Variety is the spice of life

Ah, set menus. The domain of the decision-challenged. They're a staple of French bistro lunchtimes and, of course, Chinese restaurants.

But when I decided to treat visiting relatives to a dinner at Raffles' shining star, Noble House, (which is regularly linked with the phrase “best restaurant in Dubai"), the receptionist taking my reservation surprised us: there are three set menus, no a la carte. Ever.

But there's a twist: The menus are four-, five- and six-courses, and you can choose from a quite extensive list of options. Want to try everything? With three people taking the five-course option as we did you can cover nearly all the dishes.

For starters, or rather pre-starters, we had dim sum tiny morsels bursting with flavour. Each diner can choose three each, and since there were nine to choose from, we took them all, although surprisingly it took a long time for the waiter to understand we just wanted a platter with one of each.

Noble House's selling point is the juxtaposition of Chinese cooking styles with top-notch Asian and Western ingredients. So we find a yum cha regular shrimp crystal dumpling — the perfect match of chewy rice dough and sweet seafood next to a caviar sui mai dumpling and a foie gras pancake, made with fatty, crisp and flaky Chinese pancake dough. The hit of the table was, however, a dim sum classic: yam cake. It's like a slice of spice fried chunky mashed potato fantastic! But not amazingly better than the one I get at New World restaurant in London's Chinatown for about a millionth of the price.

After dim sum, it's time for the “real" starters, and many have a pleasing ying-yang leaning which makes them all the more fun for those who love variety as there's two of everything. So the charmingly named Yuan Yang Duck has roast duck spring rolls astride a tangy duck salad, there's two-tone shrimp with a fierce wasabi kick, and a duo of steamed salmon and seabass served with a vibrant green spring onion sauce that's packed with plate-licking flavour.

A word here, while we pause to let all that digest although the portions are small, so you'll eat lots of little things and not get that Chinese restaurant fullness to tell you about the interior. I quite like the Raffles lobby downstairs. I just don't know why they employed the set designer from a 1980s music video set to do the restaurant interiors.

Back to more food: third course soups. A double-boiled tomato soup sounds intriguing, but was cloyingly sweet, although fans of tomato should look it up. It's boiled into reddish clearness, where mushrooms float like asteroids in a Martian atmosphere. The obvious winner was a rich lobster bisque, but the humble-sounding chicken soup had all spoons heading for it: rich and tasty, thickened with egg and a fistful of fragrant herbs, it's soup to cure all ills.

Elegance and friendliness

Roll on course five: mains. Still with us? The service at Noble House has excellent timing on serving of courses, spacing them well and presenting dishes with elegance and friendliness. But they fall down on occasion in the ordering, as with our mains.

Each diner selects two mains and a side dish, all of which are beautifully presented on a long platter. My side dish was aubergine with fried tofu, a juicy and spicy accompaniment. Roast duck was tasty and crisp-skinned, if a little dry, while my abalone with black truffle was heady and rich. This was a first-time experience with the shellfish, which was chewy but went down the hatch easily.

But two portions was more than enough: the wait staff mistakenly gave my dining partner the same main course, although she'd requested scallops. It's a mistake that really shouldn't happen in a restaurant of this calibre, although the number of dishes are quite unwieldy. After one bite of the wagyu beef crispy seared chunks of meaty goodness soon glossed over the issue, however, the steamed Chinese greens provided a light note.

The night's top-scoring dish from a selection of what seemed to be thousands was undoubtedly the lamb ribs. No dainty French-cuts here: it's a deboned triple rib, braised to perfection. Team it with wok-fried noodles, and why not a few seared scallops layered with chunks of foie gras?

Finish off with the restaurant's signature dish, a bubbling dry-ice bowl ('80s music video, anyone?), filled with sweet coconut ice cream.

That's the great thing about the Noble House menu: Once you've paid the set price (Dh599 for my five courses), you can pick any dishes you want from the whole menu. Go for a full onslaught with caviar, foie gras and wagyu beef; or the simpler though no less flavoursome pleasures of chicken soup, braised lamb and noodles. It's your call.

Noble House, Raffles Hotel, Wafi 04-314 9888
Four forks (one fork deducted for uneven service, which included charging us for six courses)
Must-have: Scallops with foie gras; chicken soup; lamb ribs, fried aubergine