Three rooms looking out on the water and a palm garden, and a private side entrance that passes no one: this is Si, the Mediterranean restaurant inside C Club at Bidaa. Chef Marco Fiorot runs the kitchen.
Si opened with a soft launch on the first day of the last Eid al-Fitr, serving breakfast and lunch only, and its hours have widened since.
The look of the place
The visual identity is built on one thing that repeats in every detail: the yellow and white stripe. It is on the walls, on the table lamps, and on the service trolley outside.
The glass room has a cream and black chequerboard floor, rattan chairs, and marble tables with scalloped edges. The ceiling is panelled in mirror, reflecting the whole room. The plates carry a green botanical pattern around an S, the same letter embroidered on the chest of the chefs’ jackets.
Outside, a large fabric canopy fans its yellow and white bands out from a central pole, with green foliage and hanging lanterns between them, and white scallop-edged parasols underneath.
What comes out of the kitchen
The pasta is rolled by hand and the pizza is baked over wood. The restaurant works with an in-house lab: sauces, bread and desserts are all made on site, using techniques such as fermentation, slow cooking and confit, with a stated reliance on local producers for part of the ingredients.
This is the practical difference between a kitchen that assembles and a kitchen that makes: the bread put on your table came out of the same oven as the pizza, and the dessert at the end of the meal did not come in through the back door.
It is not a slogan on a menu either. A kitchen that bakes its own bread needs a mixer, a proving time and someone watching the dough; a kitchen that buys it needs none of that. The difference shows in texture and in preparation time before it shows anywhere else.
The pasta arrives piled into a tower on a ribbed glass plate, and the thickness of the strand is visible: this is not dried thread out of a packet but dough rolled by hand. Under it, roasted cherry tomatoes and olives; over it, basil leaves.
On the pass, where the plates leave for the dining room, the prawn carpaccio is laid out in a circle with olive oil, green herb oil and dots of a red sauce. Three identical plates in a row, which is itself an indicator: consistency between plates is what marks a disciplined kitchen.
Breakfast
The benedict here is not served on the usual English muffin but on a split croissant with its layers showing from the side. On it, crushed avocado, then a poached egg, then hollandaise dusted with paprika, and over that parsley and grated cheese.
On the terrace the granola is built in front of you: a tray hung on yellow straps holds the nuts, berries and sauces, and the chef adds the ingredients to the bowl rather than sending it out finished from the kitchen. Behind them a yellow and white striped trolley, and behind that the sea.
Hours and booking
Late breakfast runs from 9 in the morning to 12 noon, and lunch from 1 to 7 in the evening. Dinner service has not started; the restaurant says it is coming.
Booking is by direct message on the restaurant’s Instagram account and through its website, and walk-ins are taken subject to tables. Prices are not published on the site or on the restaurant’s accounts, so anyone who wants to know before going has to ask directly.
Location: C Club, Bidaa, through the restaurant’s own side entrance.
Further reading: the restaurant’s official website · its Instagram account
Photo: grilled fish with lemon on a table. By E4024, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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