Mint Leaf of London, Dubai: Is it Still Good?

A six-course menu of cold and hot starters, mains, sides and desserts left us deflated. I scrabble to know where to start. The menu left me asking whether I would have done better at home. Mint Leaf’s menu was no longer the Wonka-like creative zeitgeist cutting through a melange of mediocrity. Most bites feel like a fall from grace drawing sharp breaths and long sighs like watching your favourite superhero being mortally wounded (this cannot be a spoiler anymore).



Some courses teeter around. The spinach tempura with mango compote arrives like crisp spinach shards on a swirl of tamarind, sweet yoghurt and mango. A divisive dish but one where, my view, is that green mango would play a stronger role. The sweet, ripe mango lends itself more towards dessert territory than a first-course cold starter. The pani puri arrives billowing with dry ice like a Vegas performance artist. The crisp pani puris collapse but the filling is cloying and overly sweet. Mint Leaf’s pani puri lacks the signature complexity of sharp, sweet-sour tamarind tussling with fiery herbaceous coriander water. I expect that of average street food pani puri. I want more and Mint Leaf does not deliver the imagination found in Tresind Studio Season 5. This is easily fixable.



Our transition to hot starters did not improve matters.

Our pudgy gun powder scallops with seasoned arugula misfired as a cloying, fatty mayonnaise-like sauce coats the mouth and overwhelms subtle scallops accompanied by an unsettling grit from the gunpowder. A chicken thigh in fenugreek is a divisive dish with some considering it over seasoned but overall it feels safe and, again, does not reflect an imaginative, forward-thinking contemporary Indian food menu. Our ever-patient Raj replaces this with a chicken tikka thigh that is moist with a punch of spice and a comforting smoky char.

An achari paneer tikka is a better dish finding that balance between milky sweet paneer seasoned subtly.



I could canter through the rest of the courses. I could tell you that the medium seared beef with berries pulao (ordered medium) is tougher than the leather on the chair I am sat in. That the rest of the mains courses of chettinad prawns with curry leaf poha and gongura chicken and quinoa tahiri are ceremonially submerged in enough sauce to make each dish a soup. I could talk about the parochial silken tofu and zucchini kofta that bears more than just a passing resemblance to a frozen supermarket puck drowned in a gravy boat of rust sauce; it is a total injustice to vegetarian dining when Indian cuisine probably delivers the most cogent argument that meatless eating is both vibrant and breathtaking.

You get the point.

Mint Leaf’s dessert menu

Remarkably, the dessert menu offered reprieve and glimmers of the courage, risk-taking, forward-thinking food drawing out the experimental, consequences-be-damned playfulness that, frankly, I wanted from the last five courses.

A Valrhona chocolate-dipped turmeric latte kulfi was the star of the show tempering bittersweet chocolate with the rich aromatic turmeric-scented latte kulfi. An almond halwa with citrus crumbs and lotus pista biscotti are a little divisive but, again, evidence of some more boundary-pushing.



The menu-listed cocktails are mostly positive with the whimsical, charming Goan Shack leading from the front mixing Bombay Sapphire, Pomme and passion fruit among other things. The Midnight in Paris is Mint Leaf’s take on a French Martini arriving under a canopy of hearts and lights.

Would I Return to Mint Leaf?

Mint Leaf does not compare well with its contemporaries such as MASTI, Tresind nor Tresind Studio. There is a lack of attention to detail and bold direction for the menu that disappoints me most. I am not rushing back to Mint Leaf when Dubai spoils us for modern Indian restaurants.