CARINE

Excellent dinning experience
Best French's ????

The best restaurant in Dubai

Excellent food, service and ambience.

After our initial disappointment with the food when it first opened, our next visit was just before Covid and the cold reception we received then was all replicated on our final try.
Reservation was made and arriving on time , the hostess walks past us, we became invisible yet again? We were left standing for about 5 minutes until a waiter ran over to enquire if he could help. He asked us to wait so he can check. The place was fairly crowded but at 9 p.m. a few tables were obviously free. The hostess comes back and tries to seat us indoors inspite of a terrace table reservation. Finally, after a mini scene and altercation we are seated outdoors.

Lovely weather .. perfect view. Period. The service impeccable. The young man went out of his way and did give us all the attention we expect in any decent F&B.

The food left a lot to be desired. The starting cerviche (One of the Chef’s special that day) was bland, and flat with slothy chunks of shrimp, low quality mangoes and the lemon sauce which needed some imaginative palate to decypher. The ingredients had no time to mix, seemed like thrown In together at the last minute.
The linguine, with shrimps warm on the the outside, cold inside. sautéed and introduced to the linguine, were boring. The grilled ribeye could have been smaller with a better grade of meat instead of the chewy leather that was served as a medium rare steak. The side of French fries could easily be beaten in taste and temperature by those big M fries where they would have binned the fries that were served here. Finally , the dessert, on the house , was a passion fruit cheesecake which was real french pastry, the star , to match the disdainful and arrogant french ambiance replicated , as before. The Mediterranean part is missing as the frenchness overlooks the warmth and quality of real non-french Mediterranean foods.

Very nice food and atmosphere but unfortunately the waiter mislead me and said I'd get 10% off the bill if I signed up to the Viya app using a handwritten referral code (i assume his personal code, after investigating on the app). After doing this he told me the discount was through the app and on future purchases so I felt misled. As for the personal referral code I would never allow my service staff to graze off customers.