Last week was pretty good on the food front. I had a couple of colleagues visiting from the UK which meant dining at their expense. We ate at Ushna, a smart Indian restaurant in the Madinat, and Beachcombers, an excellent Thai/Malay buffet, in the Jumeirah Beach Hotel.
Friday was my birthday and as a special treat we had booked to go to Verre - Gordon Ramsay's first restaurant outside the UK - in the Hilton on the Creek. First impressions of the room were that it was perfectly ordinary. No worry, we hadn't come for the interior design, and the restaurant has been Time Out's best restaurant in Dubai for the past 2 years. It was also the only Dubai restaurant in the recently published world top 100 restaurants.
The Maitre d' was a perfectly charming Frenchman and it was hard to resist his invitation to a glass of champagne to start. I had the full 7 course Menu Prestige and every single thing about it was flawless. Service was impeccable and the whole experience was relaxing and enjoyable. To cap things off, thanks to a passing acquaintance with the Head Chef (whose kids are also in Lucy's school), all of the drinks were complimentary. All in all, probably the best meal I have ever eaten, matched only by a couple of meals at Marco Pierre White restaurants in London.
Now, it's back to the treadmill...
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Monday, June 18, 2007
Hottest place on earth ...
... according to our UK neighbours anyway, who saw it on Sky News so it must be true. It certainly felt that way last night at the Hash - a one hour run at night in temperatures in the mid-thirties. It was 45 degrees today and it's not high summer yet.
I still haven't got a hash 'name', but it'll probably be something traffic related. Janet reversed the Durango into a little car that she couldn't see yesterday and squashed it. I then made the mistake of telling a fellow hasher that we have now collectively had 6 car accidents in 11 months. Another hasher has accused me of kerb crawling her, at the top of her drunken voice, when I slowed down to offer her lift so that's a likely candidate as well. At least it would be better than Ker-ching - the harsh hash name of a young south east Asian lady married to a middle age Aussie!
I had another culture shock when one of the local Emirati hashers, Little Mo, brought his two small under-fives, and ran off and left them in the middle of nowhere for an hour! They were still there when I left at ten o'clock. Keeping children up late is very common here though - there'll be kids in the malls even at midnight.
Nightlife in Dubai seems to revolve around (apparently) famous DJs performing in trendy clubs. There is the odd headline big act (Shakira, Roger Waters and Aerosmith being the most recent) but generally not much. Last weekend, however, we went to see 'Whose Line is it Anyway?' at the theatre. I recognised three of the five from the TV show. As they said, the only difference is that there is no 'little fat (expletive deleted) in the corner'. Although it didn't all work, generally it was very funny and we had a good time. My favourite game was when one of them left the room and then had to guess what he did for a living suggested by the audience (UAE censor using lilac highlighter, in a shed, of modern parenting and architectural review magazines). Quite bizarre.
I've also just read that Dubai has bought the QE2. It's going to be refurbished and permanently docked at the Palm Jumeirah. Some people have cynically suggested that this will be the way to introduce a casino in a Muslim country since it will be 'offshore'. I wouldn't be surprised, but I preferred the other suggestion that it is, in fact, a giant lifeboat in case the Palm sinks.
I still haven't got a hash 'name', but it'll probably be something traffic related. Janet reversed the Durango into a little car that she couldn't see yesterday and squashed it. I then made the mistake of telling a fellow hasher that we have now collectively had 6 car accidents in 11 months. Another hasher has accused me of kerb crawling her, at the top of her drunken voice, when I slowed down to offer her lift so that's a likely candidate as well. At least it would be better than Ker-ching - the harsh hash name of a young south east Asian lady married to a middle age Aussie!
I had another culture shock when one of the local Emirati hashers, Little Mo, brought his two small under-fives, and ran off and left them in the middle of nowhere for an hour! They were still there when I left at ten o'clock. Keeping children up late is very common here though - there'll be kids in the malls even at midnight.
Nightlife in Dubai seems to revolve around (apparently) famous DJs performing in trendy clubs. There is the odd headline big act (Shakira, Roger Waters and Aerosmith being the most recent) but generally not much. Last weekend, however, we went to see 'Whose Line is it Anyway?' at the theatre. I recognised three of the five from the TV show. As they said, the only difference is that there is no 'little fat (expletive deleted) in the corner'. Although it didn't all work, generally it was very funny and we had a good time. My favourite game was when one of them left the room and then had to guess what he did for a living suggested by the audience (UAE censor using lilac highlighter, in a shed, of modern parenting and architectural review magazines). Quite bizarre.
I've also just read that Dubai has bought the QE2. It's going to be refurbished and permanently docked at the Palm Jumeirah. Some people have cynically suggested that this will be the way to introduce a casino in a Muslim country since it will be 'offshore'. I wouldn't be surprised, but I preferred the other suggestion that it is, in fact, a giant lifeboat in case the Palm sinks.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
The Times They Are A-Changin
The newspapers in the UAE are, almost without exception, bland and asinine. The two main broadsheets, the Gulf News and the Khaleej Times contain lots of coverage of local events but essentially nothing by the way of real news. In their defence, it can't be an easy place to be a journalist. There are strict restrictions on what can and can't be stated in public. Any critisicm of the Royal Family, for example, is strictly taboo. The internet is also heavily censored and any number of sites are blocked for "contravening the political, religious, moral, social and economic values of the United Arab Emirates". Much to most expats annoyance, these sites include Skype and any form of cheap internet telephony. The cost of international phone calls here is ruinous.
British newspapers are widely available in Dubai, but always a day after the event and at a prohibitive price. The Sunday Times, for example, is a fiver. I can access the websites but it really isn't the same as sitting down with the printed version. So, I was really pleased to discover that The Times has now launched a locally printed version for a more reasonable pound a day. Unfortunately, it doesn't include the second section but I can manage to live without the TV schedules and reviews of opera in London. More importantly, it has sudoku and the crossword for my more cerebral wife. I was able yesterday to scoff with the rest of the UK at the new 'Marmite' logo for the 2012 Olympics, read the obituaries of minor judges and a review of Gordon Brown's new biographical book by Matthew Parris. Whilst Matthew Parris was dismissive of what he called 'clumsy thinking', all I could wonder was where the Prime Minister in waiting finds time to write books between running the economy, all that New(ish) Labour politicking and his young family? I barely seem to be managing a blog a month.
British newspapers are widely available in Dubai, but always a day after the event and at a prohibitive price. The Sunday Times, for example, is a fiver. I can access the websites but it really isn't the same as sitting down with the printed version. So, I was really pleased to discover that The Times has now launched a locally printed version for a more reasonable pound a day. Unfortunately, it doesn't include the second section but I can manage to live without the TV schedules and reviews of opera in London. More importantly, it has sudoku and the crossword for my more cerebral wife. I was able yesterday to scoff with the rest of the UK at the new 'Marmite' logo for the 2012 Olympics, read the obituaries of minor judges and a review of Gordon Brown's new biographical book by Matthew Parris. Whilst Matthew Parris was dismissive of what he called 'clumsy thinking', all I could wonder was where the Prime Minister in waiting finds time to write books between running the economy, all that New(ish) Labour politicking and his young family? I barely seem to be managing a blog a month.
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