitiz is often regarded as the “Saviour of Paris” as he refused to carry out Hitler’s direct orders to completely destroy the city.

Sorry, I digress!

For our first night I had booked us into a Michelin 2 star restaurant called Le Gourmad which is a very famous seafood restaurant in the 1er arrondissement and a short walk from our lovely hotel.


View Larger Map

This restaurant, which opened in 1872, is a bit of a Parisian institution and I am afraid has been resting on its laurels rather too long.

I rather liked the first floor room, but Lovely Wife wasn’t keen at all and would only comment that it was obviously designed by a man!

The first shock horror of the evening was being handed a wine list the size of an encyclopaedia with the wines (all French) arranged by region. I hadn’t really thought about this much but for the past 17 years or so of living in Hong Kong and Dubai we have predominantly been drinking New World wines and as a result my knowledge of French wines is really quite sketchy. The second shock horror was not seeing a single wine at less than EUR100 per bottle. Frankly I thought that was an outrage and a complete piss take. I am convinced we got given the tourist wine list as I am quite sure no local would have accepted paying these sort of prices.

The food was very disappointing. I was really looking forward to trying this restaurant but to be quite frank I could have cooked better at home myself and so left feeling very ripped off and very let down.

Lunch the next day restored my faith somewhat. We stopped at a bistro in Place du Marche St Honoré which is a great area for restaurants. St Honoré has a heap of restaurants along three sides of the square and is a lovely quiet area to sit outside and watch the world go by.


View Larger Map

We ate at Le Zinc D’Honoré which is a very typical bistro; wooden floors and panelling, the obligatory turn of the century Pernod adverts and marble topped tables all crammed up close together. The menu is scribbled on little blackboards, the wine comes in big carafes and the service is brisk, friendly, very efficient and professional. It was great. Lovely Wife and I had two fantastic salads to start with which were huge and filled with all sorts of wonderful little goodies. I had an excellent entrecote to follow just to help me through the afternoon of sightseeing.

For dinner we decided to head back to Saint Honoré as it was a very short walk from the hotel and we chose another restaurant called ‘Nomads’ which was filled to the brim, was very lively and looked really fun. We were not to be disappointed. Another great meal, excellent food, served properly and professionally.



Lunch on our last day was at Cafe Marly which is located within the Louvre courtyard and has a fabulous terrace overlooking the pyramid. This is clearly quite a touristy place but lunch was delicious, the setting is quite fantastic and it was a wonderful way to end our weekend.





Paris is still a great place to eat, it was wonderful being able to just walk around, stop at a little side street cafe, have a cold beer or glass of wine, to be served by people who knew what they were doing and took pride in doing in and to eat, generally, decent food that was well prepared.

We’ll be back.

Carnevale

Carnevale
Jumeirah Beach Hotel
tel: 04 348 0000


On a bit of a whim we decided to visit the recently refurbished Carnevale in JBH.

Up on the Mezzanine Floor this restaurant is divided into two parts split by a corridor of shops. It really is very odd indeed. On one side you sit by the windows looking out to sea, not that you can see a great deal, but in full view of everyone walking past the shops so it feel like you are in the middle of quite a busy thoroughfare. The other side is the ‘old’ restaurant which is a great deal better, certainly more cosy, and actually quite pleasant inside though they have rather overdone the pinks.

The menu is not huge but has a pretty good selection of starters, pasta dishes and then a small meat and small seafood section at the back.

The wine list is well organised by country and has a pretty good selection of both white and red and of grape types. There is certainly something in there for everybody. Prices are on the high side, there is very little under AED300 which makes this an expensive evening out.

Actually, overall I think this restaurant is expensive; starters are all around AED100 and mains AED200. With an okay bottle of wine, some water, two courses and perhaps a coffee you won’t see any change out of AED1,200, which for two people is pretty fierce.

I started with a risotto and followed with a seafood spaghetti. The risotto was overcooked, had far too much sauce and looked rather unappealing. It was closer to soup than a decent risotto. The flavours were however okay, nothing special but not bad.

The spaghetti was a greater success, a very decent portion with plenty of mussels, clams and prawns in a tomato sauce. Again, rather insipid flavours, nothing robust or exciting about it at all and I certainly didn’t feel that it was worth anything like AED200.

