Nobu is new to Dubai but not to the restaurant scene. It has been one of the trendiest and most influential restaurants in the world for more than a decade. AA Gill at The Times recently said its London brach was past its prime:
Anyhow, Nobu's new branch in Dubai is the flagship restaurant of Atlantis, a giant symbol of Dubai's oversized excessiveness that sits at the tip of The Palm Jumeirah, an even larger symbol of Dubai's oversized excessiveness.
It is only a couple of weeks old, and I'm no A.A Gill, but I'm pretty sure that it has yet to go down the path of its London sibling. We had an absolute stormer of a meal there on Saturday night, which I have taken the pleasure of recreating in blog form for your pleasure (and perhaps my recollection, with a tear in my eye, when I am poor and hungry in some terrible nightmare future).
All these dishes, except the desserts, were served one at a time and shared between three. Cold, then hot, then sushi, then dessert, then wandering, stuffed and delighted, out the door for a long hard gaze into a stupidly large aquarium.
Cold
Yellowtail sashimi with jalepeno and citrus
The cleanest tasting, freshest piece of raw fish I have ever had. The jalepeno added a nice zing to the crystal-clear flavour of the yellowtail. If I was running the show, I would make the citrus sauce a little more citrussy. But I will never second guess The Nobu.
Sashimi Tacos
The most average dish of the night. Fairly plain, just pieces of raw fish in little mini taco shells. By mini, i mean the size of a box of matches. Came with a bland tomato salsa. Nothing memorable here.
Mixed seafood ceviche
Wonderful. A lovely stack of mixed fish and shellfish, all soaked in an intense citrus dressing. Took me to the citrus wonderland I was hoping to get to with the Yellowtail, and further. "It's lucky you're sharing it between three," said our American waiter, "because that can really burn out your palate if you had it to yourself." Sissy.
Hot
Duck breast with wasabi
Pretty excellent. Avoided the usual greasy fattyness you usually get with duck dishes, and had a nice degree of zing from the wasabi, which was grated whole on top of the duck, rather than turned into the typical green paste you see in sushi restaurants. Was interesting to taste wasabi in its pure form.
Black cod miso
One of the world's great fish dishes. It is what made Nobu famous, and understandably so. The waiter told us it might be the best piece of fish we will ever eat, and that is not an understatement.
The first mouthful of this is one of those flavours I will never forget, like big overripe peaches from the tree in our backyard when I was a little kid. Each of us literally moaned. I'm a big believer in simplicity when it comes to fish - make it awesomely fresh, barbeque it with a touch of seasoning, serve it up with a fat wedge of lemon. But when it comes to fancy "cooked" fish, this was indeed the best I have ever had.
Snow crab in tomato cream
Nice big chunks of sweet, juicy crab, but slightly drowned out by the creamyness of the sauce. On any other night this dish would have you in tears of joy, but with such illustrious neighbours, this one was about in the middle.
Sushi
Once you are done with the hot and cold dishes, they bring out the sushi menu, which seems to be aimed as a kind of "filler" for those still hungry after all the fairly small plates before. We ordered a mixed plate of whatever the chef reccomended, and requested a few pieces of Toro, the fatty tuna belly that we will probably only have the pleasure of eating for a few more years.
The sushi was great, basically perfect. But it is almost anticlimactic after the culinary acrobatics of all the more complex dishes. It was probably the best sushi I have ever had, but it was just upstaged by all that had come before.
The toro was good, not great. Again, it could just be time and place, but it only seemed marginally better than regular tuna. And in a pretty seriously expensive restaurant, it stood out for its extra, insanely expensive price: $15 per piece. You would get a fairly decent sushi meal at many good restaurants around the world for the price of two pieces of this stuff.
Dessert
Dessert Bento Box
Seriously chocolatey, seriously delicious pudding, served with a damn fine scoop of ice cream. This desert was good, but I'm marking it down for being sold as a dessert "bento box". Bento normally involves a box segmented into many small compartments filled with little tasty things, this was just pudding and a scoop of ice cream served in a box. Which doesn't detract from the amazing chocalateyness and perfect composition of one of the best chocolate desserts I have ever had.
Nobu Cheesecake
This is apparently Nobu's world famous cheese cake, the most delicious cheese cake in the world, made by a blind chef in London who has taken vows of chastity and silence to give a dignity and purity to his cheesecake making etc.
It was absolutely lovely,but the highlight for me was the scoop of unbelievably good passionfruit ice cream served along side it. Passionfruit is just a fruit of the Gods to me, and that incredibly lively flavour was just translated perfectly into an ice cream. One of the best ice creams I've ever had. (The competition? Turkish dondurma, El Abd in Cairo, Golden North honey ice cream from rural South Australia).
