Average seafood in a busy mall setting.
As you enter Rob Lobster tucked away on the top floor of Al Wahda Mall you instantly notice the atmosphere. Busy and buzzing with loads of big tables full of people dining. The restaurant is large, with big timber booths and lots of other seating looking over the outside of the mall. It has a nice casual, family atmosphere to it.
Red Lobster is a popular American chain known for, well, its lobster. Staff will greet you warmly and usher you to your table past the huge tank of live lobsters which has small kids crowded around it peering in.
Our super-friendly waitress brought us over some cheesy bread to start with and a salad each.
The bread was very tasty, topped off with cheddar and herbs and served warm – we could easily have sat here all night just eating that alone. The salads were simple and a nice start to the meal.
The menu is large and consists of mainly seafood, but there are some steak dishes with which you can order lobster as a side. To start we tried the jumbo coconut shrimp and the crispy calamari. The shrimp came in a huge serving, piled up high in a bowl. The coconut coating was light and delicate and the shrimp were nicely cooked. The calamari on the other hand was very average. The seafood itself was fine but the hand-breaded coating was deep-fried in oil that tasted like it hadn’t been changed for some time and was so dripping with grease that we had a couple of pieces and stopped eating it. It was smothered in flour and not cooked properly so that the deep frying turned the coating into some sort of soggy paste. It came served with deep-fried broccoli and bell peppers which again were dripping with oil and were an odd accompaniment in our opinion.
For our mains we chose the New York strip steak with a rock lobster tail and the whole Maine lobster. We asked the lobster to be grilled but you can also have it steamed or roasted. It came nicely cooked with a buttery garlic sauce and was the pick of all the dishes we tried.
It comes with a cheesy plastic bib should you feel the need to cover up your clothes. The strip steak was disappointing – overcooked and not a particularly tender cut of meat, but the lobster tail was tasty and nicely cooked.
The restaurant seems popular enough and the service was very good, but too much of the food was disappointing for us to want to return. If you go for the lobster alone then you will be sure of a fun night with a decent meal but our advice is to stay away from anything deep fried and stick with what Red Lobster do best.
The bill (for two)
Jumbo coconut shrimp Dhs33
Crispy calamari Dhs32
Strip steak with lobster tail Dhs120
Grilled Maine lobster Dhs145
Total (excluding service) Dhs330
