Nando's (CCC Area)

Rating: 5 Stars

Special Award: Best Grilled Chicken/Cleanest Facilites and Toilets

Great food, especially if you are trying to cut carbs. Chickens are a little small, so for a Moose sized meal, I usually get a whole chicken and then a salad on the side (like the Portuguese Salad).

My best guess is that Nando's is Portuguese with an African spice flair to the food.

UPDATE: Oct-30-2008. Have been reapeatedly getting good size chickens. First chicken I got there must have been the runt of the nest. Also, on thursday nights they play some sort of rave dance music from the local radio station and it actually starts to make you angry at your food after about 10 minutes. But still great food.

D'Arcy's Kitchen (MSQ)

Rating: 4 1/2 Stars

Special Award: Cutest Atmosphere

Cutesy wootsy would best describe the atmosphere... Like a teddy bear's tea party... Flowery plates of all shapes and sizes decorate plate racks and shelves on all the walls surrounding you.

Like a teddy bear's tea party... this place also has tiny little chairs and tables...

This D'Arcy's is a carbon copy of the D'Arcy's at Qurum Beach, but a little larger. Yet you'd think with the extra size, they could afford larger tables. As my nickname is Moose for a good reason, I half feel like "Mongo" from the old "Heathcliff" cartoons from the 1980's. I quite literally feel like I'm eating at a 4 year olds pretend tea party with the spindly little chairs and tiny little tables and itty bitty glasses and tea cups. I half want to say "MONGO WANT ORDER NOW!"
I think half of the women sitting at the tables around me had hinged plastic arms and legs. I could have sworn the gentleman sitting in front of me had furry arms and buttons for eyes!

All kidding aside. Great food. Same as Qurum Beach.

Beirut Restaurant (Qurum)

Rating: 3 Stars

Special Award: Try their grilled Shawarmas. Great Mixed Grill too.

Great Middle Eastern dishes, so authentic that nobody speaks English. Hamburger is an awful overspiced thing. Maybe it appeals to a different culture, but lesson one with eating in Muscat is to not eat Western dishes in Eastern restaurants. Lebanese dishes are excellent. Mixed grill is very good. Very conservative restaurant. There is a seperate area upstairs for families.

D'Arcy's Kitchen (Qurum Beach)

Rating 4 1/2 stars

Special Award: Best Breakfast in Town.

Quaint little restaurant on the bottom floor of a mall (outside and inside entrances). Tiny tables and chairs leave something to be desired. If you weigh over 100 kilos, your butt cheeks are clenching every time your chair creaks. The tiny tables and tiny tea cups will have your little pinky sticking out as you sip tea. Food is great though. They also serve a nice steak as well. Excellent breakfasts! It's the sort of place you go to when you start to think that Muscat could really use a "Cracker Barrel" or an "IHOP" or a "Denny's".

Chili's (City Centre Mall)

Rating: 4 1/2 Stars

Special Award: Best Fajitas in Muscat!

Every time I go to Chili's at City Centre, the place gets just a little bit better. I don't know if it's because I'm getting better at picking out what's good or whether the staff is pro-active in trying to keep the place as close to an authentic Chili's as Islamically possible. I think both are the case. Last night I had the best fajitas I've had outside the United States.

They still don't serve chili - what Chili's got it's name for. Every year they are co-sponsors for the Terlingua Chili cookoff. Yet I don't see a bowl of chili on the menu. For those outside of the US, we're talking about "Chili Con Carne" a bowl of ground beef and chili spice rich gravy (sometimes containing beans). Yet you can get Chili's skillet queso, which has chili mixed with cheeze.

The reason for not serving alcohol is understandable - different country - different customs and I won't fault them for adhering to their country's culture, but they could at least do away with the pretend bar and make room for more tables. An empty bar is just something to remind Westerners that they aren't going to get a famous Chili's margarita here.

Aside from these minor things, Chili's is a great place to get a great Southwest American meal in Muscat City Centre and it's as close to a real American Chili's restaraunt as you will find in the Middle East.

Kargeen

Rating 4 1/2 stars.

