We were in Dubai again weekend before last (yes, we are rather jammy and spoiled) and once more we tended to hang around the
Burj Khalifa. This time we even stayed in The Palace hotel (which is one of
The Addresses) which is next to the Souk
al Bahr and where
Asado is situated.
On our first night we were taken to the
Cavalli Club for dinner.
Having been completely oblivious to its existence before that Thursday night, and also having been told it was the “
Cavalli Café”, I did not expect to be greeted with a red carpet and white-clad bouncers behind the velvet rope at the back of the
Fairmont on the
Sheikh Zayed Road.
We had to ascend a completely closed and close black velvet lined stairway, lit only by pin-points and purple strips along the stairs, that felt like an ostentatious birth canal before we emerged into the club. The main floor was taken up, predominantly, by dining tables of varying size with “coffee” tables interspersed among them for people early enough to nab one but not dining.
Huge great swathes of
Swarovski crystals on string dangled from the walls like really extravagant net curtains, hanging between and around the larger dining tables around the edge of the room and also surrounding the numerous chandeliers which looked very much like oddly shaped upside down salt shakers wrapped in strands of yet more crystals.
The dominant colours of the room are black, purple and zebra, with flashes of white and gold. It is just so unashamedly and hilariously
bling that it is difficult to be offended by the tackiness, while at the same time difficult to miss the fact that it is very,
very tacky. I spotted at least two bars, one of which was surrounded with
varyingly sized bottles of
Roberto Cavalli vodka – the grains for which, I have no doubt, Mr.
Cavalli harvests himself by the light of the moon and keeping only thoughts of beautiful women in mind while he does so.
All pretentiousness aside (and there was A LOT to set aside) the
Cavalli Club is a surprisingly good restaurant. The atmosphere is all about the fun and fabulous but it feels neither too predatory nor too bitchy and the music is spot on. Our reservation was for 10 which, for a dinner club, is a dangerous time if you are hoping to be able to hold a conversation with your companion(s) but the DJ kept the volume just right so that the diners could converse while still feeling a club-vibe. From sometime around 11:30/midnight the volume slowly but steadily increased until the venue was definitely more club than dinner, but the raising in volume was so gradual that we
didn’t really notice until we found it difficult to hear the person next to us, and by then we had all finished and were ready to leave anyway. Aside from a terribly bourgeois moment when the “
sommelier” got lambasted for not knowing what was in a dish (
I don’t know because I’m the sommelier. “But if you don’t know what’s in the dish how can you recommend a wine to go with it?”
I can recommend based on if it’s a light meal or heavy, if you are having meat or fish or chicken. “So, basically, you can tell me that red goes best with steak and white goes best with fish?”
Yes. Maitre D' – “He’s new.”) the service was fab. Efficient, quick but not rushed and patient. We were a party of seven and the waiter did not even look vaguely irritated when a number of us changed our order a couple of times.
So! On to the food. The food was very good. Really. I was impressed. Unfortunately I can’t remember what everyone else had (not even O! For shame, for shame!) but almost the whole table had the same main dish.
The prequel was an amuse
bouche. A rather blah, teeny, round, cheese and potato croquette, served with a smudge of marinara sauce. It did not forecast the meal to come in any way, being somewhat uninspired and flavourless.
I started with tuna
tartare that was served on a chunky olive
tepanade and topped with very white crab meat. It was served with bitter green leaves dressed in a very subtle truffle oil which managed to enhance every other flavour in the plate and hold it’s own at the same time but at no point was it overpowering. What a clever little truffle oil! It came with a bread lance (to call it a “stick” would be far too modest) speckled with white and black sesame seeds which was a welcome bit of crunch to a largely
smooshy dish.
The main was quite simply divine. A “
mille fuille” (yes, really) of beef tenderloin and garlic
sauteed spinach, topped with a fat but dainty slab of pan fried
foie gras. Though I asked for the beef to be medium-rare (as is my wont) the layers were made up of such thin pieces of meat that it was impossible for it to be anything but cooked through. It
didn’t matter though, the tenderloin was – indeed – tender and soft. The
foie gras was lovely, a gorgeous addition and the richness of it was counterbalanced by the assertively salted baby carrots and asparagus that graced the plate along with some very nice sliced and
griddled new potatoes. As is so often the case, it was a bit part on the plate which made the show: the garlic spinach was so subtle but so integral that it would have been the element that I
didn’t know was missing, had it not been there. It all worked so wonderfully together and each element was able to stand alone. The accompanying sauce was nice and savoury, I would have said it was a red-wine reduction had we been in any other country, and I
didn’t want to ask the long-suffering waiter after he’d been so considerate to our table already. Perhaps it was juniper berries…?
