Rating: 8/10
When winter starts to creep in and the cold weather nudges students indoors, nothing warms you up like a plate loaded with hot, filling food. Something with rice. Something with meat. Something like Dubai Grill’s large meal.
Dubai Grill itself is a smaller restaurant, where what you see is what you get. The kebabs are on full display, and meals are prepared as customers choose their sauces and toppings in real time. Dubai Grill is open on weekdays from 10 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
The sandwiches at Dubai Grill come with three toppings, the price ranging from $5.99 to $9.99. The bigger meals on the lunch-and-dinner menu are priced between $12.99 and $16.99, making Dubai Grill an affordable place to grab a quick bite.
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For smaller, faster meals, Dubai Grill offers lentil soup for $4.99 and appetizers ranging from $4 to $8. Fountain drinks cost $2.49.
Dubai Grill’s large meal, the biggest option on the menu, gets you a helping of almost everything for $16.99. The dish consists of three meats and four toppings piled onto a rice of your choosing. For our review, we chose a base of spicy rice with shawarma beef, shish taouk chicken and gyro beef. For our sides, we chose Arabic salad, chickpeas, onions and fattoush.
Because of the meal’s size, the food took almost 15 minutes to prepare. This wait gives hungry customers the perfect chance to tide themselves over with warm baklava and steaming chai karak. The chai karak cost $2.49, and the baklava cost $1.75, making this snack about $5 after tax.
Chai karak is a Middle Eastern take on masala chai — the same drink that inspired chai lattés and dirty chai — with a rich, creamy fusion of sugar and spice that gives it a soft, caramel-like consistency. Dubai Grill infuses their chai karak with saffron, giving it a sweet aroma that fills the room as they pour it into your cup.
The large meal was ready before the chai even started to cool. The plate weighed nearly two pounds, popping with color from the mountain of rice and mixed vegetables. Soft, smooth chickpeas and a healthy serving of fattoush promised a variety of flavor and texture differences that would offer something new in every bite.
The Arabic salad was a refreshing balance to the hearty chicken and beef, waking up the meal with every bite and ensuring no flavor got too repetitive. The pickled onions were a perfectly tangy, fresh complement to our savory rice and meats. Combined with the fattoush and garlic sauce, these sides were good enough to forgive the spicy rice’s lack of heat.
While the spicy rice had no kick, it was well-seasoned and complemented the shish taouk chicken’s excellent flavor. The chicken and beef were spiced, skewered and grilled right in front of the register, letting customers see and smell the entire process.
The chicken was firm, but the gyro meat and shawarma beef were tender and almost melted in your mouth. The varied textures and flavors made Dubai Grill’s large plate a great meal to warm yourself up, and the enormous servings made it worth the cost.
The cool atmosphere and excellent chai make Dubai Grill a place worth returning to, with fast service and delicious food. The welcoming atmosphere and excellent variety of seasonings, toppings and sides offer something for everyone — so long as it’s not an early-morning breakfast. Only a 10-minute walk from the heart of campus, Dubai Grill could be just the pick-me-up hungry students need as winter starts knocking on their doors.
