The invitation to the Flamingo Room comes, misleadingly, with a warning: there are no flamingos. None. Not even a leg, a feather, or a cocktail stick in the shape of one. It’s a little like calling a place The Unicorn Grill and discovering they only serve goat.
Years ago, on the roof of Kensington’s Roof Gardens, London, there really were flamingos — louche, pink, and faintly camp birds who looked as if they were waiting for Noël Coward to order a martini. I had assumed, in the way one does, that they had retired to Dubai, as so many Londoners do. But no — they’ve decamped to Norfolk, and the Flamingo Room must soldier on without them.
Happily, what it lacks in avian mascot it more than makes up for in setting. The restaurant sits in the Jumeirah Al Naseem Hotel, a gleaming temple to leisure that overlooks a turtle lagoon. Dining by water always does something to the soul; it civilises you. The terrace hums with a kind of relaxed, choreographed chaos — the murmured flirtation of diners, the clink of ice in tall glasses and the faint scent of grilled shellfish.
The menu reads like the collected works of Neptune and Bacchus — extensive to the point of alarm. You wonder how any kitchen brigade can hold so many recipes in its collective head without a little divine intervention. Yet, what arrives is a sequence of small triumphs.
The truffle burrata was as indecently soft as a whispered compliment, lounging beside a bed of mushrooms that smelt of autumn and money. Crab and lobster croquettes, crisp and golden, collapsed on the tongue like a fond memory. But the true stars were the tuna tartare — faultless, ruby-red and clean — and a seabass carpaccio dressed in a citrus and honey vinaigrette that managed to taste both saintly and sinful.
For mains, the mushroom lasagne — a vegetarian’s fever dream — was rich, earthy, and scandalously moreish. The prawn platter arrived like a baroque painting of gluttony: prawns the size of toddlers, gleaming under butter and lemon. The seabass with buttered leeks was simplicity incarnate — a reminder that restraint, occasionally, is the ultimate luxury.
And then came the Mozambique calamari. Good God. It landed like an opera finale: squid heads smouldering in peri-peri, tarragon, and roasted tomatoes, with a heap of shoestring fries performing a joyful collapse into the juices below. I’ve seen fewer dramatics at La Scala.
Dessert, a flaming Baked Alaska that seemed to have been designed for Instagram and pyromaniacs, drifted past every twenty minutes, until resistance became futile. We followed the procession inside and succumbed.
The Flamingo Room — for all its false advertising — is a rare and splendid thing in Dubai: a restaurant with charm, intelligence, and the confidence to serve pleasure.
Go for the calamari, stay for the lagoon, and don’t ask for the birds. They’re gone — but you won’t miss them. Actually they may have never been there.
Source: Khaleej Times