A completed guest room: the dark veneer is offset by the light-coloured linen and accessories. A completed guest room: the dark veneer is offset by the light-coloured linen and accessories.

Food & beverage
A tour of the F&B outlets alone at Ritz-Carlton takes the best part of an hour; in addition to the three signature Asian, Steakhouse and Lebanese concepts, Ritz-Carlton offers all-day dining, a lobby lounge, lobby bar, pool bar, outdoor restaurant and Hotelier’s favourite, Dolce, an Italian-style café that wouldn’t look out of place in a boutique or mall.

Designed in bright orange, white and silver, Dolce is almost clinical in its look — far removed from anything we have previously encountered in a Ritz-Carlton. It will offer ice cream, sorbets, cakes and pastries, as well as a gourmet retail selection of tea and coffee, with items packaged up in trendy orange boxes — all great for the hotel’s branding.

While the look of many of the restaurants is more contemporary than expected — the all-day dining Giornotte is modelled on a Mediterranean villa while Southeast Asian outlet Li Jiang is inspired by a high energy Asian supermarket — the approach to the cuisine served is typically traditional.

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Executive chef David Gache explains: “Maybe we’ll have two or three dishes that are more fancy or creative but first we will make sure that the basics are well done and I think that is the key of our food and beverage in all the outlets; the vision of food and beverage in this hotel is classical, well done, with the right product”.

EAM of food and beverage Tabish Siddiquie adds that with such a range of guest profiles expected, the hotel needs to offer “something that appeals to a broad base”.

It also has to be recognisable, says Gache, hence the signature Lebanese restaurant Mijana sticking to its core cuisine.

“In this part of the world Lebanese food is traditional, it’s not like French food where you have lots of dishes,” he says. “Lebanese cuisine [consists of a] couple of mezze, couple of mixed grill, if you want to go out of that you become a fusion restaurant and we didn’t want to go in this type of direction. [If you are] too eclectic you lose the spirit and intensity of the dish.”

“That’s why we’re not going into fusion,” adds Siddiquie. “We’re looking at stuff we know we can execute and we do it well.”

One restaurant in which the chef is pushing the boundaries at is The Forge, Ritz-Carlton’s signature steak house designed around a series of nooks and crannies offering plenty of semi-private dining space.

Gache says that in Abu Dhabi, most steak houses are only offering meat from the US and Australia, but he wants to provide the “best beef available from Australia, France, Ireland, England, Japan etc”.

“Some meat from other countries is unknown – it’s up to me to put that on the menu and develop guests’ tastes and palates,” he asserts.

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