Mikado Cafe brings Japanese baking to the Middle East

This new Japanese cafe located in the Al Hana Tower in Khalidiya is a breath of fresh air in the capital.

Mikado Cafe is a new Japanese cafe and bakery in Khalidiya, offering traditional Japanese food. Photos by Delores Johnson / The National
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The newly opened Mikado Cafe is a breath of fresh air in the capital’s dining scene. The restaurant, which serves both traditional and Japanese breakfast food and signature Japanese fare for lunch and dinner, also bakes 15 different types of Japanese breads every day.

Mikado Cafe’s Japanese head chef Fabio Nakazato – who has previously worked with Nobu and Okku restaurants – says the cafe offers something new to Abu Dhabi.

“This is Japanese comfort food,” he says. “We serve the comfort food that we see in Japan. At other places, they try to be more fancy – but here, we try to keep it simple. That’s our ­difference.”

The breakfast menu includes the usual suspects, such as waffles, pancakes, French toast and omelettes, but there’s also a traditional Japanese breakfast for Dh50 that comes with grilled fish, a Japanese omelette, rice, miso soup and Japanese pickles. For lunch and dinner, there is a dedicated sushi bar with an extensive menu that includes sashimi, nigiri, chirashi, futomaki, uramaki and hossomaki. Among the signature items are the kaki furai: rolled, deep-fried, Panko-breaded oysters and the tuna foie gras, where the sushi chefs first pan-sear the foie gras, then roll it with tuna.

And although sushi is a highlight at Mikado Cafe, there’s a lot more to the menu. You probably won’t find its version of beef tenderloin saikoro anywhere else.

“It’s a very common dish in Japanese cafes,” Nakazato says. “We cut it in cubes. It’s very tender inside. Our twist is the kizami wasabi sauce. The taste is really interesting. It’s very ­unusual.”

There are other unique dishes such as the tebasaki – fried chicken wings, laboriously deboned and stuffed with shiitake mushrooms – and the quail stuffed with edamame and Wagyu beef. And no need for a kids’ menu. Grab the omuraisu for little ones (it’s tasty for adults, too): a Japanese rolled omelette delicately filled with fried rice.

Mikado is the brainchild of Abdul Jabbar Al Sayegh, the chief executive of Al Sayegh Group, who was motivated to bring a traditional Japanese cafe to the capital after his extensive travels through Japan. In a joint venture with Glee Hospitality Solutions, Al Sayegh and his team spent more than a year gathering the right people for the cafe.

“When we were planning this venture, we travelled to Japan to source the very best sushi chefs and bakers possible to provide an authentic dining experience,” says Abdul Kader Saadi, Glee’s managing director. “Our sushi is prepared in a time-honoured manner and our bakery goods draw on centuries of Japanese traditional baking.”

The bakery alone is likely to make the cafe a popular spot in Khalidiya, while the casual vibe provides a refreshing alternative to the fine-dining Japanese eateries in the city.

“Fine dining is more about the chef trying to impress other people,” says Nakazato. “With comfort food, you do food that you really like. This is what we do here.”

• Mikado Cafe plans to deliver in the coming months. Open from 8am to 11pm Saturday to Wednesday, and 8am to 11.30pm Thursdays and Fridays. Located in the Al Hana tower in Khalidiya, near La Brioche. Follow on Instagram @mikadocafe or call 02 667 7557

sjohnson@thenational.ae