This is the place you take clients in order to expose them to the preconceived notions of Arabesque culture they see in Indiana Jones movies or in children stories. Kargeen has a truly magical and tranporting atmosphere. It couldn't be any more fairy-tale Arab if your food was brought out on a flying carpet.

Imagine walking down a dirty alley between a travel agency and a video shop into a huge garden with overhanging trees and canopied tents for families.

Imagine colorful lanterns hanging from chains from above you at odd levels everywhere as if they were hanging from the trees themselves. The buildings around you are distictively Omani/Yemeni (though modern). Dining areas are slightly partitioned by vine covered fences.

The odor of fruity "Sheesha" smoke permeates the air everywhere as Arabs from Saudi sit with Arabs from Bahrain, Yemen, the UAE and Oman and discuss buisness over Sheesha (Hukkah or "Hubbly Bubbly Pipes" as some of you know them as).

Some parties are sit on slightly raised and carpet covered floors, some are sitting around big wooden tables with comfortable square benches attired in traditional woolen covered pillows. Sheesha pipes are everywhere.

Service in a word, sucks...

Though waiter and waitress attire is pretty neat looking and suits the atmosphere. You just have to get pushy if things aren't brought out in time. Food is fantastic, though the mixed grill (a common Middle Eastern fare) is a little slim in quantity for the money. They have an excellent selection of juices of all kinds.

Try the Karkade frozen cocktail. It tastes great and Karkade (Hybiscus) is rumored to lower your blood pressure... something you'll need while dealing with the over taxed wait staff.

Don't order chips and salsa unless you want Doritos and Pace Picante Sauce.

Soups (French Onion especially) are excellent and are served in little clay pots over a candle.

All the bread is good -- especially the "meat" breads.

Most dishes are pretty good. They also make good pizzas.

Recommendations to the manager/owner - the place needs belly dancers and/or traditional music... Not loud earsplitting music - but good belly dancers and traditional un-amplified drums, ouds and other classical Arab musical instruments for thursday nights. Also... Turn off or turn down the Happy Birthday song. It's loud and obnoxious.

China Town Restaurant (In CCC)

Overall Rating: 4 stars

Good food over the whole menu. PLENTY of choices. Spicy dishes tend to have a lot of tomato sauce in them, giving the dish a spaghetti sauce with rice taste on some dishes.

Recommend: Peppery Lemon Soup!

Senior Picos

Rating 3 1/2 stars

When you first walk in to Senior Picos, the place strikes you as a much nicer and cleaner place than Pavo Real's, and I'd really like to rate it higher, but it was perhaps TOO clean. Picos is in the Intercontinental Hotel and it has that hotel sterility about it. Also, all the management type guys walking in and out of the back in funeral suits gives you the feel that you're in a Russian Mafia fronted Mexican Restaurant in downtown Moscow...

Then there is the creepy stage show.

They have a small stage that looks like it was once a niche for a planter or a vase that now houses the skinniest blonde singer and her mullet wearing guitar player. We left not long after they played Anne Murray's "Close to you". They do sing some Spanish songs and I would have liked to have watched except that my wife kept slapping me every time I looked in the skinny blonde's direction (not really - but it was a point of some humor).

To have the dancing duo framed in a niche in the wall made the performance look like a marianette show. To top it off, the painting of a Mexican Woman "loving" a tower shaped Mexican monument as their backdrop and the music turned down so low that the woman's dance steps on the hollow flooring of their puppet stage were louder than their music, just made it all really really wierd and creepy.

Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't a tiny little stage with tiny dancing people standing on it, I was half expecting Topo Gigo to pop out on strings and start telling jokes in Spanish or Italian.

The Appetizer: Once again, not authentic in any way, shape or form. We had ordered Chile con Queso and a seafood soup to start. The soup never showed up. The Queso tasted like it was made with Alfredo Sauce mix. It was white in color and had an Itallian cheese taste to it. Not bad flavor, but not Mexican or TexMex. Chips were sort of dry (like they were made of baked wheat or something). Not to my liking. My wife enjoyed them. The salsa was missing cilantro (corriander) and diced jalapenos.

