Bamboo

Asian flavours in Al Barsha Discuss this article

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It took our taxi driver four roadside enquiries and two anguished cigarettes before the Golden Tulip finally honed into view (sideways, weirdly) amid the dusty monoliths of Al Barsha, one of Dubai’s ‘up and coming’ (read: unfinished) business districts. Still, that’s the price you pay for being on the bleeding edge of cool, for being what marketing folk term ‘early adopters’.

As we lurched from one shady informant to another in the half-light of some unidentified underpass, I tried to persuade my sceptical (not to mention famished) cab-mate that, by breaking-in the far-flung business hotels of Dubai’s less salubrious areas, we were performing some invaluable service to future generations of Dubaians, a bit like the pioneer ravers who had to hang around English provincial fields at ungodly hours to get the party started.

Although it’s been open since 2006, it’s apparent from the sheer, desolate emptiness of the place that the Golden Tulip is far from full capacity: the Al Barsha rave-up is yet to reach critical mass.

Granted, it’s unfair (and more than a little facetious) to compare a four- star Al Barsha bolthole to a euphoric dance phenomenon that grew from the acid house movement: hotels like the Golden Tulip are, by their very nature, pretty joyless affairs; they’re intended primarily as anonymous, relatively inexpensive places for the world’s PowerPoint posse to drop anchor and recharge batteries.

That said, it would have benefited the planters of this particularly lacklustre Tulip bulb to consider that a lot has changed since 1989. Global business travellers, even the ones who haven’t yet made the corner office, expect to eat in restaurants where all of the servers can speak the language in which the menu is printed. They also expect more than 20 per cent of the advertised wine list to be available. They do not expect to leave a Chinese restaurant muttering ‘well at least the orange slices were quite nice’.

It’s true: the orange was quite nice. But it was not Dhs321 worth of nice, which is the amount we’d racked up by the time the complimentary citrus arrived on our table. By this point we’d mimed our way through the acquisition of starters in the form of acidic and lukewarm Shanghai salted duck, two unremarkable chicken satay sticks, and a gelatinous-yet-gristly poached lamb ‘crystal cake’.

We’d struggled through oily chicken noodle stir-fry and gnawed forlornly at knobbly duck chunks in glutinous lemon sauce. We’d made cursory inroads into chilli crab with spring onion and ginger but, as the English speaking waitress explained (she was wheeled out expressly for this purpose), the Bamboo kitchen is not equipped with standard crab-cracking apparatus, so we wouldn’t like to comment in depth. We had to leave most of it. All things considered, an orange was the least Bamboo could do.

Maybe we’ve become unhealthily fixated here but, when they’re plonked pitch-side during Saturday kickabouts, orange slices are often interpreted as a sign that there’s everything to play for.

Given the inauspicious beginnings outlined above, and the generally woeful state of desserts served in Dubai’s Chinese restaurants, we weren’t holding much hope for the sweet diced pumpkin and boiled grey sticky rice balls we’d ordered. We were right to manage our expectations thus. We were wrong to continue the charade by ordering two Red Bull cocktails, which, almost inevitably, turned out to be just two cans of drink. Rarely have we felt less elated.

The bill (for two)
Mineral water Dhs11
2x Red Bull Dhs36
Shanghai salted duck Dhs25
Chicken satay Dhs 25
Crystal lamb cake Dhs46
Stir-fried chicken noodle Dhs25
Chili crab Dhs45
Lemon duck Dhs50
Egg fried rice Dhs22
Sweet boiled diced pumpkin Dhs18
Boiled sticky rice balls Dhs18
Total (including service) Dhs321

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