Themed football cafes are a trend on the rise. Later this year, the Maradona-inspired Diego Cafe is due to open at Abu Dhabi’s Nation Galleria. But they’ve been beaten to the punch by the Real Madrid Cafe in the invitingly relaxed surrounds of The Beach development.
Real’s links with the UAE are strong: the club are visiting Dubai in December for a friendly match and a winter training camp, while there’s already a branded football academy in the country. Add to that rumours of a Real Madrid theme park in Abu Dhabi and recent news stories that the club’s stadium in Madrid may be renamed the Abu Dhabi Santiago Bernabéu.
First impressions at the cafe itself are confusing, as the front entrance to the two-floor dining area is via a brightly lit shop selling replica kits and associated branded items. To fully experience the cafe, we visited on the night of a Real match in La Liga (the Spanish football league’s top division, for readers who care more about food than football). The most vocal supporters appeared on the ground floor, while we headed to the more chilled upstairs, resplendent with a wall-sized television screen so large that it probably has its own postcode.
Ginza, the group behind the Real Madrid Cafe, has form in such themed outlets, such as the Vogue Cafe in The Dubai Mall. The decor here is slightly tackier, though, with walls plastered with 360-degree photo views of the Bernabéu and a Formica-like printed “grass” floor. It’s not quite setting foot in the centre circle for El Clásico, but B-minus for effort.
Thankfully, the menu featured more-genuine Spanish imports, as well as a side order of technology. We selected our order at leisure from an iPad app that listed dishes in three footy-tastic categories: First Half (starters), Second Half (mains) and Extra Time (desserts).
First Half match report: the starters were split into tapas and salads. Keen to maximise the Spanish input, we majored on the former. The octopus with steamed potatoes and paprika featured sumptuous seafood bites on a bed of slightly hard vegetables, while the generous bowl of patatas bravas was a mite over-salty. But our half order of buñuelos de bacalao cod fritters was the best kind of own goal: we could have devoured twice the amount of the three smooth-centred spheres.
Limbering up for the Second Half, we picked one home-grown Spanish talent and an international superstar in the respective shape of seafood paella and homemade Wagyu beef burger with hand-cut fries. At Dh85 for the paella, you certainly got your dirham’s worth of prawns among a sea of sticky yellow rice. The burger, sadly, proved to be an unwise signing: the patty was sizeable but somewhat dry and lacking seasoning.
Change ends; Extra Time. We’d already seen numerous plates of churros (Spanish doughnuts) with hot chocolate sauce arrive at tables near us, and we now know why: the sugary treats were addictive. The almond tart with vanilla ice cream, by comparison, was bland, aside from its topping of a Real crest in icing sugar. Regardless, when the final whistle blew, and we’d dabbed our mouths with napkins emblazoned with the club crest, we were fuller than Jan Molby on steak night (ask a friend, football newbies).
Much like the galácticos of Real Madrid, there’s a feeling that the pursuit of the flashy and fabulous might be at the detriment of any soul in this clean-lined cafe. But the greatest compliment that we can pay is that its food is sufficiently tactically savvy to keep even haters of the beautiful game on the edge of their seats, where it could have been a non-league-level pub-grub afterthought.
• A meal for two at Real Madrid Cafe, The Beach, JBR, Dubai, costs Dh409. For more information, call 04 277 5625. Reviewed meals are paid for by The National and conducted incognito
aworkman@thenational.ae
