Places in Lagos| Arabesque

Arabesque is a middle eastern restaurant located in Victoria Island, Lagos, Nigeria. I’ve been to Arabesque several times with friends and family and it’s one of my favourite places to eat. If you are looking for a place that serves clean fresh food that won’t make you feel bloated after eating, then this is the place for you.

AMBIENCE
From the moment you walk in, you immediately feel like you’re in another country. The restaurant has an amazing ambience that can work for date night, girls night out, birthday party, work meeting and anything you can think of. The space is really detailed and you can tell a lot of work was put into it. It’s truly an Arabian dream and I’m not exaggerating. The restaurant has both outdoor and indoor sitting areas, it’s beautiful and vibrant outside and more mellow inside.

MENU
Now, let’s move over to the menu. It basically has the cuisines you will expect to see in a middle eastern menu like hummus, kebab, shawarma, shish and a whole lot of others.

WHAT WE ATE
Like I said before, I’ve been to Arabesque a couple of times but I also stopped by last week for Iftar with my brother and sister-in-law. We started off with a fruit platter and proceeded to order our starters and mains which we ended up sharing.

Fattouch is a mixed salad with lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, radish, onion, mint, sumac and crispy Lebanese bread, olive oil and lemon dressing.  The salad was as delicious as it looks, the vegetables were fresh and the bread was crunchy.

Mixed grill is a selection of grilled skewers; lamb, shish taouk and kaftah, a side of salad and seasoned Lebanese bread. It’s a safe dish with a little bit of everything that someone always orders every time I’ve been here. The meats were well seasoned, the salad was crunchy and we all enjoyed it. For some reason, salads at restaurants are really crunchy like the vegetables are not sourced from Nigeria. Can you relate?

The fish wasn’t all that great initially but I asked for some salt and chilli which I spread over it in addition to the garlic sauce that came with the meal. It tasted really good after that and all that was left were bones.

The lamb cutlets were juicy but not well seasoned. Out of everything we ate, it was our least favourite. I ended the night with a cup of mint tea to wash the food down. Check out the teapot below, truly Arabian style.

Prior to my recent visit, I also visited in January and I had the most delicious salad I’ve ever eaten; Tabbouleh. Tabbouleh is a mixed salad with chopped parsley, tomato, onion and crushed wheat olive oil and lemon dressing. I asked for Tabbouleh last week but it was no longer available so I decided to try Fattouch which was good too. If you’re vegetarian, these salads don’t have meat in them and they are really tasty.

I couldn’t let my photos from January go to waste so I shared a few of them below;

Final Comments
Mariam: Overall, the service was fair, I had a good time as usual and I got extra bread.
Dee: The bread and the salads were really nice and the fish was out of this world.
Luki: I wanted to stay outside but there were a lot of insects. We were offered insect repellant cream but we didn’t want to use that so we had to move inside. Besides that, everything was good.

Will you visit Arabesque soon?

Thanks for reading.

Mariam Shittu