If you’re looking for a break from Dubai’s ubiquitous steak restaurants and European-style dining rooms, then give Asian-inspired Eauzone a go – though you’ll need to overlook the slightly cringey name, which comes from the fact that by day the space doubles up as the pool bar for the One & Only Hotel, by a palm-tree shaded beach overlooking the Arabian gulf – though if you fancy dining poolside on wooden decks, you’ve come to the right place.
Daytime eats take in salads and pasta alongside the core Asian dishes of soups and small plates. So you might start with tomato mozzarella with pesto dressing, chicken Caesar salad or a nicoise salad ahead of spaghetti bolognese or carbonara, fusilli marinara (with lobster, prawns, scallops, mussels and clams) or penne pasta (with tomato sauce, olive, anchovies and capers). There are sandwiches – club, tuna, turkey and ham – and burgers, too.
Still, Asian eats are the raison d’etre of the place. Kick off with wonton soup or hot and sour soup ahead of Thai salads and a line-up of snacky sharing classics: prawn and chicken spring rolls, various tempura, salt and pepper squid and chicken satay, as well as rice- and noodle-based dishes along the lines of mee goreng and nasi goreng and pad Thai.
Things are rather more elegant in the evening, when a dress code stipulates no sleeveless T-shirts, shorts or plastic flip flops. The food is a shade more formal, too, with more full-sized dishes. You might have sashimi salad, pan-seared crab cakes or minced prawn skewers with a nam jim sauce before miso-glazed black cod, pan-seared salmon fillet, ginger lotus seabass or stir-fried Szechuan lobster, plus grilled lamb chops or black Angus rib-eye for the meat eaters.
Desserts, however, are more European than Asian: coffee almond cream cake or passion fruit crème brulee alongside the usual sliced fruits and sorbets.