Love eating out in Dubai? Here are your new openings this weekThe restaurant openings never stop in Dubai (and to some extent, Abu Dhabi), with something new on a weekly basis — more often than not, quite a few new things. Here’s what caught our eye this week. First up: after a revamp of the Mina A’ Salam’s restaurant offerings, Hanaaya (“happiness” in Arabic) opened this week, serving cuisine from around the world (it’s a refurbishment of the old Al Muna). The focus is on variety with live cooking stations. If it’s the outdoors you’re interested in, check this out: There is an expanded terrace overlooking the Madinat Jumeirah lagoon and turtle sanctuary. The restaurant is part of the revamped brunch at the hotel at Madinat Jumeirah serving up the likes of liquid nitrogen desserts. It’s open daily for buffet lunch and dinner from 12.30-3.30pm and from 6.30-10.30pm. Over at the Sofitel Downtown Dubai — which earlier this month opened Peruvian Inka and Lebanese Al Jazira Chez Louis — there’s now something for Asian food lovers.

Wakame is a restaurant and bar serving pan-Asian cuisine including dim sum, wok-fried dishes, sushi and new-style sashimi.Think Chilean seabass, oven roasted with a jalapeño and ginger marinade or the gluten-free miso caramel cheesecake with a black sesame shortbread base. There’s also a bar and a nightly DJ. Another taste of Asia came to Boxpark this week with the opening — finally! yo sushi takeaway newcastle— of Mikado Bakery, the sister concern of Mikado Cafe in Abu Dhabi.While the capital’s restaurant serves up traditional Japanese fare, including sushi, the Dubai outlet focuses on Japanese baked goods, desserts and teas (they also do delivery). yo sushi takeaway readingThings start with breakfast (pancakes, waffles, crepes or sandwiches, including the yakisoba, a bread roll sandwich stuffed with Japanese sauteed noodles. sushi grade fish walmart

There are also soups and salads such as a blend of mizuna served with kabocha squash, radish, lotus root, cherry tomatoes and seaweed, tossed in kaiso dressing, and kabocha soup with ginger. Desserts are made from Japanese ingredients such as matcha tea, red azuki beans and tofu. It’s open daily, 10am-midnight; call 04-3003000.Per Te Ristorante e Cafe is expanding, with a second outlet in Business Bay’s Bay Avenue following its first spot in Jumeirah 1. yo sushi menu portsmouthThe same menu is on offer, as well as a new salad bar, an in-house patisserie and an outdoor terrace with views of the Burj Khalifa. sushi grade salmon per poundIt’s open 8am-11pm daily; sushi conveyor belt indonesiacall 04-4403051.If you are crazy about Japanese baked goods, you’ll be glad to hear Al Wasl Square’s Yamanote has opened a second location in Dubai Mall, next door to Yo! sushi making kit barnes and noble

Sushi on the lower ground floor.Gold chocolate for Dh15,000 per kgChristmas brunch at Ramada Downtown Dubai23 top festive turkey takeaways in UAE Six of Dubai's best Yuletide treats for tea Ramada Downtown Dubai’s New Year's Eve party New Year's Eve gala dinner at Hawthorn SuitesNew Year’s Eve brunch at At.mosphere Restaurant‘#CookforSyria’ offers food with a differenceBy the time those prawn nigiri sushi pass me for the sixth time, I really begin to feel their pain. Sitting on a small, blue-rimmed plate, entrapped beneath a clear plastic dome, the sorry pair, desolate and unloved, seem resigned to an eternity spent upon the vast, ponderous conveyor belt that rolls by before us. It was like a piscine Groundhog Day, only with a fraction of the laughs, and Bill Murray’s crumpled features replaced by the soft pink and white of a crustacean’s backside. The salmon, according to Yo! Sushi's website, is 'happy'. It's floppy and wan and warm We’re sitting in Soho’s Yo!

Sushi on a busy weekday lunch, watching various Japanese greatest hits trundle past on the aforementioned belt – a few flaps of lurid orange salmon sashimi, followed by salmon nigiri (a lozenge of vinegared rice, topped by stuff, usually raw fish), then rolls filled with salmon and avocado, and some strange, pastel-coloured Japanese sweets that I’d cross continents to avoid. then those wretched prawns. So how do I know this exact plate passed me half a dozen times? I’m clocking a freshly made version of the same dish, put together by the hardworking folk in the middle of the belt. Well, using my brilliant and hard-earned skills of surveillance and subterfuge, I came up with a dastardly scheme – pushing the lid off by a fraction and counting how many times the plate passed by. The cooked prawn nigiri sushi are cold and overcooked, but again, not offensive. And if you like sushi rolls, which I don't, they won't frighten the geegees

