Ember - will it light your fire?

Ember, The Address Dubai Mall

It’s perhaps emblematic of our times that there’s a hotel in Dubai’s biggest shopping mall. 

The Address Dubai Mall would seem to cater for all kinds of travellers, not least those avid consumers who regard a town-sized shopping centre as a destination in itself. There would appear to be plenty of demand for such a place - the Address has another property at Downtown Dubai, no more than a Gucci handbag’s hurl away - but for those who live here it’s the hotel restaurants that really matter.

Hiking around one of Dubai’s malls can be soul-destroying at worst and exhausting at best, so it’s not uncommon to lessen the pain with food. If you’re particularly disgusted with yourself for going to a mall in the first place, that might involve a trip to Taco Bell. If you deserve better (and you do), The Address - which is licensed - offers something of an escape. Of sorts.

Ember is the recently-opened signature grill there. As a restaurant, it is one of the vital components of a five-star hotel, along with rooms, a reception, a spa and fitness centre, a swimming pool and a car park. Unfortunately for Ember, it’s smack bang next to the car park. What’s worse is that you can see the cars through a large window, and at rare interludes the screech of tyres or the impatient blast of a horn can be heard.

It’s a shame, since Ember is otherwise stylish, contemporary and very pleasing on the eye. Huge mirrors on roughly rendered walls make the elegant dining room seem larger than it is, yet the lambent glow of a candle on each table offers an intimate touch. The immaculate open kitchen sprawls along the edge of the room, while at the opposite end a bar blushes with warm red lighting and large invigorating photographs of vibrant bubbles and sloshing liquid.  

The setting certainly got us in the mood (adjoining car park notwithstanding), as did the capable maitre d’. Rarely have I encountered one so charming and knowledgeable at a new Dubai restaurant. He was even careful to warn me that the Japanese-style ‘Robata’ items on the menu were modestly proportioned, and that two might suffice for a starter. He was lying, of course. One would have been perfectly sufficient, but since I was here as a guest of the restaurant, perhaps he thought it best if I tried as much of Ember’s food as possible.

I wasn’t disappointed. I chose the spicy jumbo prawns, which arrived on a bed of kimchi sat upon a papad-like green onion pancake. The seafood was moist and suitably prickly with heat, while the option of further tangy hotness lay in a sprinkle of spicy powder at one end of the plate and a dab of chilli sauce at the other. Following the maitre d’s advice, I added the miso cod cheeks, which on this occasion was substituted with hamachi, a similar white fish from Japan also known as yellowtail. Either way, four dewy hunks of the stuff had been perfection-seared in miso sauce and presented with pea shoots and a scattering of orange flying fish roe.

My lucky companion opted for the foie gras, a hearty lobe indeed, seared and set across three slices of smoked duck, accompanied by a duck consomme, figs and a handsome ball of cabbage - rolled pleasingly into a perfect sphere not unlike a bumper Brussels sprout - stuffed with more shredded duck for good measure. 

For my main course, I had the braised short rib, which was every bit as tender, gooey and sticky with thick pinot noir sauce as I’d hoped. The American meat peeled away, deep red fibre after fibre, but I wanted to snaffle the accompanying potato and coarse grain mustard first, so it was just me and the meat left. If a stretch-Hummer, painted Day-Glo yellow, driven by a zombified Michael Jackson wearing a Macauley Culkin t-shirt had parked right next to my table, I wouldn’t have bothered looking up.

I did glance across the table, however, when a medium rare wagyu steak pulled up with a black truffle risotto and a zingy chimichurri sauce. The Australian grade 5 sirloin was as richly flavoursome and tender as I’d expected, although it was let down at the end by an unfortunate string of gristly fat.  

   
I rounded things off with a celebration of the Granny Smith apple which came in the form of a light cheesecake encased in paper-thin white chocolate, an apple sorbet, scattered crumble and a thousand shards of crisp apple. It was like having a regular cheesecake in an orchard that had been hit by an asteroid. I guess the chef really likes Granny Smith apples. Meanwhile, my accomplice demolished a selection of Fourme d’Ambert blue cheese with pear and a wispy salad, which was delivered on a thin black slate.

We left asking each other a simple question: did we really eat that well - in a mall? Technically speaking, the answer was no. Ember isn’t in a mall. It’s in a hotel with direct access to a mall. For some that may be too close. But although the views onto the underground car park might bring home the reality of Ember’s location, the gentle ambience, fine service and great food - at its best - can take you someplace else. 

Besides, the car park problem can always be solved by some kind of big, heavy curtain. I'd bet they sell them in Dubai Mall.

Meal courtesy of Ember restaurant, The Address Dubai Mall, open 6.30pm - 11.30 pm, 04 438 8888.

Blooming heck!

