Indian cuisine is arguably one of the tastiest there is. Even if you are not a fan, you can still agree it is a creative cuisine, what with its dozens of spices and colourful sauces that make for all-round colourful dishes.
However, it is not a gourmet cuisine.
If you do want Indian gourmet, though, one of your best bets would be Spice Mela, the pan-Indian restaurant at Abu Dhabi’s Rosewood Hotel, where the chef will spoil you with flavour.
With a romantic view of the glittering blue sea, we took a look at the menu, which includes dishes from various Indian regions such as Rajasthan, Punjab and southern India. We opted for the tasting menu to get a little taste of the chef’s signature dishes.
Before your meal, Spice Mela serves a bowl of crisps, but these are not your everyday crisps. It was a mix of sweet potato, purple potato, taro root and banana crisps, which were all fried to a delicious lightness that was still very crispy.
The starters included scallop moilee, tandoori-grilled sea bass, chicken chops and tandoori lamb chops. The scallop was well-cooked and beautifully served in its shell in a pool of coconut sauce. Yum!
It is hard to say which of the other dishes stole the night as they were equally mouthwatering. The sea bass had a lovely crispness yet it was soft inside, and melted in our mouths.
The chicken chops were marinated with fresh turmeric, and crusted with crushed pine nuts, which gave a lovely crunch. I have never tasted chicken marinated this way before, but cannot wait for the next time I do (probably in my kitchen when I toy with the idea of adding pine nuts to chicken).
Next up was the main course, and it was the heart of Indian cuisine; curries and biryani.
We thought the dishes could not get any better but upon tasting the biryani, we realised just how wrong we were. Served in a pot, the biryani was just as the chef had described it, “different from any biryani you will taste elsewhere”.
Chef Siddharth’s secret recipe included very different spices, which gave the dish a delightful, unusual flavour, and the rice a slightly green colour. The chicken was also well-cooked, making the dish an absolute winner.
The curries included Calcutta prawn curry and butter chicken. The prawn was cooked and marinated to perfection, and was served in coconut sauce that only added a hint of a flavour without overpowering the fresh prawn.
The butter chicken was less impressive as the sauce was rather bland, in comparison to the typically rich butter chicken sauce.
Despite already feeling stuffed, the sight of dessert was too tempting to miss. The chocolate wattalapam featured a rich, crustless, dark chocolate tart topped with coconut ice-cream that burst with flavour. The sweet dish was yet another proof of the chef’s mastery.
With its array of eccentric dishes and a view worth travelling for, Spice Mela is anything but your average Indian restaurant.