For the sweet, a few deserts were ordered and did the rounds of the table. Being so stuffed and satisfied after my main I was reluctant to indulge (I know! ME!!) but I did try some of Os caramel
tiramisu, which worked well when you tried to escape from it being a
tiramisu. Very creamy but not too heavy, nice caramel and dense
spongey bits, the coffee in the form of a scoop of real coffee ice-cream nestling on top of the glass the
tiramisu was served in. Other deserts were an exotic fruit platter (which I
didn’t bother with though it looked very pretty) and a selection plate with a fantastic almond ice-cream and an oozy chocolate
fondante.
We took the fur-lined lift down to street level on the way out at about 1 in the morning as the club was just heating up. Absolutely a place to see and be seen, but with the right people and for the right reasons I would love to go again, have dinner and stay for the festivities into the night.
The next day, instead of relaxing and hanging out within walking distance where much entertainment could be had by all, we piled into our cars and drove out to
Atlantis. Sited at the epicentre of the outer-rim of Dubai Palm, in order to reach it you have to drive up the trunk of the palm, past roads leading off to the “fronds” and a multitude of identikit apartment-blocks-that-kinda-look-like-hotels which brings to mind
Barrett Homes: the Dubai model. Turning a bit of a corner and Atlantis appears, shouldering itself up to the sky, in all it’s pink and green “glory” it looks somehow embarrassed to be there. With more than a whiff of Disney-does-Arabia already present, Atlantis somehow made me think of those poor souls who dress up in the character outfits at
EuroDisney for the little kids whose dreams of the
real Disneyland were only recently crushed and who stare, distinctly unimpressed, while they cavort and jape in the rain.
We ate in
Rostang, (allegedly) a traditional French brasserie from two-star Michelin Chef Michel
Rostang. Looking back, I wonder how often Monsieur
Rostang ventured to his namesake restaurant, particularly at lunch time. The entire meal was a farce, from start to finish. Having arrived behind the rest of our party we had to ask for menus and call the waiter over to order our drinks. To be fair, we were seven people dining, some having starters, some not, ordering drinks and, I dunno, FOOD. I know that can be a little confusing. However, this is a restaurant under the name of a two-star Michelin chef, I would expect the staff to have had a wee bit of training and to know that neither a
croque monsieur nor a club sandwich count as “starters”. Oh yes. These two sandwiches came out with the starters, along with one wrong starter and one missing starter (can you say a missing starter was brought out? Probably not, let’s just move along swiftly, shall we? Good-o). After a bit of disagreement with the waiter who kept trying to assure us that sandwiches are starters and whose only response to my question of what does one have as a main course following a sandwich starter was to keep offering to bring me the menu, the sandwiches (which came with chips!!) were taken away and the M
aitre D' came over. We explained the wrong starter and he went off again. Came back with the correct one and then asked if everything else was fine. No, we are also missing another starter. The first course took about an hour. By this point I was ravenous and very much looking forward to my wild mushroom fricassee with
penne pasta in a creamy sauce. Wild mushrooms my arse. The pasta was that quick-cook rubbish that has the texture of old crumbly rubbers and the creamy sauce was cream that had been heated through with a bit of onion in. The limit was reached when O found something that looked like an ex-winged
beastie in his salad. On closer inspection it appeared to be some salad roots or something, but it showed that the garnish
hadn’t been washed properly and, for me, enough was enough. I
couldn’t eat any more after that – and I’m not a particularly fussy eater when it comes to unexpected items in my food. The M
aitre D' was summoned again and we complained about the whole sorry show. I would absolutely NOT recommend eating at
Rostang which is a real shame because it is a lovely looking restaurant, a breath of authenticity in the wholly cynical church of tourism that is Atlantis.
The rest of the weekend, by turns, passed slowly and quickly with good and bad food (notably another fantastic meal at
Asado, how spoiled am I?, and a really disappointing brunch at More) and the impulse purchase of a pair of canary yellow roller-blades because they were half off and I felt tubby after a weekend of eating.