Lovely Wife had a lobster salad to start with that was actually a sort of gazpacho with lobster in it and followed by a chicken dish with gnocchi. The gnocchi were completely undercooked and tasted like dough. It was all very average.

I have to say that the service was somewhat of a pleasant surprise, it was efficient, professional and friendly, which does make a change for the normal standards we find here in Dubai. It makes it perhaps more of a shame that the food was such a disappointment.

As I have already said this is a very expensive restaurant and I am afraid the food is very, very average and certainly worth nowhere near the sort of prices they charge.

Caveat emptor.

Afternoon Tea

Afternoon Tea in the Lobby Lounge
Ritz Carlton Hotel, Dubai


Many of Dubai’s hotels will serve one form or another of a ‘British afternoon tea’: various versions, many slightly odd, of this ‘traditional British delight’ are offered in lobby lounges across the city.

We chose to go to the Ritz Carlton for an Eid treat: a party of ten, booked two weeks in advance. Sarah and I had been there during Ramadan, seen the tea buffet they’d put out and thought it would be a pleasant way to spend an afternoon with friends. The Ritz Carlton lobby lounge is a great location, incidentally, a pleasant change from Dubai’s marble-bedecked faux interiors, with its comfortable chairs, calming colours and impressive, vaulted wooden ceiling. It’s a pleasant place to sit and while away a cup and chat. We got together a group of pals to join us and booked it.

They muffed the booking. Finally re-booked, we turned up at 3pm as promised. A waitress delivered sparkling water on request, and menus. We all then waited for 20 minutes as some five staff tended to seven occupied tables, missing ours consistently. The buffet wasn’t out – apparently that only happens on Saturdays. Oh well...

Fed up with waiting for someone, anyone to take our orders, I eventually got up, walked over to the serving station and complained. A waitress came and took our orders for tea. We all opted for the ‘Ritz Carlton tea’, a selection of sandwiches, cakes and petits fours together with a pot of the finest delicacies of the tea world. Two of our party were vegetarians and one requested no butter on the sandwiches.

We then waited for a very long time indeed: in fact just over 45 minutes and a second complaint, for the tea to appear. Four pots did. Then another wait. An hour into the ‘experience’, the two herbal teas arrived and completed the order of nine teas. One guest had coffee, the single cup arrived promptly and was drunk in ten minutes, leaving her watching everyone else drinking pots of tea for the afternoon. We ordered more coffee for her eventually. This wasn’t charged, so was apparently a ‘bottomless’ cup, but was never at any stage offered by staff.

The clock had moved on by now, but there was no food. Over an hour after ordering, not a speck of edible stuff. Not even a biscuit. In the meantime, waiting, we drank four bottles of sparkling water, charged to us at an interesting Dhs 32 each. The lobby lounge, I would like to be clear on this, was not exceptionally busy.

We finally complained to a suit and pointed out that we’d been waiting over an hour for some food to arrive. Some dishes of jam and whipped cream turned up. The cream was advertised as ‘Devonshire clotted cream’. It most certainly was not clotted and highly likely not from Devonshire. If you’ve ever been to Devonshire, the famous cream is yellow and rich, not polyfilla white. Clotted cream is thick, rich and gloopy. This had been whipped and wasn’t.
I defy anyone from the Ritz Carlton to prove to me that it has been serving Devonshire clotted cream with its teas. If not, then it needs to change its menu descriptions and stop misleading people.

Ninety minutes in, the tea trays started to be brought out by a single waitress, two at a time. She came out with two trays, put them down then walked back out to the kitchen. A couple of minutes later, she re-appeared with another two.

One member of our party went mad waiting for her and had to be restrained. We gave her a heavy shot of Prozac mixed with diazepam, luckily we had the right drugs in the first aid kit and none of the other guests noticed as she slumped down in her chair.

The vegetarians got an interesting choice of three cheesy cucumber thingies and an egg sandwich. The cheesy cucumber thingies were identical and, in fact, formed one quarter of everyone else’s sandwich selection. So the kitchen had obviously decided that a vegetarian guest would really like to eat a selection of three of the same things rather than, perhaps, something as revolutionary as four vegetarian sandwiches.

The ‘no butter’ order got four egg sandwiches. She rightly pointed out that this wasn’t really what she’d subscribed to and sent it back.