Main Course: Mixed Fajitas. They had excellent flavor, though the beef tasted better than the chicken. Also not authentic as they were served with baby corn and asparagus, though were better than Pavo Real in that the rice wasn't piled on to the sizzling plate underneath the meat. They also provided a selection of fixings, which I liked (sliced jalepenos, cheese, sour cream and guacamole (after they told us they didn't have guacamole when we ordered it as an appetiser)).

Service was a bit stiff. The Manager (a Russian Mafia Suit wearing dude) walked over and asked for our opinion. He was very nice and we explained that we were from Texas and that we have a Mexican Sister-in-Law, so we are a little picky on Mexican food. They were very graceous.

We had an overall positive experience. The place was more quiet than Pavo Real and the food was slightly better. Though Pavo Real has Kareoke on Wedesday Nights and appears to be more of a fun place, constantly haunted by expats. Picos would be a great place for quiet conversation.

We will have to go back on a weekend night and see how busy it gets.

For drinks we had a pitcher of Margaritas. Equally good at Picos.

The Golden Spoon (Khuwair)

Rating: 4 Stars

Special Award: Great Mongolian Barbecue!

While the Golden Spoon seems typical of all Indo-Chinese restaurants around Muscat, it offers a great Mongolian Barbecue. However, you may need to bring your wife with you.

The Mongolian style cooking appears to be for families as it is only upstairs. Al a Carte Menu looked like it had some interesting Chinese and Indian items. We ate the Mongolian Barbecue. This involved something that looks like a salad bar where you select what you want in a bowl. You then hand the bowl to the chef and he frys the stuff on a big round skillet type cooking surface with a large set of chopsticks. When it's done, he scoops it all back into the bowl and it's ready to eat. I will write more on this place when I return to try something new!

Pavo Real

Review: 3 1/2 stars

Special Award: Great Margaritas and Social Hotspot

Okay, this review isn't coming from the Limey side of my family but the Texas side -- and I'm tired of reading the rave reviews of Pavo Real by European writers that portray this restaurant as being "truly authentic". Pardon my Limey words, but:

There isn't a bloody thing authentic about it!!!

Overlooking the Indian waiters dressed as cowboys (there's a joke in there somewhere). African art motifs and the leopardskin roof... there are 8 Myan Sun Calendars (one of them huge) and a giant (lifesize) depiction of a Myan water god that are perhaps actually from Mexico.

But I understand that you have to do the best with what you got, and given that you don't have Mexican or Southwestern US customers in any large number, it's understandable that the business has to cater to a wider clientel, so I'll be a little easy on them.

Pavos has Great Margaritas and live music and a fun, mostly expat, atmosphere. The best way to describe the dishes at Pavo Real are "Indo-Mex". Nearly every restaurant I've been to in Muscat is either run or staffed by Indians, so naturally the food becomes part Indian. It's been my understanding that the head chef of Pavo Real is real Mexican who was a cook on a freighter or a tanker before landing in Muscat and signing up as Pavo Real's head chef.

But if the dishes are an example of his cooking, I'm writing a letter to his mother and sending her a plane ticket so she can fly over to Muscat and slap him -- because no Mexican I know has ever used curry as a main spice ingredient in their cooking and 3/4 of everything on the menu is saturated with curry spice. In a land where you can't get away from Indian Restaurants or Indian copies of Chinese Restaurants, you get to where you really wish there was something that didn't have curry in it... So Pavos can be a little frustrating on that account.

To be fair, the dishes at Pavo Reals are really quite unique and taste great, if you enter on the mindset of someone wanting a good curry along with a good alcoholic beverage in a place where you can bump elbows with friends on kareoke night (Wednesday night), it's definately a happening spot.

If you're desperate for Mexican food and you have to eat at Pavo Real's, I recommend the fajitas. They come out a little wierd. They put the rice on the sizzling plate under your fajita meat and they put way too much bell pepper (or capsicum) on the plate, but it's not bad.

Reviewing Senior Pico's next...

New Info 15-Jul-09: Pavo's no longer uses curry in most of it's dishes... as far as I can tell.