There’s a concept restaurant in Muscat, which will leave you intrigued or somehow confused. Are we walking into a club or a restaurant? Inside Love at First Bite, you'll find a dining area split into three different sections – Italian, French and Arabic. Each one has a different seating arrangement, but they all serve the same menu. The French section looks like a bedroom, while the Italian section is meant to be a Sicilian garden, and the Arabian section is a tent in which you are meant to sit on the floor.
Too much colors and details…
A setting one can't justify. It’s like a Moulin Rouge…The waiters are wearing clothes like the Chicago movie, a huge arrow decorates the center of the restaurant, golden placemats and blue napkins, chairs from all colors and shapes, marble floor like that in a huge bathroom, our table looks exactly like a bed... the restaurant is disturbing!
Now for the menu. It can’t get weirder than this. No photos and bizarre names. It doesn't help at all. Name titles are too sexual for a restaurant in Oman. Pretend, Speechless, She Loves Me Not, Fries with Benefit, Deception, Intense, Heartless, Marry me Betrayal, Denial, Cruelty, Addiction... and much more comes in the description!
The descriptions... OMG! "Who needs friends when you can have fries...", "You deserve better" and so on… I personally didn't find the descriptions funny or meaningful. So imagine having to read the entire menu and in between the lines to understand what every title means. Starters, soups, one night-stand (three fried fingers), main dishes, grills, pasta and dessert.
Love is all over the menu. This might excite you or depress you depending on your social status... Let's see if the food is as badly conceived as the place itself.
"Carefully selected music" is far from being the appropriate description. After ten minutes, the music starts to become disturbing!
Food is served, main course before appetizers:
- The Way You Look Tonight: Tender chicken breasts cooked with basil cream sauce and garnished with crispy potatoes. Very good chicken quality, tender and moist and juicy and the sauce is tasty.
- It's Not Over: Seafood salad, roquette leaves, lollo rosso lettuce mixed with seafood, oranges and pomegranate molasses. Beautifully presented, colored and tangy salad, fresh vegetables, grilled seafood combination and an enjoyable pomegranate sauce. It’s a good plate indeed.
- Obsession: Grilled lamb chops, chicken strips, cheats steak served with fried and mashed potatoes. Extremely chewy meat, hard lamb chops, but juicy chicken. The meat is really bad, the lowest quality I've ever tried. It’s nicely presented plate with cheese and vegetables but don't order it because the meat is bad.
- He Loves Me Not: Crispy sesame chicken in honey chili sauce. Good enough, sweet and spicy crispy chicken.
- Heartless: Crispy beef strips tossed with teriyaki sauce, Asian herbs and served with homemade scented rice.
- Alive: Shredded super hard beef served with cherry tomatoes sautéed onions, fresh jarjeer leaves and capsicum served with honey balsamic dressing and a spicy lemon side dressing. A complicated mix with bad meat.
- Swing: Prawns in creamy spicy volcano sauce. Extremely tender yet unpleasant to eatin a . The sauce is too spicy and the shrimps need that extra crisp.
The food is complicated just like everything else around here. Too many flavors, too many slices and too many sweet notes… But one can't deny the fresh ingredients used and the good taste in some of the plates. To have a full review I ordered one dessert that's three times more expensive than the others, so I presumed it's bigger than the others and it will be enough for the whole table.
A giant ice cream cake lands on the table. It is not worth it at all. We spent more than $32 for a piece of tasteless dry cake filled with inedible ice cream and topped with commercial chocolate fudge. It’s surely not recommended.
It’s a bit too overwhelming for my taste. A claustrophobic decor, annoying music, average food and an expensive check. It’s not worth visiting!
