10 hours Ago
There are many things that characterise Dubai . One of them is an obsession with size. Nearly everything is big, bigger or biggest.
For instance, each time I go to the massive Dubai Mall, I am terrified that I might never find my way out again because I always get lost in its endless corridors. It is the same with hotels. When I went to Dubai for the opening of Atlantis the Palm in 2008, I was startled by how big it was with nearly 1,600 rooms, all run to luxury standards.
It surprised me also that the hotel had so many restaurants , many of them very large and run by the top chefs of that era (Santi Santamaria, Nobu Matsuhisa, Giorgio Locatelli, Michel Rostang and many others). Some of these chefs were at the absolute peak of their profession. (Santi had three stars for his flagship restaurant; Rostang had two) and I found it hard to believe that tourists (let alone locals) would pay the high prices required to eat this amazing food.
(Also read: The Taste by Vir Sanghvi: Abhijit Banerjee's new book explores India's complex food culture ) I was wrong, of course. Though Atlantis keeps shuffling the chefs around (currently, the restaurants are run by Gordon Ramsay, the Hakkasan group and others), it has always been massively successful and it launched Dubai‘s boom in Michelin star dining. Every restaurant anywhere in the world with a Michelin star now wants to open a branch in Dubai.
Today Dubai is not the global restaurant capital, but it is certainly the capital of the restaurant branch. Nearly every top place in Dubai is a branch of a restaurant somewhere else in the world but it is usually a branch run by inferior chefs despatched by the mother restaurant to turn a quick buck. That was hardly the intention behind Atlantis’s original gourmet foray but that’s how others have taken it forward.
I stayed this time at the new, even more upscale, Atlantis the Royal, the smarter younger brother of the old Atlantis. The Royal is smaller and has (only!) 800 or so rooms. It made it to the top 10 of the World’s 50 Best Hotels list and has become a global destination of its own.
Atlantis the Royal has its own set of restaurants run to high standards by celebrity chefs: Jose Andres, Gaston Acurio, Heston Blumenthal and more. And the cult of Nobu flourishes at both hotels. The original Nobu, where I first dined at the old Atlantis, has moved to a new space high in the building, (it used to be the Bridge suite) and is now the largest Nobu in the world.
(This is Dubai, capital of bigness, after all.) I actually prefer the smaller Nobu at the Royal Atlantis, which is more casual and is located on the beach. Two years ago, when I went to eat at Ossiano, the old Santi Santamaria restaurant which won a star in the post-Santi era, I met Bjorn Frantzen, one of the worlds most successful chefs.
He came off as a cross between James Bond (good looking, sharp and often on the best dressed list in his native Sweden) and Alain Ducasse. Like Ducasse and Thomas Keller, Frantzen is one of the few chefs in the world with two restaurants that have earned three stars (in Stockholm and Singapore) and has also successfully run larger restaurants at the one star level. (Also read: The Taste by Vir Sanghvi: Farewell Vistara; the airline's legacy and challenges for Air India's future ) Frantzen was collaborating with Gregoire Berger, then the chef at Ossiano, for a pop up, but I was pretty sure that he was also there to discuss opening his own restaurant in Atlantis.
I was right. Shortly after I left Dubai, Atlantis announced that Frantzen would open two restaurants in the older Atlantis. They would take over the Nobu space.
One would be a large casual restaurant and the other would be a gastronomic restaurant like his celebrated places in Singapore and Stockholm. Last week, shortly after the two restaurants had opened, I went back to eat at both of them. I ate first at Studio Frantzen, the casual restaurant which is a fun space with a bar section and a smart dining room which mixes it up: some tables have table cloths, others are bare.
While the service at Studio will take a little time to settle down, the food is already very good. I was surprised by the many oriental influences on the menu. A veal minute steak was flavoured with Sichuan pepper, the roast chicken had chilli and miso, and the lamb rack came with a wasabi and mint raita.
There was also Frantzen’s unique take on nigiri sushi. And the oysters came with such flavours as seaweed and wasabi. All of the food was very good, but I wondered if the oriental dishes had been inspired by Dubai’s fascination with modern Japanese cuisine.
(If the city’s dining scene has an absent father figure, then it is Rainer Becker whose Zuma has influenced nearly every expensive restaurant in Dubai.) I was assured by Lucas Jaktlund, who used to run Frantzen’s three star restaurant in Stockholm and has now moved to Dubai, that the Chef has always been fascinated by Japanese and other oriental flavours. So it had nothing to do with Dubai’s preferences.
The main Frantzen restaurant (called FZN) is less formal than the three star Zen in Singapore which I have been to. (By some coincidence, Tristin Farmer who was the chef at Zen when it won its three stars has also moved to Dubai and will open Maison Dali there next month.) It has the familiar Frantzen touches.
You ring a doorbell to be allowed in. You first sit in a living room type space where they serve you champagne and then go up to the dining room. Before you enter the dining area, they show you the ingredients you will eat, including truffles, caviar, etc but also live langoustines that have been freshly flown in.
Service is uniformly warm and friendly and seeks to put guests at ease. The dining room is a revelation. There are some tables but most guests sit at a counter around an open kitchen, making it clear that this is a serious dining experience.
The chefs come from all over the world but the understated star of the kitchen is the head Chef Torsten Vildgaard who is Scandinavian cooking royalty, having served as René Redzepi’s right hand man at Noma for years and having won a Michelin star for his own restaurant in Copenhagen in 2014. (His brother is the chef at the three Michelin star Jordnaer in Copenhagen.) The food is, as you would expect, fabulous.
The langoustines turn up, transformed and quickly deep fried, served with Japanese rice. A Chawanmushi is surrounded by a moat of beef broth and topped with caviar. Raw Toro tuna is shaped into a flower and served with fermented strawberry.
The food is so outstanding that everyone in Dubai expects FZN to get three stars. My guess is that it will enter the list with two stars next year but within a few months or so, it will be a serious contender to be the first Michelin three star restaurant in Dubai.It will be ironic, that in a city that is so fixated on bigness, a small 26 cover restaurant will lead the rest.
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