The rest of us got an egg and cress mini-roll sandwich, a salmon paste open affair on a dark bread base, a beef ham and cream cheese mini-roll and a cucumber wrapped cheese thingy. This was completed by two scones, two slices of sponge cake and four petits-fours, a strawberry, chocolate and lemon meringue and a mini éclair. To be fair, the sponge cake was not dissimilar to that plastic wrapped stuff you can get from desert truck stops and rural cold stores. What they often (laughingly) call ‘English cake’.

Three of us only got three sandwiches of the four on their trays. They complained and their fourth sandwich eventually turned up.

Mrs No Butter then watched in mild horror as her tea tray reappeared. On it were four squares of semi-toasted cheese and tomato white bread sandwich. The crust had been cut off. It was the sort of thing you might find in a four year-old’s school lunchbox before calling in social services because you think the kid might be neglected.

We then called for the floor suit in charge. By now, the whole party has had pretty much enough. It’s been well over an hour and a half and we’ve still not managed to eat anything. The tea’s going cold despite the heaters put under the pots. Besides, by this point, we’re all sick of tea and fizzy water.

The waitress takes away the daft sandwich. We had suggested that the vegetarians might consider this light relief from their platters of cheese wrapped in cucumber, but that suggestion met deaf ears.

And then the suit comes back to say that the kitchen will prepare a no butter selection, but it will take fifteen minutes. The teas are all pre-prepared and chef will have to do ‘something special for us’, you see.

‘Something special’. Over an hour and a half after taking the order, the request that the guest had made becomes a favour – something special. We are meant to be pathetically grateful, the two fawning old ladies from Fawlty Towers. ‘Oh, thank you Mr. Fawlty!’

The red mist descended.

I pointed out, quite politely but with a perhaps understandable degree of asperity, that it really shouldn’t take a five star kitchen fifteen minutes to make four sandwiches. I reckon about 30 seconds should do it if they set their minds to it. I also suggested that perhaps the maitre d’ might like to make them, in which case we’re perhaps looking at four or five minutes. They are, after all, not complicated sandwiches.

Or, if they’d prefer, I’d make the bloody sandwiches myself.

We also pointed out that we’d been sitting around for over 100 minutes waiting for the food to arrive, put up with error after error, been generally misunderstood and had really had just about enough of the woeful, second-rate and generally cack-handed service.

This is, let us remember, a top five star hotel – charging top, five star prices.

The new sandwiches arrived just as we finished complaining. They were the same as everyone else’s sandwiches, because the Ritz Carlton doesn’t use butter on its sandwiches. Nobody of the floor staff had known that up until this point, apparently. It was news to them.

I have to tell you that if the food had arrived in a timely manner, say at around the same time as the tea, it would have been perfectly fine. The scones were nice, the sandwiches edible. The petits-fours were perhaps a little soggy on the pastry front (pre-made, you see, not fresh) but fine as they go. The cake was, as previously mentioned, pound cake quality sponge.

But by this point, the thrill had gone. We’d moaned and bitched, dealt with a suit who didn’t really seem to quite get how to handle the situation and had all been hanging around way too long to get some sandwiches and tea. It wasn’t really fun anymore, just frustrating and mildly embarrassing.

A plate of sliced vegetarian wrap things turned up as most people had moved on to the sweet stuff, featuring processed cheese, tomato and cucumber in tortilla. We never quite worked out why.

We paid the bill, presented and met in full, and left. We found out that the Maitre d’ was actually the sommelier, standing in. He had not dealt with the whole situation terribly well and we did take the opportunity to tell him that. His pat ‘we are so sorry to have had challenges serving you’ response was infuriating.

We didn’t ask for any discount. But if I had been on that floor, I’d have comped the whole damn table to make up for the whole awful, rubbish experience and the subsequent word of mouth.
English tea my butt. We will never, ever go back.

The Crown Inn

View Larger Map

The Crown Inn
Polstead Street,
Stoke by Nayland
Suffolk
Tel: +44 (0)1206 262 001







Stoke by Nayland is a quintessentially English village set in the heart of ‘Constable Country’ in Suffolk and being perched on a small hilltop has the most incredible views over the famed Dedham Vale and the Stour Valley.

The historical wealth of the area, all from the production of wool, is best demonstrated by the magnificent and imposing fifteenth century church that dominates the skyline and the village. In the Middle Ages, the wool trade was the main source of commercial wealth in England, and tradition has it that the woolsack was introduced in the House of Lords to symbolize the importance of wool in the commerce of the realm. In the wool trade no area was more important than East Anglia.

