Il Rustico.

Provided by 7DAYS.ae

If you asked 100 people in the UAE to describe how their ideal Italian restaurant would look, I'm pretty certain a chunk of them would say exposed brick, wooden tables, a pizza oven and so on.

Perhaps the sort of place where Lady and The Tramp got their pasta or where doe-eyed young lovers eat dishes cooked by dough-bellied Italian chefs. In fact, many would describe the interior of Il Rustico. Unfortunately, Il Rustico at Rydges Plaza has, for a while now, been tagged with the 'it's not as good as it used to be', having previously been regarded as the best cheap Italian in the country. So I set out to discover if this is really the case.

First up, I'm glad to report that they still bring out the garlic at the start.

A whole garlic bulb is sliced in half and roasted, still in the skin, so by the time it reached your table the little segments are cooked to a perfect consistency ready to pop out and spread on the fresh focaccia bread. If there's a more delectable start to a night with an Italian then I'm sure only French President Nicolas Sarkozy knows about it.

The rule with garlic is that either you both have it, or nobody has it, but when the entire bulb has been sliced in half, the cloves roasted in the skin, any lingering potency vanishes and the sweet flavour makes it a perfect accompaniment for a basket of bread.

And yes, the setting is still charming. Of course it's faux rustic rather then genuine rustic but this is Dubai - even the 'old' Arabic buildings here are new, so we can forgive the lack of authenticity and just admit that this warm and snug setting is perfect for a romantic Italian meal. It's cosy in a way that somewhere fantastic like Quattro at the Four Seasons just can't compete.

While Quattro has one of the most inventive and modern interiors, with top Milanese dishes to match, Il Rustico is still the master at warm and wonderful. When the starters came, however, I realised why people were saying standards had fallen. My beef carpaccio was fine enough and the meat was fresh and delicate with shavings of cheese and leaves of rocket completing the Italian standard, but it was something that's now done better in many other places.

My dining partner's mussels arrived in a cloud of steam in a little red Le Creuset pot. Resisting the temptation to appropriate this kitchen classic and add it to her own collection of burned pans and motley pots, my companion set about instead removing the oversized mussels from their homes. This particular rendition of the seafood classic proved to be a winner; plump mussels drowning in a creamy tomato and ginger sauce were eagerly mopped up with the remnants of the homemade bread.

Sadly, the chili crust salmon that she ordered for main course proved unable to live up to the mussels. The chili crust lacked any kick and resembled little more than greasy breadcrumbs spread over the top of the slab of pink fish.

The accompanying orzo pasta (that's pasta pretending to be rice) was passable but uninspiring. My order of beef was a little tough and dry in parts and not as good as I could have done myself at home. I know all men think they can cook a beef steak, but that just means that restaurants have to get it right even more regularly and this was not a great piece of meat.

I wished I'd ordered pizza as I know it's pretty good here, but that's not enough to sustain the place, especially as there's Roundtable Pizza specialising in great pizza just down the road. The tiramisu we shared for dessert lacked punch and deep flavour. It was just 'alright', which pretty much sums up the entire experience.

Il Rustico can't coast by on the setting alone now that there are so many more options in the city. That said, the fall in standards from its glory days (about three to five years ago) are not as great as some suggest and crucially it's still busy on most nights.

Perhaps it's just the simple fact that lots of new Italian restaurants have opened in the last few years and the old faithful has been superseded. But far from having to get the shotgun and take this old friend out behind the woodshed, it's still got legs in it yet. A bit more love with the dishes could easily see this romantic corner of Dubai put the spring back into our relationship with it.

7DAYS Verdict

Cheap, cheerful but still falling a bit short. The bill came to dhs339 including two glasses of wine that cost dhs30 each.

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