To Tip or Not To Tip:That is the Question

Giving a tip at a restaurant is not really been part of the Omani culture, perhaps due to cultural aspects such as the fact that eating out as a family has not been traditionally common here in comparison to other countries or the fact that we do not have many fancy places to go eat at anyway.

Tipping is almost an obligation in some other cultures, it is very common in some countries to have restaurants that explicitly mention in their food menus that service charge is not included (although I really do not understand how they could charge us so much when service charge is NOT included, vegetables and meat are not that expensive) so that the customer has to pay/tip for the service. However, the majority of restaurants in Oman do charge a ‘service tax’ when you dine in, so that does not really matter much in Oman.

So what do you our readers do, at what circumstances do you tip? Do you tip only when you experience an extraordinary service? does it depend on how fancy the restaurant is? does the frequency at which you eat at the place matter? and finally – how much do you tip: is it a specific percentage of bill amount or is it just whatever change you have left in your wallet?

Guest Post – Review : Flavours Al Athaiba

This post has been submitted by Amjad Hayder, a high school student in Muscat, he keeps a blog that he updates regularly at http://amjad248.blogspot.com. Please feel free to share your recipes and reviews with the rest of the Omani Cuisine community by emailing us at contact@omanicuisine.com.

The other day my friends and I went to this new restaurant in Athaiba called Flavours. This is a new international cuisine restaurant in Muscat owned by PFI group. It is located off the the Sultan Qaboos Road next to the Mazda showroom in Al Athaiba.

We went there for lunch at around 2pm. The customers we saw were mainly employees from different nationalities having their lunch break probably coming to Flavours for its special buffet offer for lunch.

The atmosphere at Flavours is great, it is a spacious restaurant with two additional halls, one for families only and the other for ladies only. There is a billiard table and some internet facilities for anyone feeling like hanging out in Flavours.

Flavours serves different types of meat or chicken rice meals and sandwitches. Their menu has a variety of items for desserts such cream caramel and fruits. They also serve Baskin Robin’s ice cream.

The prices at Flavours are very reasonable. Their special rice and curry buffet is served for 2 riyals only! All their other menu items are also of a similar reasonable price as well.

(Photograph by Amjad)

I liked Flavour’s food and prices, but I did not like their waiters. The majority of their staff are Indian, they have one Omani woman and one Omani guy at the counter. I hope that you do not get me wrong, I have nothing against other nationalities, but I got really annoyed by the waiters who did not seem to feel like serving us. We were a group of ten and we stayed for a bit in Flavours, it was quite apparent to us that the waiters were irritated by our stay and one of them stood waiting for us to finish eating to collect the dishes from us.

Disregarding the attitude of the waiters, we had a great time at Flavours: great food, great atmosphere and reasonable prices. If you’re looking for these things, do not hesitate to have your lunch after work/college/school at Flavours Restaurant or even having a dinner there with your family or friends.

Guest Post: Vegetable Grilled Fish Dish

This post has been submitted by chef Mohammed Al Manthari – a Omani student in New Zealand. Please feel free to share your recipes and reviews with the rest of the Omani Cuisine community by emailing us at contact@omanicuisine.com.

Today’s recipe is rich with protein and minerals and tastes great with its seasonal spices and basil leaves. The locals of Oman are known for their many different fish dishes (Fish is the second largest export of the country after all!). I have chosen this recipe as it is one of the healthiest and most tasteful. A must-east for both grilled food fans and sea food fans!

The Ingredients are:

• ½ Kg of Tuna (Gaithar) Fish cubes.
• A selection of vegetables (any of all):
  • Courgettes
  • Mushrooms
  • Cauliflower,
  • Yellow, Green, Red Peppers
  • Egg plant
  • Lady fingers (Okra)
• 2 crushed green chillies (amendable, 1 makes it mild).
• 1 large onion
• 3 tomatoes
• Basil (a handful)
• 1 lemon
• 2 teaspoons fish curry powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon black pepper
• ½ teaspoon red chilli powder
• ½ teaspoon turmeric
• 3 cloves of crushed garlic

Before anything, marinate the fish cubes for an hour to 3 hours into bowel and add the green chillies, lemon, fish curry powder, salt, black pepper, turmeric, garlic and red chilli powder, then return the bowel in the fridge.

