restaurant | Living the Travel Channel

Archive for the ‘restaurant’ Category

New Restaurant

June 6, 2010

Posted by Kanga.

Well, we’ve discovered yet another excellent restaurant. Soofi Restaurant on Muraqqabat street has opened within the last year. The atmosphere is quite pleasant – wood/upholstered chairs and linen table clothes. The food (Persian) was delicious and reasonably priced.

Flat bread, vegetables and lassi (yogurt drink) were complimentary. It was my favorite type of flat bread. Yes, there are several types of flat bread, but the subtleties of flat bread are not easily described. You have to experience it.

Above is the “Soofi Royal Kabab” entree. The menu says this feeds two. Combined with the mixed appetizer (baba ghanoush, hummus, two green salads), this can easily feed four for $35.00. Not knowing this, I ordered the clay pot lamb pictured below. It was so tender, I hardly had to chew.

We also tried two soups and found them delicious. This lovely meal was topped off with tea, which came with lime, anise, mint, sugar, and ginger.

Our party of three ate well, with some left overs to take home for $57.00. We found absolutely nothing to complain about at this restaurant and highly recommend it. You should, however, get there before the tourist bus arrives and unloads a crowd of hungry tourists.

Posted in food, restaurant | Leave a Comment »

Aji

March 28, 2010

We’ve discovered a new favorite restaurant, like we needed one. And, as you can see, it has the added benefit of creative food presentation. Aji is one of the more delicious fish on the face of the earth and now we know he is handsome, as well.

Bentoya

Posted in food, restaurant | 3 Comments »

Kanga’s Birthday

March 23, 2010

Posted by Kanga

Happy birthday to me! We went to one of my favorite places, Bu Qtair Cafeteria.

With some of my favorite people.

And ate some of my favorite food.

Posted in birthday, restaurant, socialization, Tweet up | 3 Comments »

One More Picture

February 19, 2010

I tried to stand far enough back to get everyone in the picture.

[In DaddyBird’s defense, we started out sitting together, but as the group grew, he mingled. We ended up sitting next to each other. As for my birthday, I don’t know what we will do, yet.]

Posted in birthday, restaurant, socialization | Leave a Comment »

DaddyBird’s Birthday Party

February 17, 2010

Posted by DaddyBird

Last night, to celebrate my birthday, we had a dinner at my favorite restaurant, Aroos Damascus, with a number of our Dubai friends, most of whom we have gotten to know through Twitter. We had a great turnout, including ourselves 30 people showed up over the course of the evening, and it was a really wonderful time. Aroos Damascus serves very delicious Syrian-style Arabic food, and has a large menu, so there’s plenty of choice. The staff there is always very helpful and kind. I like getting people to visit this restaurant with us, but it can be difficult coaxing some to our part of town since the traffic can be very heavy coming this direction in the evenings. So last night, it was a particular thrill to have so many of many favorite people together at one of my favorite places.

Aroos Damascus has a large outdoor seating area which is very popular, and always full in the evenings when the weather is nice. We managed to monopolize several tables for our large group. It was a lovely way to spend a birthday evening!

Here are a few pictures taken by our friends at the party:

Our friend Mahdi took this picture of me, along with (part of) Muhammed Ali, Wajiha and Money:

Micheline had several picture to contribute, capturing much of our group:

Here’s Micheline herself flanked by Muhammed Ali and Ritesh:

Posted in birthday, celebration, restaurant | 1 Comment »

