Row on 45 Dubai

It has been almost 25 years since I first had Jason Atherton’s food , French in technique , British in identity, at @rowon45dubai it now relies almost entirely on the clarity of Japanese produce to complete the vision .

Your meal takes place over three rooms , the champagne lounge for snacks , the kitchen counter for the crux of the meal before finally the chefs library for petit fours . It’s a nice journey and a clever trick as you are aware that there is new physical place you will soon be transported too .

There are some amazing highlights on the plate too .
A delicious smoky A5 Wagyu and smoked eel tart is the last amuse but it is quickly expanded upon and bettered by a superb Wagyu oxtail consommé, enriched in marmite , fragrant with long pepper and given texture with pickled turnip and crisp sweetbread .

The following course lifts the standard again , raw Amaebi , deliciously sweet and paired with , tomato dashi , finger lime and salted duck egg sabayon . Every mouthful of this dish pulls you in a different direction yet great harmony is the result .

Pierre Koffman’s squid tagliatelle is reimagined with sous vide scallops , gently shredded into strips , bathed with a sake and Shiso sauce and topped with fresh off the plane Bafun Uni .

The nostalgia hit of the night delivers in spades . A jacket potato with glass like skin made from Hokkaido potato aged for 540 days , soulful and humble , it stands proud next to curls of Otoro , a quenelle of kaluga and smoked cultured cream .

Kinki grilled on the binchotan was a slightly meagre portion size which didn’t let you enjoy the lusciousness of this premium fish , a shame as the crystal dumpling and the killer Cornish/singaporean chilli crab sauce were gorgeous .

Wagyu returned for the third time at the end for a rich finale , highlighted by a beef cheek char siu taro dumpling , but I think a different source protein would have been a nice note to play .

Colston Bassett Stilton tart was a lovely cheese course , fresh and slightly neutralised for those that struggle with blue cheese .

Two desserts - malt and miso / gold pineapple and some brilliant petit fours ended an excellent meal . Less

There are some parts of a restaurant that words and photographs never quite manage to catch.

The scrape of a chair. Glasses clinking. The hum of a dining room settling into its evening rhythm. The sight of steam rising from a basket or a broth. They’re fleeting details, but they’re part of what it feels like to be in a restaurant.

So I thought I’d try something new!

I’m calling these Sound Bites. No music. No voiceover. No trending audio, but also no ASKR gimmicks. Just a few moments from a restaurant exactly as they happened.

This one comes from ROW on 45.

Returning three years later, I found a restaurant that had become leaner, sharper and far more assured. It also reminded me that if restaurants are allowed to evolve, critics should be prepared to revisit their own conclusions too.

If you’d like the full story, including why I changed my mind, the complete review is now on Substack and EatGoSee.

DO YOU LIKE THE SOUND BITES IDEA? Less

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