Mochis
Weird, weird, weird. Ice cream wrapped in a kind of glutinous, gummy wrapper. A really interesting texture, and tasty, but they were a little boring: it was three Mochi balls, each cut in half. All were different colour but tasted exactly the same, they got a bit repetitive by the end.
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All in all, this was a seriously excellent meal, almost as good as any high-end restaurant meal I have ever had. We literally just walked in off the street and got a table, which by Nobu standards anywhere in the world is pretty crazy. Notice to UAE food lovers - Nobu claims over the phone to always be fully booked for weeks, but a number of people, including us, have just shown up and got a table. They made us wait for about 5 minutes while they checked if it was possible, then called one of us over and said that luckily there was cancellation.
I call bullshit, the place was never more than 75% full between 8pm and 11pm when we left. Just show up and get your Nobu on.
Money: Nobu is expensive, really expensive, there is no way of getting around it. Including a tip for the waiter, we spent about $170 each, and we did not buy wine. That's almost one third less than the bill that AA Gill described as "disgusting and embarassing" on his recent trip, but it is still plenty. But...
Two things:
1) Included in this price is about $30 each spent purely on water and a piece of toro. The water came at $10 per 800ml bottle, which is a pretty good scam if you can get in on it. And the toro was the second most expensive dish we ordered, even though it was just one individual piece of sushi each.
2) This is not really food, and shouldn't be priced as such. This is an event, a series of memories, inspiration and joy. The happiness I received from the meal would equal a good dinner, followed by a decent concert, followed by a boat ride on a river, chased down with a late-night move in an outdoor cinema. Just shut up and pay for it, or don't, whatever floats your boat.
I'll probably go to a place like Nobu about three times a year. I don't care how much it costs, just like I don't care about the cost of flying to Amsterdam and seeing Radiohead in the park. Counting little piles of golden beans and hording them away obsessively has never really been my strong point, and although it has to change, it doesn't have to change too much. Life is too short etc....
Next up, sometime in 2009, Reflets a Pierre Gagnaire. And El Bulli looms on the long-term horizon, as long as I can have my shit together enough to remember to enter the booking lottery next September.
They’ve packed so many into this low, unprepossessing canteen of a room that they’ve made it a labyrinth. The waiters, apparently (or, rather, not apparently — invisibly), are constantly losing their bearings and finding themselves stuck up cul-de-sacs or unmarked tracks, hemmed in by the thick vegetation of Middle Eastern small-arms dealers, knickerless Ukrainian executive-stress consultants, record pluggers and fashion PRs putting each other on expenses and an overdressed smattering of speechless visiting provincials, who booked a seat at the most exclusive room in the nation six months ago and can’t quite believe that this is it. They are left in their own private Siberias to rue the truth that the abiding emotion for the socially aspirant is a deep sense of cheated disappointment.The whole review is classic slamming of place that clearly got a bit too cosy and lazy in its ability to charge the suckers, and makes a great read...
Anyhow, Nobu's new branch in Dubai is the flagship restaurant of Atlantis, a giant symbol of Dubai's oversized excessiveness that sits at the tip of The Palm Jumeirah, an even larger symbol of Dubai's oversized excessiveness.
It is only a couple of weeks old, and I'm no A.A Gill, but I'm pretty sure that it has yet to go down the path of its London sibling. We had an absolute stormer of a meal there on Saturday night, which I have taken the pleasure of recreating in blog form for your pleasure (and perhaps my recollection, with a tear in my eye, when I am poor and hungry in some terrible nightmare future).
All these dishes, except the desserts, were served one at a time and shared between three. Cold, then hot, then sushi, then dessert, then wandering, stuffed and delighted, out the door for a long hard gaze into a stupidly large aquarium.
Cold
Yellowtail sashimi with jalepeno and citrus
The cleanest tasting, freshest piece of raw fish I have ever had. The jalepeno added a nice zing to the crystal-clear flavour of the yellowtail. If I was running the show, I would make the citrus sauce a little more citrussy. But I will never second guess The Nobu.
Sashimi Tacos
The most average dish of the night. Fairly plain, just pieces of raw fish in little mini taco shells. By mini, i mean the size of a box of matches. Came with a bland tomato salsa. Nothing memorable here.
Mixed seafood ceviche
Wonderful. A lovely stack of mixed fish and shellfish, all soaked in an intense citrus dressing. Took me to the citrus wonderland I was hoping to get to with the Yellowtail, and further. "It's lucky you're sharing it between three," said our American waiter, "because that can really burn out your palate if you had it to yourself." Sissy.
Hot
Duck breast with wasabi
Pretty excellent. Avoided the usual greasy fattyness you usually get with duck dishes, and had a nice degree of zing from the wasabi, which was grated whole on top of the duck, rather than turned into the typical green paste you see in sushi restaurants. Was interesting to taste wasabi in its pure form.
