The Dish: Pablo’s new menu

Pablo’s is the in-house restaurant on the ground floor of the Four Points by Sheraton on Argwings Kodhek. I’ve been to this restaurant several times before, back when it was Best Western – I was a regular visitor, simply because it is convenient. The rooftop was pretty and usually not too packed to allow for a bit of relaxation as we waited for the traffic to go by. But after a particularly underwhelming restaurant week visit (I really don’t know why we still do these, and why we, the customers, do this to ourselves by going), I struck it off my list for anything completely.

A few weeks ago, I got an invite to come and taste their new menu, and so, in the spirit of ‘things change’ and ‘don’t write things off too quickly’, I honoured the invite to go check out what they’ve changed about the menu, and if this new management has managed to do something different with the food than what they had before.

They haven’t.

It doesn’t feel like fine dining

Pablo’s claims to be a fine dining experience, with food gathered from, forgive the pun, the four points of the globe, but for me, it didn’t feel like it was fine dining at all. First, the chafing dishes are immediately apparent when you walk into the restaurant – for me, fine dining means a la carte, not mass-market production. The chairs feel more like they should be next to a poolside than in a space supposed to encourage comfort and decadence (clearly, I read a lot into the phrase fine dining).

I might have ignored all of this if the food was great (well, no. I probably wouldn’t have, actually), but I don’t think the food was at a fine dining standard either. The welcome white wine sangria drink was very good, but of course, we were only allowed the one. Little did I know that that would be the best thing I had that day. I made sure to taste everyone’s food at my table, too, as they gave out three different menus for everyone on the table. My menu had a nice butternut soup with almonds and cheese – I would have gone lighter on the cheese, but you can’t go wrong with butternut, and at least that still holds. My menu had lamb chops; the lamb was ok, and this is coming from someone who doesn’t even like lamb.

The beef was really tough, which I really didn’t like, because I was expecting it to be, well, more edible? There was spicy rice that was far too spicy for my taste, but those who like spicy food, would be more likely to like it – although they should indicate that the rice is spicy on the menu as opposed to when you get it. My dessert was a dessert calzone with an apple pie filling and a blueberry compote – which, for me, was nothing to write home about.

And I think this is the main problem with Pablo’s. In trying to do everything, they haven’t done enough to focus on the elements that actually make a restaurant experience fine. I don’t want to pay to fight with a slice of beef.