Food in the Middle East, eight: Meals in Abu Dhabi

This is the eighth post in a new series based on the Middle East trip that I completed in May and early June. The first posts in the series covered breakfasts, lunches and dinners in Jordan, sweets, pickles and olives, lunches and dinners in Jerusalem, street food, and lunches and dinners in Istanbul.

We stopped over in Abu Dhabi for one night on the outward leg and on the homeward leg. The hotel in both cases was the same 5-star Jumeirah Hotel that is owned by Etihad, the airline we used for most of the flights on the trip.

On the way to the Middle East, we had dinner in our rooms on the day we stayed in the hotel. We were tired from the long-haul flight over the Indian Ocean and just wanted to relax. I had a burger with chips and my friend had something with prawns that came with a sauce. The bun that came with my burger wasn’t all that fresh but the meal did the job it was intended to do. I remember thinking that it was a bit pricey but I don’t remember the exact price of either meal and I didn’t make a note of them.

On the homeward leg we checked in in the evening and had a late dinner in a Lebanese restaurant in the hotel’s basement. We had soups each and then a main course which we shared. This main was grilled meat and it was, like the soup, very good. We also had a green salad that we shared and the meal came with small dishes of mezze and flat bread. I had two glasses of a Lebanese white wine and my friend had a bottle of still mineral water. The photo below shows my friend’s soup. You can also see in the frame the mezze dishes and the salad.

We put the meal on the hotel tab and I don’t remember how much it cost but it was something like 600 UAE dirhams (A$235). I didn’t pay much attention because it was so late in the evening and because, anyway, you don’t have many options in a hotel like this. If you want to go out you need a taxi and then the question of where to go arises. There is no central tourist area or shopping district in Abu Dhabi, as there is in Amman or in Jerusalem or in Istanbul. The hotel is a little oasis and if we didn’t eat in one of its restaurants we would have been thrown back, again, on room service. It was around 11pm by the time we sat down to eat. We asked the waitress about the time and whether it was too late but she said that due to Ramadan the restaurant stays open until the early hours of the morning at that time of the year.

I have described the breakfasts in the Jumeirah Hotel in another post in this series, so I won’t go over that ground again here. There was one lunch however that we ate on the day we stopped over in Abu Dhabi on the homeward leg, and this will be dealt with in what follows. 

On the morning of the day we were due to leave the city we did a bit of sightseeing, visiting the Presidential Palace, then we headed to the Marina Mall, a shopping centre, where I exchanged some Turkish lira for UAE dirhams. 

We considered the possibility of eating in the shopping centre but there were no signs indicating where the food court was located. There didn’t seem to be many customers around the place, either. We rattled around a few corridors on our way to the currency exchange kiosk but, eventually, left the building. Outside, in the humidity and heat, there were about 40 taxis lined up waiting for fares on a driveway that sat on a local road. 

We got in one cab and asked the driver to take us to a local tourist attraction named the Heritage Village but he didn’t understand what we were saying or else he didn’t want to take us there. We thought it was close by and it might have been that he didn’t want such a short fare. In the end we decided to cut our losses because the hotel staff had told us that the Heritage Village closes at 2pm on Fridays and it was already after 1pm. So, we got out of the cab and into another one and told the driver to take us to the Palace Hotel. 

This institution is located just across the road from our hotel. It took a while before we got to the lobby. The driver was originally from sub-Saharan Africa, so he was from out of town, and he had been on the job only for a week or so, so he didn’t know which way to go to get to the driveway in front of the hotel lobby; there are no signs that might help you to get there. In the end we did a loop and made a U-turn before finding the right driveway and then pulling up at our destination. Paying for the ride was, as usual in the UAE, easy. Taxis in the country always put on the meter when you get in so there were no dramas in Abu Dhabi as there had been in the other cities we had visited during the trip.

One of my friend’s shoes gave up the ghost as we were walking into the lobby but we successfully managed to get past the lobby to the restaurant that is located at the far end of the ground floor space. We had been told at our hotel that you need to book to get into the restaurant in the Palace Hotel but we had not done so and had decided to just rock up unannounced. Not only did the maitre d’ show us to a table immediately but he also kindly agreed to find some hotel slippers so that my friend would have something to wear on her feet when we got up to leave the place after lunch.

The food on offer varies and there was also a buffet that we decided to avoid. The menu had a range of different Middle Eastern and Western options and I chose a burger with chips and a Coke. My friend ordered a seafood roll and a bottle of mineral water. The first photo below shows my friend’s meal and the second one shows me heartily tucking into my chips, which came in a little metal basket on the plate with the burger. The burger was very good and the bun this time was fresh. 

The tab was hefty (partly due to the gold-coated cappuccino my friend ordered; more on this in the next post in this series) but, again, by this time we didn’t care very much. It came to about 250AED (A$97) but I didn’t make a note of the cost, as I had for meals and beverages that had been bought in other places we visited during the trip. Anyway, it had been a treat to eat in this sumptuous hotel, which is enormous. It takes a bit under five minutes to walk from the front door to the restaurant through the lobby, past the front desk, and through a series of spaces, occupied by sofas and chairs and tables and vases, that are for guests and their visitors to relax in.