Ritaj Indian Restaurant - Everything You Need To Know

Blink and you'll miss the entrance to Ritaj - which we nearly did. To the casual observer, it's not clear that it does dine-in at all, but after asking the friendly chap outside, he assured us we could eat in (though looked a little surprised that we wanted to!), and in fact, the dining room holds around 20 people.

The restaurant is fairly clean and expects a mess to be made! Bright blue plastic tablecloths are whipped off after every diner and replaced with fresh ones, and everyone is issued with both tissues and gloves, also bundled up at the end and disposed of.

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FOOD

We know Ritaj specialises in biryani: we eyed up all the other tables as we took our seats and they were all enjoying different variations with gusto. We set about ordering and decided on the specialty chicken biryani, a butter chicken set which came with dal and rice and a mixed grill kebab plate.  We had high hopes for great taste but I think it's fair to say we were disappointed in a couple of our options.

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We were served a huge mound of steamed white rice with our butter chicken set, disproportionate to the amount of sauce in the dishes, but it was well cooked as expected. The butter chicken was probably 6/10: the makhani sauce was good, not too spicy and flavourful but the chicken was dryer than we would've expected. We felt that the dal was almost good but a too salty and too thin with very little lentil and a lot of water.

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The tandoori chicken biryani was beautiful, the chicken soft, tender and juicy and tasty with fragrant rice, not spicy and not overbearing. This was a win and we could see why everyone was ordering this and nothing else. To be honest, everything else we ordered felt like a menu afterthought, almost as if they didn't really want to serve anything else but felt they had to.

DESSERT

The dessert menu showed an interesting looking orange sponge which sounded so appetising we took the plunge. It arrived in a glass bowl, doused in sugar syrup and actually tasted pretty good!

WOULD WE GO BACK?

Ritaj has some pitfalls.

As a starting point, Ritaj is ideal if you speak Hindi or Malayalam but the wait staff don't speak English so this is going to a be stumbling point for many.

The restaurant itself is clean but very much no-frills. Food arrives in chipped bowls into which food has been slopped: we figure that the regulars don't care how it comes, as long as it comes!

This is clearly a place where mostly single men go to eat: even female Hindi speakers feel uncomfortable here and our two reviewers felt somewhat intimidated, so much so that it almost put them off their dining.

The overall feeling is that there are more inclusive places to get an authentic Indian food experience in Abu Dhabi, and while the biryani was excellent, they think Ritaj would be better to remove everything else from the menu and just focus on this, their clear strength.

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