Magnolia Bakery, Bloomingdale's, Dubai


Being a man, and the wrong side of 30, the cupcake revolution has passed me by. This shouldn’t be an embarrassing thing to admit, right? Please tell me its okay for men my age to have more interest in things like whelks, ostrich eggs or Stilton than paltry blobs of sponge cake slathered in pretty icing and cradled in frilly little paper buckets... Thanks, I needed the reassurance.


The truth is, I would never have felt the need to investigate the wares at Magnolia Bakery at the newly opened Bloomingdale’s in Dubai Mall, had I not been made aware of the virtues of cupcakes by other men. Big men. Men who - if you so much as looked at their ribeye in a steakhouse - would happily pull your face off with their thumb and forefinger and kick it across the other side of the restaurant before ordering two more steaks and downing them both in one.


Some of these men were practically crying sugar-syrup tears over the cakes they’d had at places like Sugar Daddy’s bakery in Dubai - a cupcake shop with a pink sign and even pinker cakes. So I decided to look deep within myself, to reach out to my inner 7-year old girl, and skip merrily along to Magnolia Bakery at Bloomingdale's to see what all the fuss was about.

 

Bloomingdale's, Dubai Mall: disgusted valet-staff turn their backs on this embarrassing Porsche in the hope that something more blingy turns up instead, like a Koenigsegg or a spaceship.

Thing is, since I’m around six-feet tall and well-upholstered, with a buzz-cut and a five o’clock shadow, I don’t look like a 7-year old girl (unless you live in some parts of northern England). So, when I got lost in the ladies fashion section with my camera slung around my neck, I started to get funny looks from security. I saw a rat-faced man in an ill-fitting Men-In-Black suit squawk something into a walkie-talkie while staring at me through pinched eyes, so I waved at him like a 7-year old girl would and skipped off. I was in the wrong bit of Bloomingdale's anyway - the “home section” was on the Lower Ground floor.


There I found Magnolia Bakery, and low-and-behold it appeared to be besieged by a well-drilled platoon of scary-looking schoolgirls. They were all happily loading up boxes full of cupcakes at Dhs60 a go, just so they had something to nibble on or throw at their mates on the way home from school. Times have changed. In my day we’d save our sweaty lunchtime sandwiches for that. Especially if it was Marmite.

Order here. Pay here. Lose self-respect here.


Anyway, when they had dispersed I had a peek over the counter. There is no seating area at Magnolia, just a counter full of cakes to choose from. Whether it’s proper, large-sized cakes for slicing into wedges, or the famed cupcakes that make grown, hard men tearful, it all gets boxed up and taken away.

The opening exchange between me and the assistant went something like this:


Me: “What have you got?”
Her: “Red velvet sir, which is like red and velvet and like chocolate but red chocolate with white vanilla sir... then we have choc-choc, vanilla-choc, van-van, choc-van and van-choc-van...”


Of course, it made me dizzy. It just sounded like two closely-related cupcakes had been interbreeding. So I had the lot. Actually, there were only five different varieties of cupcake available, so I ordered an auxiliary cake to complete the box-set of six...


Her: This is like, not a cupcake sir, but more like a dessert sir, with brown sugar on top.
Me: Looks like a blueberry crumble.
Her: Yes sir. 

It was probably a good thing that the mall-going public of Dubai didn’t have to witness a grown man with a scowl on his face munch his way through six cupcakes and a blueberry crumble in public. So I carefully took my package home and put the kettle on.

 

Guess which one isn't a cupcake.

First, I went for the cupcake that looked least appealing, with the skewed logic that the rest would be easier to face after that one. So I reached for the "red velvet" which was an angry red pustule of ruddy sponge with a creamy white head of icing. From now on I'm going to call it "the zit-cake". What the zit-cake lacked in aesthetic quality and natural grace, it made up for in moistness once bitten into. And redness. Christ, it was red. The sponge looked like it had been dipped in stage-blood. And the white head made it look like it would have been more at home on the forehead of a greasy teenager. It tasted much better than it looked.

  

Choc-choc: will it look any different on the way out?


Next up was the one the assistant called "choc-choc". I think the fact that it was named after a Harlem pimp in a 1970s Blaxploitation movie was lost on her. What I will say is that it was very chocolaty. The sponge was exceedingly moist too, so much so that it simply disintegrated on contact with hot breath. Most pleasing of all was the residue left on the cupcake paper, which demanded to be scraped off with lathe-like accuracy and savoured.


And that's where I had to leave it - for now. Five cupcakes - and another cake - is a little too much for one sitting. After all, I'm only 7. And a girl.


Don't worry, when I get round to eating the rest I'll be sure to give you the verdict. I bet you can hardly wait...

Addendum: Should anybody buy more Magnolia cupcakes than they can eat in one go, take heed of the following tip. Don't put them in the fridge. Store them in an airtight container, otherwise they turn into lumps of brightly coloured granite sprinkled with hundreds and thousands. Not nice.