Anyway, I remember eating in Yo! Sushi when it opened here in 1997. the fluorescent-tinged, Tokyo-tinted excitement! The wacky font, the wanton and extravagant use of exclamation marks. taps for still or fizzy water, even a button with which to summon yourIf I wasn’t exactly burned by the white heat of technology, I was In those days when sushi was a rare and precious treat rather than a supermarket staple, the food was certainly secondary to the rabid Japanophilia that surged through my veins. Although I was probably deeply, deeply impressed, 17 years later I’m simply bored. disgusted, nor delighted, just left unmoved, and a little depressed, by the bog-standard, mass-catered, bog-average feel of pretty much every Here they take Japanese comfort food and demean it to the level of a supermarket ready meal Because, when it comes to nigiri sushi and sashimi, average just ain’tThere’s either good, or don’t bother. I’ll spare you the

over-romanticised paeans to the art of the true sushi chef. of training needed to simply mutter ‘fish’, let alone slice it; importance, in nigiri sushi, of the rice; the astronomical prices paid by the best sushi joints for the very finest, freshest cuts. don’t go to Yo! Sushi expecting the sort of raw fish that made Mr JiroAnd to be fair, the nigiri rice is fine – warm, with a whisper of vinegar, and not overcooked.The salmon, according to the website, is ‘happy’. and wan and warm. Not cloyingly fatty, like the very sorriest specimen, but a long way from happy. The cooked prawn nigiri sushi are cold and overcooked, but again, not offensive. And if you like sushi rolls, which I don’t, they won’t frighten the geegees. Am I alone in being offended by this joyless, half-assed excuse of a lunch? The place was packed, so perhaps I am As for the rest, well, there’s a curious absence of pork on the menu. The Japanese love their

pork – and do wonderful things with it. I love it too. even an oink, which means that chicken takes the role of pig. aren’t bad – they’re crisp and properly fried (although real gyoza should be cooked in a pan, not deep fryer), but the filling isA steamed bun is stuffed with duck in a Chinese Hoisin sauce – wrong country, but it does, at least, register on the taste Unlike pretty much everything else. Because here, they take Japanese comfort food, katsu (breaded and fried meat), for example, or karaage (deep-fried chicken bits) and demean it to the level of a supermarketFROM THE MENUMISO SOUP                         £2.20CHICKEN KARAAGE           £3.60DUCK GYOZA                     £4.10KATSU SELECTION            £5CHOCOLATE DORAYAKI    £4.10 Which means that the yakisoba noodles taste the same as theSeasoned by corporate corner cutting and heartless Chicken katsu is dry and sullen.

It has all the charm of bird flu. Karaage manages to have batter that is both overcooked and chewy. It would be slow-handclapped out of KFC. Popcorn tempura shrimp is an insult to popcorn everywhere. batter is soggy and sad and deeply depressing. Well, save the beef tsukune, which look like the GIFT?? More from Tom Parker Bowles Event for The Mail on Sunday... Taco of the town: A blast of Mexico City chilli in the chilly heart of London. Where brisket MEANS brisket: Another bog-standard barbecue joint? No, this place is smokin' The Prawn Supremacy: Dish after dish of fantastic fish – and even my team of experts were in awe Margot's slice of the good life: This grand new Covent Garden Italian flirts with greatness... and nearly achieves itTOM PARKER BOWLES rounds up the essential tomes for any true foodie's bookshelf Britain’s best value... bar naan! Three great curries with rice at a Big Mac price – Manchester's mad for it I'll never be off my Roka ...so long as it serves not one, but two, of the finest dishes I've ever devoured

The taste of Thai fidelity: Authentic roadside cuisine roars into London (without the smell of diesel)After an epic lunch at the TV chef Antony Worrall Thompson's pub, guess who emerges from the kitchen... They have the tang of a fairground beef burger, circa 1978.Then there’s the service. Or rather lack of it. I realise the conveyor belt cuts down on the need for front of house, but with an entire section of the menu only available by ordering from a person with blood, rather than oil, pumping through their veins, you would have thought they could employ more than one person. Saying that, he was a valiant general manager who not only greets the punters, and answers the phone, and takes orders, and tots up your bill, but occasionally jumps into the middle and makes sushi. He’s easily the best thing about the restaurant. So there we go, a triumph of the utterly, depressingly average, dressed up in J-Pop gear. Everything is fresh and clean and stupefyingly inoffensive. But are our palates so calcified by the bland and mediocre that we no longer care?

Am I alone in being offended by this joyless, half-assed excuse of a lunch? The place was packed, so perhaps I am.But after watching those prawns revolve for the sixth time, my friend Bill has had enough. ‘Come on,’ he says with a shrug. ‘Enough of this nonsense. Let’s go for lunch.’Lunch for two, minus drinks: £30 Nobu once had the most coveted tables in London, Nobu Matsuhisa’s Japanese/ Peruvian fusion menu is still packing them in. Don’t miss the classic yellowtail with Jalapeño. LONDONQuaglinosquaglinos-restaurant.co.ukThe cigarette girls, the vast, grand staircase ...Terence Conran’s restaurant was a Nineties power palace.Michael Caines is one hell of a chef, and he’s been at Chagford’s Gidleigh Park since 1994. The restaurant’s popularity, and immaculate standards, have been sky-high ever since. Chef proprietor David Everitt Matthias’s Cheltenham Classic has been wowing the punters for over 25 years. Immaculate  and exceptional high-end cooking.