Omani Cuisine

Kobe is the relatively fancy relatively new sizzler restaurant in the first block of shops next to the Zawawi car showroom in the Qurum commercial area. I do not know when exactly it opened, but the first time I go to it was sometime last month.

The first thing you notice about Kobe is that it has a serious theme/identity crisis, the restaurant table paper sheets say that Kobe is a place (or a thing - can’t remember) in Japan and the restaurant is nicely decorated with bamboo sticks, but all the food served is Indian. All the staff members are Indian. And occasionally between the Britney Spears songs and the Nancy Ajram songs a random Indian song would be played. We consider Kobe to be an Indian restaurant regardless of their confusing mention of Japan here and there.

Kobe Sizzlers, as the name suggests, serves mainly sizzlers, these are meet, chicken, or fish dishes grilled or fried and brought to you sizzling. All the sizzler dishes of Kobe come with cooked vegetables (spinach, carrots, tomato, flower, and green beans) and either chips, boiled rice, or mushed potatoes depending on your choice. The menu has a long list of sizzlers in all various forms, shapes and falvours, along with soups, some random little sandwiches (e.g. cheese chili sandwich), burgers, one pasta dish, and three fried rice dishes. On the drinks side, Kobe offers a selection of juices which we did not try, ice tea which a friend tried and thought that it was okay, and good old soda.

Kobe has several things messed up, but the major thing that they do have right is the food itself as it is really very good. I have already been to it three times, my favourite dish is a delicious schezwan sauce chicken sizzler which is rich in flavour and quite spicy but not to a crazy extent. We thought that the amount of food served was good. The sizzler meal costs on average RO 3.500, a rice meal costs about RO 2. The total we spent for dinner for four was about RO 15.

Dinner at Kobe was a pleasant experience, we wished that it would have a greater variety of appetisers, but that section of the menu had only soups. A point that we think is worth mentioning here is that the whole of the Kobe restaurant is engulfed with the sizzling smell of the food, we do not think that you would like to go for an important meeting after staying inside Kobe for an hour.

Prior to the launch of the Omani Cuisine, we attempted to make a burger from scratch, but the experiment failed miserably, we recently gave it another shot after doing some research and some unofficial experimentation at other venues, and as a result the Champions Burger was successfully born at the Omani Cuisine - coincidently AC Milan won the Champions League on the same day.

Ingredients (To make six burgers)

• 600g of pure minced beef
• Coriander (كزبرة) finely chopped
• 2 small shallots (بصل أخضر), finely chopped
• 2 cloves of garlic, finely crushed
• 1 tbsp barbecue sauce
• 2 tbsp Thai chili sauce
• 1 tbsp flour
• Nandos mixed spices crush
• salt and pepper
• 1 big onion sliced into rings
• extra virgin olive oil (EVOO)

Method

1. mix the beef well with the coriander, shallots and the flour in a bowl.
2. add the garlic, barbecue sauce, 1/2 a spoon of the Thai chili sauce, the Nandos crush, salt and pepper and mix with the beef.
3. divide the beef mix into six equal portions to make six burgers. (you can cook them directly or keep them in the fridge to cook later)
4. heat some EVOO in a frying pan until it is screaming hot.
5. fry the burgers, each side left for six minutes.

Extra - Spicy Cooked Onion to be served in the bun along with the burger.
Leave the burger on the side and fry the onion in a pot with a little of EVOO, wait until it turns golden and then add the rest of the Thai chili sauce and some salt and pepper.

Rice in Arabic is called A’ruz, but in the majority of the Gulf states nobody calls it by its proper Arabic name and instead refer to it as Aish (3aish), which literally means “the state of living” or “life”.

Rice is a principal element in the Gulf diet and it has to be served for every-single-lunch-meal. Many nationals in the area will not consider a meal they eat around noon time without rice a ‘lunch meal’.

It is interesting to notice the distinction between the naming convention of rice based meals in Arabic and English. In English, the meal is called ’something and rice’ while in Arabic Khaleeji dialect, the rice always comes first, it is Aish wa Laham (rice and meat), or Aish was Samak (rice and fish). Another interesting fact is the different usage of the word Aish in other Arabic states, such as the Mediterranean Arab states and Egypt, where Aish means bread and not rice, as bread is the principal element of of the majority of the meals served there.

Our dish today is a very basic ‘aish’ meal, check out the ingredients and method on how to make your own ‘aish’.

