Dubai Restaurant Review: Flavours on Two, Towers Rotana

In a nutshell: cheap and cheerful, good food but not great alcohol.
4/5



Flavours on Two is the sort of place to go to with a group of friends when you want a relaxed dinner with a few drinks at a reasonable price. It is not the place to go for a romantic meal or with people you want to impress! As the name suggests, Flavours is on the 2nd floor of the Towers Rotana Hotel on Sheikh Zayed Road. Every night the 'all you can eat buffet' has a different theme; Thursday is Italian night.



When you enter the restaurant from the lifts you are straight into the buffet area as all the tables are around the outside near the windows. It felt very small because having the bar and buffet area in the middle doesn't seem to have left much room for tables. We were a group of 7 and were seated at a c-shaped sofa (5 of us on there - pity the person stuck in the middle, Simon in this case!) with individual chairs filling the sofa-free section. It was comfortable but we realised that the shape of the sofa seemed to catch sounds so it was quite noisy - although the wooden floors and seriously wasted group sat next to us helped with that!




The starters included soup and various salad items. I nearly had the cream of courgette soup until my friend pointed out that it would be full of dairy - she can't eat dairy and yeast either (although hopefully I'm only off them for a few more weeks) so was able to give me some great pointers and ideas. Simon did have the soup (actually the bowl that I had taken for myself) and said it was fantastic - he actually went back for more before he got his dessert! The salads included cold roasted vegetables, melon with bresaola plus the usual suspects. The live cooking station was all pasta so sadly I had to avoid that - the effect pasta has on my stomach doesn't even make me crave it. There was a great variety of foods in the serving dishes though, including chicken, beef, fish and lamb. The fish and chicken I had were both very tender and the potatoes and vegetables were luckily not presented covered in black pepper. Dessert-wise, I settled for fresh fruit although the chocolate fountain and sticky toffee pudding were extremely tempting! Whilst the food didn't blow me away, it was all very tasty and fresh which is exactly what you want from a buffet.





The only disappointment of the evening was some of the drinks - cheap vodka and cheap wine. For AED 169 per person for unlimited food and drink, you can be sure that you aren't going to be served top quality brands but there should still be some sort of minimal standard. My brother, Struan, was on gin and said that was fine so maybe stick to that. The staff were friendly but we had minimal interaction since it was a buffet and I pity them having to work there with some of the seriously drunk people they need to deal with. One good thing was that they automatically served water (local) - I remember going for a buffet years ago where alcohol was free but water had to be paid for!!