Three years ago, I sat in a room that wasn’t even open yet, eating a tasting menu with Jason Atherton and Dan Birk watching. I wrote 1,300 words that landed somewhere between admiration and a warning: a genuinely good restaurant, hiding inside one doing far too much.

I didn’t go back for three years. Partly pride, partly principle. When I finally did, I wanted to go with people who’d never been.

ROW stands for Refinement of Work. So the only real question worth asking is whether it had.

Sixteen courses are now twelve; the pricing is trimmed; the music still modern but less intrusive. There are other softer edges sanded down “refined, through the steady, unglamorous graft of moving one hundred things one inch forward.”

There’s enough Japanese produce to make one question whether this is still credibly a British restaurant, but then you lob in a kari buto cheese and onion “crisp” and a 540-day old jacket potato with what I’ll uncharitably call tuna mayo, meat and two veg with Saroma Wagyu A4, a meltingly pleasing blue cheese and — if it only matters to me — bread that once justified its own course now sits quietly as a side.

“The dining rooms remain admirably eclectic and unmistakably British, like a lounge in Saltburn estate, minus all that transgressive eroticism.”

Two people can eat here for less than one seat costs at FZN, Dubai’s three-Michelin-starred Frantzén outpost. That says more about FZN’s pricing than it does about ROW.

Full review, ROW on 45, Dubai, revisited — link in my bio. If you were at ROW in its first year, I am curious to know what stands out for you now. Less