Ingredients

• 2 mugs of rice (Uncle bens rice)
• 400g of boneless chicken diced into small cubes
• 2 medium onions sliced into short wide strips
• 2 medium capsicums sliced into short wide strips
• 2 medium tomatoes diced into small cubes
• 2 clovers of garlic crushed
• chili crushed
• tomato paste
• mixed chicken spices
• salt and pepper
• 1 lemon

Method

Chicken

1. Put the chicken in an oiled heated pot and stir until it turns white then add salt, pepper, and mixed chicken spices.
2. Add the onion, capsicum, tomato, garlic, and chili to the mix and then stir and leave for 5 minutes.
3. Add the tomato paste and a mug of water. Mix and add the juice of the lemon.
4. Lower the heat and leave for 15 minutes or until the chicken is cooked. You can add more water to the chicken if all the water in the pot evaporates and the chicken is not yet cooked.

Rice

1. Add only a quarter of a mug of rice to an oiled pot and stir until the rice turns brown.
2. Add the rest of the rice to the pot and add 3 mugs of water. Add salt to it, stir well, cover and leave for 20 minutes on low heat.
3. Remove the pot from the cooker and leave on the side for 5 minutes before serving.

We went out today to try Hamburger Nation - the new burger restaurant in Muscat City Centre. The restaurant is located on the ground floor right below the escalator if you’re coming down from the horrible Emax.

Just as the name suggests, Hamburger Nation serves burgers and not much else. All their burgers are relatively massive in size and are served in sesame seed buns, lettuce, pickles, tomatoes, and raw onion rings. Unlike some of the huge burgers served by other places, you can actually hold these in your hands and have a bite without creating a huge mess. I tried the Buddha Burga, which is basically a Thai spiced chicken breast burger, I thought that it was pretty good. Their 2-pages menu also has some beef, lamb, prawn, and some veggie ones as well.

The burgers do not come with anything, you have to order the drink and whatever sideline you wish to have separately. We did not feel adventurous and had regular chips - which was good. On the drinks side, they have milkshakes, soda, and some bottled organic juices.

The staff of the restaurants are all Asian and were very friendly. Burger Nation is your average noisy mall-restaurant, but the place still feels cozy even though it was a little bit tight in space.

The average price for a burger sandwich here costs RO 3, sidelines range in price from RO 1 to RO 1.8, drinks from RO 0.7 to RO 1.5, milkshakes from RO 1.5 to 2.5, and deserts from RO 1.7 to RO 3.0. So the average whole meal with a desert could cost RO 6 to RO 8 per person.

Overall, it was pleasant experience, the burgers were delicious and the service was really good. There isn’t much variety though, it is Burger Nation afterall, the quantity of the chips that we got was a bit questionable, and the 700bz soda was only for one bottle, not a refillable glass. This makes us wonder if the money we paid was really worth the food we got, especially when you realise that it was pretty close to what it would have cost us to eat at Chili’s.

This was an experiment for making something different this week, the original idea was to make a club sandwich, but we ended up with the result you see above. The boring chicken sandwich was saved by the creamy sauce we added to it. This is a simple snack that you can make, check out the ingredients and method below.

Ingredients (4 sandwitches)

• 400g of chicken breasts sliced into small strips
• 1 medium sized onion minced finely
• 1 red capsicum sliced into thin strips
• 2 garlic clovers
• 2 green chillies
• Nandos crushed spices mix
• butter 1.5 tbsp
• half a mug of milk
• 1.5 tbsp of flour
• salt and pepper
• brown toasted bread

Method

1. In a small pot over low heat melt the butter.
2. Add the flour immediatly after all the butter melts - make sure to stir the mix while adding.
3. Add the milk gradually while stirring to ensure that the mix blends properly.
4. Add half a mug of water to mix and keep on stirring.
5. Add salt and pepper and stir.
6. keep stirring. (Now you understand why this is boring) Stir from time to time for a period of 10 minutes. You should get a thick white cream. You can adjust the viscosity of the cream by adding more water. Once done leave covered on the side.
7. Crush the garlic clovers with the chillies and the Nandos spices mix.
8. Melt some butter on a fraying pan.
9. Fry the minced onion and capsicum slices on the pan for four minutes.
10. Add the chicken to the mix and fry while stirring until the chicken turns white.
11. Add the crushed spices mix with one tbsp of vinegar to the chicken mix on the pan.
12. Add half a mug of water, cover the pan and leave for 5 minutes.
13. Remove the cover and wait for all the water to evaporate before adding the cream we made at the beginning.
14. Stir the mix until cream is absorbed by the chicken and the mix is creamy.
15. Take out and serve with toast as sandwitches.