Asado - Restaurant Award Highly Commended in The Palace, The Old Town, Downtown Burj Dubai, Dubai - Restaurant Reviews

Asado - Restaurant Award Highly Commended

Will the Old Town Island hotel impress your business clients with a sense of taste and style? 8 Reviews

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When judging a restaurant, one must take into account the décor, the ambience, the service and, of course, the food. But an additional set of criteria applies for a business lunch. If you’re taking a client out for a spot of early-afternoon schmoozing, you have to win their confidence, impress them with your sense of taste and style, and show them that you really do mean business.

On such occasions, the setting is every bit as important as the food, so a steak-house might not instantly appeal. But Asado – The Palace Hotel’s Argentinean grill – is no ordinary steakhouse.

The interior of the restaurant may offer the kind of gaucho tat, rough-stone walls and open kitchen you might expect at a high-end South American meat joint, but it’s outside on the terrace where your deal will most likely be clinched. Towering above a serene seating area and glimmering, limpid pool is possibly the most impressive statement of commercial intent on the planet, the Burj Dubai. At over 600 metres, it’s already the world’s tallest building – and it has another 300m to go.

Although it’s hard to keep your eyes off the various elevators and cranes whirring and whizzing up and down the big lump of partially-glazed reinforced concrete in front of you, it’s a good idea to quickly scan the set menu options, especially if time is scarce.

Asado promises to deliver all three courses and one house drink within 45 minutes, and on this occasion it was as good as its word. The soup of the day – today a thick, creamy and rustic mushroom broth with a drop of herby olive oil – arrives in a modestly-sized bowl, leaving plenty of room and time for the main.

I opted for the 200g tenderloin steak, which arrived with my side order choice of thick-cut fries arranged like building blocks, perhaps in tribute to the somewhat larger construction site nearby. Clearly, no corners had been cut for the lunchtime briefcase bashers, since the steak was beautifully marbled, sensationally tender and tastier than anything I’ve ever seen in pinstripe.

If you’re worried that steak might sit a little heavily while you’re trying to look all sophisticated and businesslike, there’s a chicken and a vegetable (sweet corn) option in reserve, but none of the portions are prohibitively large.

This is just as well, because you won’t want to leave any of the superb apple tart, which lies prostrate under a majestic scoop of vanilla ice cream that compliments the sharp, sweet slices of fruit with its lush creaminess. By the end of the lunch, even if your potential partner in commerce is inanely mumbling platitudes about ‘paradigm shifts’, ‘blue-sky thinking’ and ‘impactful action-items’, there’s always the majestic Burj Dubai to help you fantasise about becoming a construction worker instead.

By James Brennan