Stoke-by-Nayland is home to two incredibly good pubs, both have acquired a great reputation and people travel from all over the area to visit and eat at them. The first is The Angel Inn and the second is The Crown.

The Crown has a range of local beers but where it really shines is with an extraordinarily eclectic and huge wine list. Rather cleverly their menu has wine suggestions beside each of the dishes and they are not trying to push the upper end wines either.

The food here is fabulous, they use as much local produce as is available and their Daily Special’s change as often as the weather, which is to say very regularly!

The seafood is all local East Coast and all fresh, and the blackboard keeps tabs on how many dishes are left. The crab is from Cromer, the pork is organic from a local farm well known in the area and the duck free range from just over the border in Norfolk. This is exactly what an English village pub should be doing; showcasing the very best of produce from the area and only serving food in season.

The Crown has a large terrace at the back with a huge fenced in garden for the children to run around in, which is fantastic if you want to have an undisturbed lunch.

Inside light woods on the floor have lifted the usual darkness of country pubs and with big open spaces and the French doors onto the terrace you have a very pleasant light and airy atmosphere.

If you ever find yourself in this part of the world I thoroughly recommend a trip to both Stoke by Nayland and to the Crown. You will not be disappointed by either. This is The Fat Expat's pledge to you!

Emirates

Emirates
EK 058 from Dusseldorf to Dubai
Web: http://www.emirates.com


Nobody likes eating on an aeroplane much. Unless you’re sat at the pointy end, meals are a tray of mild inconveniences, awful food and a drinks trolley that always manages to lag by just enough to ensure that your drink gets to you just after you’ve finished the main course.

The whole experience isn’t necessarily helped by the fact that you (probably) know you’re eating mass-produced meals of low food-cost ingredients drenched in anti-bacterial washes, churned out in a factory where wellington-wearing minimum wage workers sling around buckets of sauces and squeeze part-cooked ingredients into little foil-covered trays ready for reheating and slinging out to a couple of hundred punters five miles up.

Many years ago in another life, I interviewed the BA station manager in Dubai. He was terribly pleased with himself and surrounded by a fawning marketing and PR team and so, when I got to my last question, it had to be: “Tell me one thing. You know you serve breakfast on that red-eye flight to Heathrow. How do you store an omelette for seven hours on an aeroplane and serve it precisely at the very moment...”

“Yes? Yes?” from the excited team waiting for their compliment from the over-awed young passenger/journalist.

“...When it’s become just like a housemaid’s flipflop?”

But sitting at the pointy end and quaffing Taittinger, now that’s quite another affair. And on this flight, I had the best meal I have ever eaten on an aeroplane: food that was quite exceptional and which I’d have been delighted to have been served on the ground. And that’s saying something, as I’m sure you’ll agree.

Dinner starts with a tray of nuts (including heart-attack inducing pecans and macadamias for the health-conscious executive to pick his way around) and a drink: a chance to move on from the Tatty to a G&T, what?

The first course, ‘grilled scallops on a vanilla skewer, served on a marinated fruit salad, dressed with papaya sauce’, was the start of what was to be a unusually delightful experience. They were simply stunning: a salad of three tender scallops that had been quite literally skewered in a neat little line on half a vanilla pod (Oh, the food cost!), which meant fun digging out the tiny, crunchy seeds and playing with them combined with tastes of scallop and fruit like a true food obsessive. A green salad later and I’ve moved from a cheeky Porcupine Ridge sauvignon blanc to a stunning Chatea du Tertre Margaux to go with my ‘Pan-seared lamb cutlet topped with a coffee bean crust, served in a cardamom just, accompanied with a medley of grilled vegetables and saffron rice.’

The coffee thing should have warned me away. I should have gone for the fire-roasted chicken breast in a creamy herb sauce or the pasta bonbons; filled with ricotta and served with a béchamel on a tomato rucola coulis. Or the fillet of trout, poached and served with saffron vegetables and parsley chateau potatoes (257 calories, if you please).

But I’m glad I was brave: it was amazing, enjoyable and grin-inducing. I’ve always wondered about that particular combination but never felt quite mad enough to go for it. I will now. The lamb was excellent, tender and the vegetables and rice just perfect. The coffee crust worked – just. Scallops and vanilla, lamb and coffee. This was hardly a 'safe' menu, particularly to be serving in the insane catering conditions of an aircraft. That it delighted rather than disgusted has to count as a major feather in EK's cap.

