Small pleasures: Okku's lunch

It seems these days it's as much about where you're lunching as where you're having dinner. Many of Dubai's restaurants are tuning in to their customers' noon-time needs with special menus served in under an hour.

Better yet, they're often an affordable way to check out some of the city's high-end eateries. Okku is the latest example, with its Tezukuri (meaning hand-made in Japanese) menu served Sunday-Thursday from noon to 3pm.

Okku, famous for its chic, dark interior livened up by tanks of neon-blue jellyfish, serves up all your contemporary Japanese favourites black cod with miso, tempura crab maki rolls, yellowtail "carpaccio". At lunch, it's a trimmed-down version with options to pick a "small plate", miso soup and donburi  a dish served atop rice. A word of caution: the "small plates" do live up to their name. Respect is due: at least they didn't try to disguise that fact by calling it anything else.

I went for the Dh99 Kaze menu, which gives the full whammy of miso, small plate, donburi and ice cream (not including my lemongrass-scented mocktail, "Green Envy", which was lovely). The three wagyu beef gyoza dumplings were lucious and melting, but needing the tang of the vinegary sauce to cut through the rich meat, while my dining partner's little dish of crisp chicken bites gained zing from a generous shower of grate ginger on top. Mains were hit-and-miss: a grilled salmon was a pleasingly simple affair, teamed with a pile of sweet-sour cucumber salad healthy and fast, and the black cod plate is a must-have. But the sauteed vegetables and grilled tofu  what should have been light, salty and fresh was a little slimy and underseasoned.

Want to end your meal on a high note? Go for mind-melting richness of the smooth dark chocolate ice cream or the puckering shiver delivered by the passion fruit sorbet.