1. Cut onions into small cubes.
2. Heat up the pot and add 2-teaspoon oil (preferably, olive oil).
3. Add the onions and let it fry until golden brown.
4. then cut the tomatoes into smaller cubes and add them
5. add the marinated fish.
6. let it cook for 10 minutes.
7. add the basil leaves
8. then add all the vegetables and add a cup of warm water.
9. let it all cook for another 20-30 minutes on medium heat.
10. heat the oven and add the fish pieces only to grill for 10-15 minutes, while the rest of the vegetables are cooking in lower heat.

N.B: the spices are adjustable depending on your taste.

Hope you enjoy your vegetable fish dish.

Review: Kobe Sizzlers – Qurum Commercial Area

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.

Review: Hamburger Nation – Muscat City Centre

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.

The Lottery of the Bill Amount

I am amused by the funny feeling I get as I wait for a food receipt when I have no idea on how much the food I ate costed me. Not including the taxes in the displayed price on the menu is so stupid. Do they honestly expect a casual consumer, who could be anything between 10 to 50 years old, to calculate, on the top of his head, how much 4% + 5% would add on the numbers that he sees on the board?

While some of us might be fortunate enough to be able to order from a Hardees takeaway outlet without giving much though about how much EXACTLY it will cost before making the order, that does not necessarily apply to everyone. The extra 150 Baizas that we pay might not break anybody’s back, but I can think of the little kid that had only a RO 2 allowance to spend on dinner on the family’s day out, he was allowed to go and buy his own meal from whatever food outlet he selects in the food court, he checks the prices on the menu above and orders a meal that costs him EXACTLY what he had in his pocket, the cashier says okay, he gets him the order and, makes a couple of clicks and a random number appears on the numerical LCD – which is surprisingly more than what the kid had in his hands.

Was it the mistake of the kid that the menu did not clearly state that the meals actually cost MORE than the amounts mentioned? This is stupid and it should be illegal. It is very likely for any consumer to be misled to think that the prices displayed are those that he has to actually pay. Especially when the price is displayed in a bold big font and there is not sign right next to it stating that a tax is to be imposed upon it.

I think that all restaurants should include the taxes within the price of the meal, I should have the right to KNOW how much EXACTLY I will be paying in advance. While it has been traditionally accepted that service at a restaurant could be charged on a percentage basis depending on what you order – and that cannot be specified in advance, it is crazy to expect a consumer to even estimate how much a 5% plus 4% plus the service fee or delivery fee would be in total.

Even though it can be nice while waiting for the bill to come to have a bet on who actually manages to guess how much the bill would be, it is obviously not right as this is not a lottery.

Cardiff Cabsa

I hate it when people make cooking sound like a complex job that requires knowledge of specific mysterious formulae. Anybody can cook. As long as you do the very basics right, whatever else you do is optional and rarely anything will severally affect the way your food tastes. This meal is one of those really easy ones to do. The Cardiff Cabsa is what we used to cook all the time during uni days in Cardiff, I learnt how to make it there, the recipe could not be traced to a single Gulf or Indian country because guys from different places in the Gulf chipped in their own additions and twists over the years. Check it out here:

Ingredients (For Four People):

• 2 mugs of basmati rice
• 1 whole large chicken, sliced into 6 or 8 pieces, skin removed optionally
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 2 tomatoes, chopped into small pieces
• 1 chili, chopped into small rings
• 1 garlic clover, crushed
• tomato paste
• 1 chicken stock (Maggi cubes)
• 1 tablespoon of mixed arabian kabsa spices
• 1 tablespoon of turmeric (kurkum)
• 1 teaspoon dried lemon poweder
• 1 teaspoon of salt
• 1 teaspoon of black pepper

Method:

1. In a large oiled pot fry onion until colour turns to redish yellow, add chopped tomoto, chili and crushed garlic and stir until juicy syrup is created.
2. Add chicken, turmeric, spices, and stir to cover all chicken pieces with spices.
3. Add tomato paste and stir.
4. Add 4 mugs of water, wait to boil for a while, add the chicken stock.
5. Heat on high heat for 20 minutes, check using the knife test to see if chicken is cooked.
6. Lower heat, add rice, cover the pot using the lid and wait for 20 minutes. Make sure not to lift the lid so that the steam does not escape.
7. Take out and eat!

Introduction

The Modern Omani Cuisine blog covers the adventures of a group of young bachelors stuck starving in Muscat searching for some decent food to eat. We shall report to you random recipes of meals we invent, reviews of restaurants we dine in, and the latest news and happenings in the food scene in Oman.