Black cod miso
One of the world's great fish dishes. It is what made Nobu famous, and understandably so. The waiter told us it might be the best piece of fish we will ever eat, and that is not an understatement.
The first mouthful of this is one of those flavours I will never forget, like big overripe peaches from the tree in our backyard when I was a little kid. Each of us literally moaned. I'm a big believer in simplicity when it comes to fish - make it awesomely fresh, barbeque it with a touch of seasoning, serve it up with a fat wedge of lemon. But when it comes to fancy "cooked" fish, this was indeed the best I have ever had.
Snow crab in tomato cream
Nice big chunks of sweet, juicy crab, but slightly drowned out by the creamyness of the sauce. On any other night this dish would have you in tears of joy, but with such illustrious neighbours, this one was about in the middle.
Sushi
Once you are done with the hot and cold dishes, they bring out the sushi menu, which seems to be aimed as a kind of "filler" for those still hungry after all the fairly small plates before. We ordered a mixed plate of whatever the chef reccomended, and requested a few pieces of Toro, the fatty tuna belly that we will probably only have the pleasure of eating for a few more years.
The sushi was great, basically perfect. But it is almost anticlimactic after the culinary acrobatics of all the more complex dishes. It was probably the best sushi I have ever had, but it was just upstaged by all that had come before.
The toro was good, not great. Again, it could just be time and place, but it only seemed marginally better than regular tuna. And in a pretty seriously expensive restaurant, it stood out for its extra, insanely expensive price: $15 per piece. You would get a fairly decent sushi meal at many good restaurants around the world for the price of two pieces of this stuff.
Dessert
Dessert Bento Box
Seriously chocolatey, seriously delicious pudding, served with a damn fine scoop of ice cream. This desert was good, but I'm marking it down for being sold as a dessert "bento box". Bento normally involves a box segmented into many small compartments filled with little tasty things, this was just pudding and a scoop of ice cream served in a box. Which doesn't detract from the amazing chocalateyness and perfect composition of one of the best chocolate desserts I have ever had.
Nobu Cheesecake
This is apparently Nobu's world famous cheese cake, the most delicious cheese cake in the world, made by a blind chef in London who has taken vows of chastity and silence to give a dignity and purity to his cheesecake making etc.
It was absolutely lovely,but the highlight for me was the scoop of unbelievably good passionfruit ice cream served along side it. Passionfruit is just a fruit of the Gods to me, and that incredibly lively flavour was just translated perfectly into an ice cream. One of the best ice creams I've ever had. (The competition? Turkish dondurma, El Abd in Cairo, Golden North honey ice cream from rural South Australia).
Mochis
Weird, weird, weird. Ice cream wrapped in a kind of glutinous, gummy wrapper. A really interesting texture, and tasty, but they were a little boring: it was three Mochi balls, each cut in half. All were different colour but tasted exactly the same, they got a bit repetitive by the end.
-----------
All in all, this was a seriously excellent meal, almost as good as any high-end restaurant meal I have ever had. We literally just walked in off the street and got a table, which by Nobu standards anywhere in the world is pretty crazy. Notice to UAE food lovers - Nobu claims over the phone to always be fully booked for weeks, but a number of people, including us, have just shown up and got a table. They made us wait for about 5 minutes while they checked if it was possible, then called one of us over and said that luckily there was cancellation.
I call bullshit, the place was never more than 75% full between 8pm and 11pm when we left. Just show up and get your Nobu on.
Money: Nobu is expensive, really expensive, there is no way of getting around it. Including a tip for the waiter, we spent about $170 each, and we did not buy wine. That's almost one third less than the bill that AA Gill described as "disgusting and embarassing" on his recent trip, but it is still plenty. But...
Two things:
1) Included in this price is about $30 each spent purely on water and a piece of toro. The water came at $10 per 800ml bottle, which is a pretty good scam if you can get in on it. And the toro was the second most expensive dish we ordered, even though it was just one individual piece of sushi each.
2) This is not really food, and shouldn't be priced as such. This is an event, a series of memories, inspiration and joy. The happiness I received from the meal would equal a good dinner, followed by a decent concert, followed by a boat ride on a river, chased down with a late-night move in an outdoor cinema. Just shut up and pay for it, or don't, whatever floats your boat.
I'll probably go to a place like Nobu about three times a year. I don't care how much it costs, just like I don't care about the cost of flying to Amsterdam and seeing Radiohead in the park. Counting little piles of golden beans and hording them away obsessively has never really been my strong point, and although it has to change, it doesn't have to change too much. Life is too short etc....
Next up, sometime in 2009, Reflets a Pierre Gagnaire. And El Bulli looms on the long-term horizon, as long as I can have my shit together enough to remember to enter the booking lottery next September.
Nice you liked the ceviche. I am surprised to find it here while it comes from the other side of the world (Peru) and it's not of everyone's delight