This all followed by more Margaux and cheese: I took a rain-check on the clotted cream panna cotta or croissant butter pudding (which looked suspiciously like James Martin’s wicked butter, egg and white chocolate version) and did for some excellent Stilton and perfectly matured Camembert instead.

It’s always nice to have something great meeting your low expectations and this was no exception: a really nice meal of memorable and interesting food, served well and all that on a flight, too. Even as pointy end standards go, this was an outstanding experience. But it isn’t going to make my next flight, down the back, any easier to bear!

Reflets par Pierre Gagnaire

Reflets par Pierre Gagnaire
Intercontinental Hotel, Festival City
Front Desk: +971-4-7011111
Web: http://www.ichotels-emea.com/ic/middle_east/dubai/

I came to an important conclusion over the weekend. I love food that makes me laugh. And I laughed my way through one of the best fine dining experiences to be had in Dubai right now – a meal at Reflets by Pierre Gagnaire, the fine dining restaurant at the uber-funky new Intercontinental Festival City.

We were an interesting group: one grumpy diner who’s had a million more bad service experiences than he wanted and wasn’t going to put up with any messing around. One very loud and entertaining ‘couldn’t give a toss’ redhead. One exceedingly strong-minded and crusty (but lovely!) wine buff. One ‘this is how I like it and I’m not putting up with anything you choose to foist on me in the name of theatre’ Diner With Attitude, two perfectly normal people and a slightly pretentious foodie. (sounds like ‘Tubular Bells’, doesn’t it? “Two Slightly Pretentious Foodies”) In case you’re wondering, I’m the latter. Argue with the ‘slightly’ if you will.

The evening started with cocktails at the Intercon’s Champagne Bar on the 26th floor as we waited for stragglers. This is a truly fantastic place with one of the best views in Dubai, a James Bond sliding door secret entrance and beyond funky furnishings (the cocktail table chairs feel dangerously unbalanced and aren’t terribly comfortable, however). The champagne list here is extensive and pricey: you’re not going to get much below Dhs 155 a glass, but the cocktails are more reasonably priced. Service could be smarter, but the hand-around hot canapés are a lovely touch.

And so down to dinner. Pierre Gagnaire holds three stars for his Paris restaurant, is head chef at London’s Sketch (just the one star, but a top 20 placing by Restaurant Magazine, a top 50 from Time Out and so on) and has recently opened up in Tokyo and Hong Kong. His Dubai venture is so new, it doesn't even get a plug on his website. The decor is definitely individual: a definite taste of Sketch but perhaps a little too close to a room layout in ‘The One’ to be a defining interior design moment. Sure, it’s funky, but it’s also a little, well, last year’s funky.

Time to talk toilets.

Oh, you came here to read about food and drink, did you? Don’t forget where it all ends up, buddy.

The toilets in Reflets are mirrored. The ladies are offered, as a consequence, a view of their derrieres. The men are forced to stand up against a mirrored black wall while water runs down it in front of them. You’re not sure whether to lean closer or step back. Nice piece of visual design, but I do rather prefer interior design that remembers that we humans, inconvenient, erratic carbon-based life-forms that we are, have to manage living with it.

So we sat down to dinner, a merry group led by a loudly guffawing redhead. Now, given that this is fine dining and the rest of the relatively small restaurant contains groups of quiet and well-behaved diners sitting at their well spaced out tables, you’d expect a little nervousness from the staff. Not a bit of it: the team, mainly French from what I could see, have obviously dealt with a great deal worse than us before getting up for breakfast. In what seemed little more than a trice, they’d managed Miss ‘I’m not playing’, not only disarmed Mr. Grumpy (who had actually announced to them that he was grumpy) but had done so to his approval and delight and had gone on to share the joke with our chattering redhead and make it quite clear that if she wanted to bellow at the top of her voice, she was more than welcome to do so! Subsequently the sommelier gracefully dealt with strong minded wine buff and pretentious foodie with such charm that we were both left speechless and, to be honest, really quite pleased.

