Ashiana in Sheraton Dubai Creek Hotel & Towers, Deira, Dubai - Restaurant Reviews

Ashiana

Ashiana is a very handsome eatery, and fine for a business lunch if food is less important than setting, but many of the city’s less glamorous curry venues offer equally good meals for a fifth of the price 8 Reviews

One of the Sheraton Dubai’s revamped outlets, Ashiana is a sleek, beautifully decorated curry house. It’s deeply tranquil, with lots of heavy wood lattices, elaborate chandeliers and a huge and beautiful painting of an Indian palace. Music is Indian easy-listening with plenty of sitar riffing. Unlike the majority of its cheaper, less posh counterparts in Dubai, it serves alcohol so the classic curry and beer combo is happily an option.

Bottles of ice-cold Kingfisher slid down nicely as we muched on triangles of spicy poppadom and perused the sackcloth menu of North Indian food. We started with bhutte ke kabab, fresh from the fryer and baking hot. The three kabab patties looked rather like mini burgers, and came with a small patch of salad. Crisp outside, they had paste-like interiors, filled with a mixture of sweetcorn, garlic, coriander and potato. Some green chillis and garam masala lent the dish a little heat, but otherwise it wasn’t very exciting, and needed healthy dollops of mango chutney to cheer it up.

Our waiter arrived to spoon out a bowlful of khass ka roganjosh, the Ashiana version of the classic dish. The mutton was tender but the dish spoiled by occasional lumps of booby trap meat which were almost entirely composed of fat. The pungent gravy was strong but there was no subtlety to the flavours – no magical mix of spices, just one blocky thump of heat and then nothing.

In comparison, a dish of murgh khuskh parda was far better – pieces of flavourful chicken breast wallowing in a tomato, onion and capsicum sauce under a layer of puff pastry. This Indian meat pie was a relative success, the mop-up pastry rendering our crisp but greasy paratha redundant.

By Rob Orchard