Saturday Tweetup

January 11, 2010

Saturday we met with our Twitter friends at one of our favorite restaurants – Al Baghdadi on Al Muteena Street. The very first time Daddybird and I ate at this restaurant, my purse was stolen. You can read the detailed account of that experience here.
Anyway, back to the Tweetup. There were 26 people, according to my count, not all pictured here. They are a marvelous group of people from a wide range of countries, ages, professions, etc. Rami showed up late, but that’s the beauty of a tweetup. People come and go as they please or their schedule allows.
Now a word about Twitter. It seems that my friends and acquaintances back home haven’t figured out what to do with Twitter. They prefer Facebook. For me, Facebook is fine for keeping in touch with people you met and made friends with “in the flesh.” I have never made a new friend through Facebook. For me, the beauty of Twitter is making new friends. We are having an atypical expat experience because of this. We would never have met these people through “normal channels.” I once described Twitter as: “like being in a room full of people who are all talking, but you can hear and understand what everyone is saying and join or ignore any conversation.” This got “retweeted” a few times, so there may be some truth in it. The people (mostly stupid journalists) who say they aren’t interested in Twitter because they don’t care what other people had for lunch, really don’t comprehend what is happening in Twitter. There was a study that randomly sampled tweets and determined that 40% is “pointless babble.” This study was deeply flawed, because you can’t pull tweets out of context without turning them into pointless babble. Twitter is a conversation.
Why did I take a picture of this bystander who was not part of our group? Because he’s wearing a leather coat over his kandura BECAUSE IT’S SO COLD! The low that night was 63F. Since the people back home are complaining about rain, wind and sometimes snow, the thought that people think Dubai is cold is amusing to me.

Posted in restaurant, socialization, Tweet up | 6 Comments »

Restaurant Signs

December 11, 2009

I took a walk during my holiday break to gather a few pictures of the signs that are amusing due to spelling or images or business name choice. First is the Exzotica Restaurant which is a Russian restaurant.
It had the ever present chef image. He is labeled “pectopah” and I had to do a little research to discover that is the transliteration for the Russian word for restaurant.

Here we have the Fast Food Restaurant and the Fast Meal Restaurant which are about two doors down from each other.
Below is the Generous Visitors Restaurant. I’m not sure if this means that they are generous to visitors or they expect visitors to be generous.

Posted in Naif, restaurant, signs | 2 Comments »

Cat comparisons

December 9, 2009

We have another new favorite restaurant. This one is on Al Muteena street not far from our apartment. It is a Arabic food restaurant, but our waiter is Tunisian and loves to practice his English on us. He is very interesting and amusing. He gives us a hard time if we don’t come every few days. He counts and tells us if he knew where we lived he would have come to check on us. Our first time at the restaurant I tried to order “fool” which is a bean dish, but he told me “No, no good…Egyptian…you don’t want.” So, I guess I’ll never get to test it for myself. Not that I’ve had enough fool to know good from bad. I also ordered an avocado shake for my drink. He was taken aback by this and warned me that it is a “strong drink.” It turned out to be heavenly. It is an avocado smoothy with a dollup of cream and blanched almonds. Yummy! I finished it off and he was impressed by that. So, now I don’t have to tell him what drink I want. He knows.

Like all restaurants with outdoor seating, this one had a stray hanging around to clean up any scraps. This is the healthiest street cat we’ve seen. From a cursory examination, it appeared to be a female, although she must have been spade.
She had a sweet little voice, so we we dallied with the idea of exchanging Oliver for her. But, upon interviewing her, we found she lacked certain qualifications. She doesn’t play fetch. She probably wouldn’t let me cradle her like a baby.

When we got home, we gave Oliver the new toy we picked up at the pharmacy. (Yes, we get our cat toys at the pharmacy because he likes gel toe cushions.) He entertained us greatly reveling in his new toy. So, we’ll keep the noisy little knothead.

Posted in cats, restaurant | Leave a Comment »

More Manga Sushi

October 27, 2009

Here are two news articles about Manga Sushi (five days apart and in the same newspaper – what’s that about? Slow news day?)

Sushi You – Khaleejtimes August 7, 2009

Emirati Serves Up a Taste of Japan – Khaleejtimes August 2, 2009

In a world of foreign franchises, it is nice to see a locally owned restaurant with a unique flavor. (Actually, if you’ve been reading this blog for very long, you know that prefer to eat at locally owned restaurants with unique flavor, as a rule. I didn’t mean to imply this was the only one. Sushi is unique in the locally owned realm, however. Some restaurants seem new to us, but they are just franchises from other countries. )

Posted in restaurant | Leave a Comment »

Bu Qtair

October 26, 2009

Last week we met up with friends and completely new people we’ve never met before at Bu Qtair Cafeteria for lovely fried fish. There were about 18 people in our group. Tom Gara and Rami were having some kind of private hat contest. Tom is sporting a red fez these days. Rami wore a Russian army cap. Rami won the contest. Daddybird could have blown them both out of the water with his Viking hat, had he known. Rami is collecting money to pay for the meal, but it looks more like a Russian black market deal going down.