Dubai: Tomo – Yakitori and ramen

It’s been quite a while since my last visit to Tomo, but as Poul and I are visiting Tokyo next month, we thought we’d better prepare our taste buds for what awaits us over there. It’s been quite a while since our last visit to Tomo, so I was curious to see whether Tomo was still as great as I remembered the place to be.

Spoiler alert: Tomo still got it!

Last time at Tomo, we had sushi, sashimi and a couple of sides. The sushi at Tomo is excellent, if you order from the special sushi menu. You can also order sushi as a bento-style set menu, but even though it’s decent (and cheap), it’s not of that extraordinary quality, as the sushi you’ll find at the sushi menu.

This time, we decided to skip the sushi and have some yakitori (skewers) and a bowl of shoyu ramen instead. Shoyu means soy sauce so the broth of this kind of ramen is seasoned with soy, clear and typically based on chicken, seafood or pork. The ramen we had at Tomo came in a large bowl topped with seaweed, marinated bamboo shoots, egg, bean sprouts and slices of pork belly. The egg was overcooked but the bowl was delicious in all other ways.

Poul spotted “salmon head” in the menu and started talking about how he used to eat that as a kid and how tasty it can be, but I managed to steer him away from that, suggesting that we ordered the salmon without the head but with sesame sauce instead. Unfortunately, the salmon was a bit dry to my liking, and the sesame sauce rather heavy, but I’m also a bit picky, when it comes to cooked fish. Serve it just after it has transformed from raw to texturized, or you’ve lost me.

The funniest dish of the evening was raw tuna with sticky potatoes. Japanese sticky potato is actually a kind of yam, which, after grating, turns into this really sticky and slimy mass. It may not sound very tempting, but paired with the raw tuna it was divine.

Tomo is located in the pyramid shaped Raffles hotel right next to Wafi Mall in Oud Metha. Depending on traffic, it’s quite a drive from where I live, which explains why I’m not eating there all the time. Tomo is by far the best Japanese restaurant in Dubai in terms of authenticity, selection of dishes and service, and while we’re at it, why not add “location”. How often do you get the chance to sip sake (or maybe eat a salmon head) in a pyramid?

Note to self: Visit Tomo more often.

Read my blog post about another visit to Tomo

Tomo, Raffles Hotel, Dubai