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.