ROW on 45, Dubai — Restaurant Revisited

ROW stands for Refinement of Work. So three years later, has it?

There’s certainly more focus, trimmed from sixteen courses to twelve, at 895 dirhams a head to match, before you’ve even opened their tome of a wine list (or considered the alcohol-free pairing). Tighter. Less extraneous and lower priced.

The Room, and the Anglo-Asian Menu

ROW’s unrelenting, idiosyncratic, heterodox style is a marvel. The dining room remains admirably eclectic and unmistakably British, like a lounge in Saltburn estate, minus all that transgressive eroticism. There’s grandeur, camp and whimsy. Calligraphy meets pristine white linen. A champagne trolley glistens. The team? Impeccably dressed. The music is still contemporary, but less pronounced — evidently, they leaned into refinement over Frantzén pop cool.

You want to spend time here. And you will, ending in a maximalist gentleman’s lounge where only the strong can resist a jewellery-like trolley of petit fours that pluck away at your inner child.

ROW’s final gentleman’s lounge for petit fours and drinks explodes with Hollywood Regency maximalism.

Over three-and-a-half hours, an Anglo-Asian menu blooms. It is luxurious and unforced, with sojourns through some sublime morsels of provenance.

I wonder whether ROW’s Japanese flourishes advance modern British food or strain the marketing’s credulity — ‘British Heritage Reimagined’? Is this actually Jason’s personal homage in the language he knows best?

It does not matter; only critics and ink-spillers care, and the answer is less interesting than what comes bite after bite, spoon after spoon.

ROW’s contemporary take on Koffman’s squid tagliatelle with Hokkaido scallops.

The Food

A first snack of Hokkaido kari buto gentrifies pungent cheese-and-onion crisps. It shatters, then comes a late sweet balm of onion marmalade and an onion consommé jelly. A kutchan jaga potato — matured in controlled temperature and humidity for no less than 540 days — is laden with curls of chutoro, Oscietra caviar and fresh yuzu. It is the Eton Head Boy of jacket tuna mayos. Its skin, roasted and blistered, whispers of smoke. The fatty tuna slips down like a saline caviar lozenge.

Kutchan 540 with chutoro and caviar.

Wagyu appears three times, which provokes: is this a crutch? But the first two iterations read as a single ‘beef two-ways’ moment, and the third arrives as dinner’s rightful main.

First, a fragile, brooch-like A5 Saroma tartlet smells like bacon, thanks to smoked eel and sweet kabayaki sauce. It is over too soon. After a quick shift to the dining room, a dark Saroma consommé laced with Marmite is poured from a black yokode kyusu, a Japanese one-handled teapot, over crispy sweetbreads and pickled turnips into ribbed ostrich-egg porcelain, so thin that I am afraid I might break it. The beef’s final form arrives in a ‘meat and two veg’ apotheosis. A Satsuma Gyu A4 in a glossy jus buttressed with a crispy taro bite, alongside the Hokkaido milk bread, served earlier, with fermented honey butter on the side. Bread as a side, not as a course. For me, if no one else, that alone is progress.

Apex main course: Satsuma Gyu A4 with a fried taro dumpling and the remnants of the Hokkaido milk bread and butter with local fermented honey.

 

The pacing is near-perfect, as we ask for an intermission only once. The chefs explain each course, wisely sharing more when asked. Dinner feels chaperoned and never lectured.

The Abashiri Kinki’s skin is fine and see-through like church glass — smoky, the result of weighted robata grilling. Paired with a crystal dumpling rolled over popping roe and the gentle, purring spice of a Singapore chilli crab sauce, it is — listen to me closely — lick-the-plate good. I trace a heart in a sauce I never wanted to leave behind.

I will always chuckle when someone says Kinki fish