This is service beyond the ordinary. This is empowered service by smart people who know just when a joke is something to share, just when to intervene and just when to let the flow of the evening take its course. This is service that waits for someone to finish talking before speaking to the table, that knows when to suggest and guide and when to leave you to it, when to smile indulgently and when to simply back off. And I’m not talking patsies here: one guest declaimed she didn’t like chardonnay wines but would appreciate a nicely cooled Chablis. “Chablis is chardonnay, madam” said the sommelier, pleasantly enough but there was steel there, in the velvet glove.

We had a ball.

We started with champagne, because this was a celebration. I'm not telling you what we ordered or what we paid for it. The wine list is extensive, very French-oriented (it’s a French restaurant, so fair enough) and damned expensive. You’ll be hard put to find much worth drinking for under Dhs550 a bottle. We started with a Pouilly Sur Loire, but some found the petrol (“Yes, petrol, but after pineapple”: sommelier. Some agreed, some didn’t) taste too much, so we went on to a Pouilly Fuissé. Our red was that greatest of treats: Gaston Hochar’s amazing Chateau Musar. I love introducing people to Musar: once they’ve tasted it and gone ‘WOW’, you can let ‘em into the big secret: this huge, camphorous, hint-of-the-smell-of-an-old-grand-piano, complex and fundamentally gorgeous wine is Lebanese. We had the 1999 and it was, of course, great. Interestingly, it was decanted for us by the sommelier, who also went to great lengths to let everyone know that 'white wine with white meat' was something that he didn't personally have great time for so they should feel free to order what they fancied without getting caught up in old fashioned thinking. Which is a nice change from the 'deep breath then repeat order in outraged, strangulated voice' school of sommelier, no?

As we sat sipping our celebratory pop, tiny morsels of food started appearing. These were laid out and then introduced by the maitre d’. This was interesting: everyone was slightly wary of trying out the many delights before them. The general feeling around the table regarding this array of little things was clear: this was going to be defining. If they were amazing, the meal was obviously going to be a smash. If they were just puff and pretension, then it was going to be awful.

Amazing took the day.

A shot glass containing a Greek onion marmalade and a slice of anchovy was a tiny amazement, a miniscule salted ginger biscuit was a surprise, a titchy steak tartare with a soft biscuit didn’t really have the volume to compete on taste, the truffle butter with a sliver of nutty bread delicious, cones of soft, barely-holding-it-together-rich crumbly biscuit filled with houmous (a clear nod to Thomas Keller here, surely) grin-inducing, a cheese dip with tiny slivers of toast pleased, a little savoury dip of squid piqued, tiny slivers of dark-sauced smoked eel on sticks exploded... there was more, but I can’t remember it all. A succession of delights, of tiny tastes, textures, flavours and colours that provoked surprise and a childish sense of adventure. I was grinning like an idiot already. We got down to the serious business of choosing from a quite dazzling range of foods – and, for Dubai, some quite dazzling prices. My starter came in at Dhs 210, the main at Dhs 410.

I started with the foie gras de canard marbré: three slices of a foie gras terrine served on the side of a bowl containing a Tarbais bean cream topped with a black olive jelly. Served alongside this is a cocktail glass containing a melba toast sandwich of speck ham and Morbier cheese above a green salad with warm chicken gizzards masking a layer of mango and other fruit below. This was hard to manage: a challenging counterpart to the foie gras and particularly the creamy beans and rich jelly: also relatively hard to eat elegantly. But damn, was it good.

Others had the pascaline de poularde fermiere, a mixture of achingly tender chicken breast, cheese and spinach served alongside a bowl containing a creamy base, which was topped with a rich truffled bouillon by the waiter. One of us had the truffled gnocchi, served over a rocket mash and alongside a crisp salad: the tiny, delicate gnocchi again topped with a sauce at table.

An alternative was a range of soups and cereals: from almond soup with white beans and redcurrant cubes to pressed basmati and black rice with whipped horseradish and a bisque of blue velvet crab. Hard to pass by, really. But we managed.

By now I’m giggling like a schoolgirl that’s just broken into the chemistry lab and taken a major hit of nitrous oxide before meeting the Physics master she's got a crush on. The food is overwhelmingly good, demanding attention and focus – and getting it.

Some had sole as a main, served in its cooking butter and accompanied by a dish of morels in white Port and with a cube of citrus and passion fruit granite (a solid granita, really) on the side. The fish was enjoyed hugely, the creamy morels were amazing, soft and quite, quite delicious.

