Restaurant Review: How A.A. Gill missed out on Sheba at the Meydan racecourse
Posted on 21 March 2011 with 6 comments from readers
This month the famous British restaurant critic A.A. Gill takes a nasty sideswipe at Dubai in a long article the Vanity Fair magazine, the latest and hopefully the last of this miserable genre, and singles out the huge Meydan racecourse complex outside the city for particular vitriol.
It is a shame this whirlwind visit to Dubai to frame his usual acidic portrait did not also include a lunch at the Japanese restaurant in the Meydan Hotel. He might have been far more impressed and found something nice to say.
Horsey crowd
The Sheba restaurant is nestled to one side of the massive Meydan Hotel, although it shares its excellent views over the turf and has its own terrace. Visitors to the Dubai World Cup this weekend will be lucky to get a table.
A.A. Gill seemed overwhelmed by Meydan as a focal point for local culture and was very rude in his generalizations about our nationals. Fittingly then this reviewer joined a small party of businessmen to welcome a visitor from the UK and our generous national host picked up the bill.
Sheba is another example of the imported culture that upset Mr Gill so much in Dubai. Then again it is also the sort of stylish and beautiful import that abound in Dubai if you care to look for them rather than see the worst in everything, and then pile up the adjectives to vent your fury.
Beautiful import
A simple stained glass window of Koi and cherry blossoms greets the visitor. Inside you have cherry wood, paper, water colour paintings and silk screens on the ceiling. We enjoyed the luxury of a traditionl private dining Tatami room with Robotayaki and Yakitori served at the table.
The chef appeared to talk us through the feast and took up my seafood allergy as a challenge, producing extra chicken and beef dishes and a replacement for the sushi. One diner joked that the giant fried prawns were not big enough and the Japanese waitress took him literally and brought us some bigger ones. Oh that Dubai excess!
All the ingredients are apparently flown in regularly from Japan and the attention to detail is first class. By the end of this long lunch – with green tea flavoured rice cake with fruit to finish – another business visitor to Dubai was looking forward to his next trip here. Who cares what A.A. Gill says? Apparently the Meydan steakhouse is even better.
6 Comments posted by readers:
AA Gill was spot on. End of story. And your article only reinforces his comments.
‘Oh that Dubai excess!’-seriously, you are not in any danger of getting a Pulitzer (or any other prize for that matter…)
Well done AA Gill on at least speaking out…unlike everyone who reads this and is one of the mercenaries Mr Gill talks about…
A. A. Gill yet again!
Once more the blindness of the knee jerk reactors.
What city on the Arabian peninsula has ever been the lead article of Vanity Fair? Only Dubai.
Yet again we have a positive, yet most look to the micro, shame on all reactors!
who wants to venture where opinion is held in esteem?..a A$, we quarrel about money, fine dining, idiom & vocabulary..we love sarcasm while eschewing cursing, except in intent..Mr Robbins won’t be coming to dinner..if our reviled editor grows moody, i desire to be a guest..just now rereading fleming’s Thrilling Cities..my bloated self-deception informs me i rather know the old man..in addition, i hack other witticisms
A.A. Gill’s Vanity Fair article was intelligent, meticulously accurate & hilarious! Typically, it’s upset those still trying to justify their decision to live & work in Dubai. The majority have become completely innoculated against any sort of critiscm of their chosen base… Well get this… this is how it works in the first & civilised world and long may it continue! If we had any degree of free opinion (without recourse!) these ridiculous projects may never have been started.
Mr Gill is notorious for his vitriol. A specialism in controversy that funds a very comfortable lifestyle.
To be fair, he does write very well with tongue firmly in cheek. Dubai got off quite lightly. Just google for his hatchet jobs on other locations.
Example, Albania:
“The Albanians are short and ferret-faced, with the unisex stumpy, slightly bowed legs of shetland ponies.”
Isle of Man:
“The weather’s foul, the food’s medieval, it’s covered in suicidal motorists and honky folk who believe in fairies and whip each other”
Las Vegas: :the worst place on earth”
The Welsh: “loquacious dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls.”
The English: “the lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd of English”.
Mr Gill is Scottish.
Vile and poorly informed as his articles may be, for too long the majority of speculative expats who have come to work out here have been among the worst of the worst, and in that regard Gill hit the nail on the head.
However, elements of truth aside, Dubai has never attempted to compete with the cultural heritage the European West has to offer, but to be the most accessible international hub in the Middle East; a logical progression for one of the most historically active trading and mercantile centres on the fringes of the ancient Silk Route. Decorative spires are precisely that, a modern embellishment of the Arabian nights’ fantasy so many Western cultural docents have forever eulogised as archetypal of Persian and Babylonian opulence. Just as the developed world flounders…
Hasty to scoff, the irony is that in his diatribe against the new rich, uncultivated “what money can’t buy” generation of breathless aspirants, he has published what many Europeans would consider an almost textbook definition of America and what it stands for, in an American journal.