I had the boeuf ‘Master Kobe’. This was advertised, variously, as: a heart of entrecote ‘Master Kobe’ roasted, sliced on a bed of melted sorrel with a wagyu fondant treated like a condiment, ‘Club Dubai’ and braised turnip with Banyuls wine.

It turned up on one plate and a further three separate dishes. Gagnaire's food is frequently a multi-plattered experience and, while this lets him play to his heart's content, it can sometimes be a challenge to work out quite what to do with everything.

The wagyu came on the plate with its fondant condiment, served on the sorrel. There was a whizz of decorative deep red on the plate. Cooked to absolute perfection (I wasn’t asked how I’d like it and I didn’t tell), the luscious, tender wagyu was red inside, but just the right side of rare not to be bleeding. The steak was, incidentally, very small and had a lump of gristle in it, which was sloppy butchery at this level of dining. The sorrel and fondant were, respectively, excellent. Served in a separate dish, the braised turnip in wine was insanely rich. There was also a small chafing dish of wagyu, a ‘cheaper cut’, the waiter informed me, which had been braised in wine and was delicious, but fibrous in a braising steak kind of way. I’m not sure why you’d serve this, to be honest. It was as good a braised piece of beef as you’ll find, but it didn’t stand up as distinctively wagyu or necessarily complement the main dish in any way. The ‘Club Dubai’, on another dish, was a cube trencher built up from red-stained (beetroot?) bread and topped with a floppy, transparent red pepper jelly sheet that featured the restaurant’s logo on it. Below this, in the cube itself, green vegetables.

This one item, in the whole meal, scared me. I don’t buy ‘Dubai slings’ or ‘Dubai special’ anything. And I didn’t buy this. It wasn’t reflective of Dubai (God help us if someone finds a food that is) in any way that I could see, it didn’t really work for me at any level and the green vegetables inside were, to my mind, over-done. I likes a bit of crunch, see. I would have much preferred something honestly, greenly, crisp and buttery with a challenging flavour along the lemon or creamy scale of things to offset the rich wagyu, deep winey turnip and dark brown, intensity of the braised beef.

But then I’m not swinging four Michelin stars around as my culinary pudenda, am I?

By now the Musar’s flowing and it’s perfect with the rich flavours and sumptuous textures: I’m in transports and everyone around the table is nothing less than delighted, surprised and charmed. We’re also starting to work out that we’re not going to get away with this one on the cheap!

Desserts included ‘Le Latour’ a stack of praline, chocolate and coconut milk cake (“Nice, but ordinary”) and the ‘Feuillitage croustillant’, a puff pastry baton halved at table by the waiter in a neat piece of theatre and served with mascarpone and apples on a bowl of apple and calvados ice cream and apple sauce. I passed and went for the cheese course.

Again, like Keller, Gagnaire doesn’t do a ‘cheese platter’, but actually cooks with his cheese: a ‘composed cheese’ course. This didn’t suit one member of the party, who just wanted ‘some cheese’, but not enough to test the waiters and ask for it.

My ‘Nord de la France’ consisted of a ramekin of salad and beer cream with shavings of carroty Mimolette, a sharp, ammoniac mousse of Camembert with two studs of creamy Pont L’Eveque and a slice of soft, melting Neuchatel with a rich drizzling of lovage and pear cider reduction.

It was nothing less than spectacular and I was deeply glad that I had rubbed my glass to conjure up that genie of the bottle, the sommelier, to bring me a tot of truly excellent dessert wine to go with it.

If this isn’t the longest review I’ve ever written, it’s certainly the longest I’ve written for The Fat Expat. This was a truly, awesomely, great meal cooked by a great chef working for a world class chef and supported by a team of utter professionals. You can't just skim over it..

My fear is that the French team are in for a six month stint, training some local hires before they jet off back to London, Paris or Tokyo. My fear is that the kitchen will go all wayward, the worst danger of the licenses and franchises that are peppering Dubai’s yaya hotels.

But for now, this is as good as you’re going to get. We paid a touch over Dhs 1,000 per head: pretty much the price that had The Guardian wringing its napkin in angst when it reviewed Sketch.

Would I pay it again? Yes I would. This is the restaurant that I would recommend anyone in Dubai visits for a stunning experience: ambience, service, delight and sheer experimentalism combine at Reflets to create a truly sublime experience. The food is not only brilliant, but challenging, silly, funny, charming and entertaining in itself. The service is impeccable. The experience is brilliant.

Go there.