Calicut Paragon, Dubai: restaurant review
You must respect a restaurant operating for nearly 100 years, but Calicut plays it safe, appeals to the masses and lacks South Indian cuisine’s flair.
Where were you in 1939? When Calicut Paragon first opened its doors in Kozhikode, the UAE did not exist, Europe was limbering up for World War II and Gandhi was still telling the British where to stick their empire.
While the outside world convulsed in bombs, politics and bluster, Govindan Panhikeyil and his son established Calicut Paragon, a casual dining restaurant plating up Malabari dishes, the moreish by-product of its Portuguese influences and Kerala’s centuries-old maritime trade with the Middle East. His grandson owns the business today.
This food orbits seafood and coconut’s versatility. It is more aromatic than spicy, save for the occasional good nose blast of green chillies. Think mussel roasts, silky egg curry breakfasts or Thalassery-style biryani.
Sanjay Varman and I waltz into Aaraamam Restaurant in Karama—another Keralite slash South Indian restaurant—but we leave while being offered half a dozen brick-red, fried fish, as the lunch menu lacks the luster of the Aaraamam’s full offering. There is unfinished business here, but we jaunt towards Calicut Paragon, passing Patiala House, one of my favourite pani puri spots.
Calicut Paragon is a vast, industrious, spartan labyrinth. We weave through three cavernous rooms, each the size of a 60-seater restaurant. We sit in two separate waiting areas (one indoor, one outdoor) for over 30 minutes.
Calicut Paragon is full. Full to the rafters. Servers balance biryanis and stock pots while ladling red rice like a pit crew in perpetual motion and navigating the tight lanes between tables. Each room is packed like Dubai Terminal 2 over Eid weekend. Here, your children should wear AirTags or risk losing them forever. Up to you.
It’s a study of beige, punctured with workmanlike dark furniture, framed stock images of tropical islands and wall mounted LED screens that oscillate photoshopped images of chicken kebabs, porothas and then some. We thumb through a menu longer than most toilet rolls. I lose count around 180 dishes. Then the Specials Board scribbles another eight.
The good dishes, the reassuring bowls of chicken chettinadu, morsels of fried pandanas that resembling classroom molecules and steamed, craggy rice puttus leap out from a menu that also panders indecisively, interspersed with Caesar’s salads, American chopsuey and–remind me–is tiramisu from north or south Kochi? I forget.
No matter what else you read, Calicut Paragon needs no endorsement beyond its constant churn of hundreds of patrons every hour of every day from Dubai’s South Indian diaspora. Yet, the braggadocious trumpet-blasting that it is one of the “Most Legendary Restaurants in the World” rings hollow as popularity is quite a different thing to greatness, and this lunch is a tale of two meals that speaks to a wider feeling that Calicut Paragon’s dishes play a straight bat and never swing for the boundaries.
In its brightest moments the food is tasty, filling and affordable—offering full and half portions, priced accordingly. Our blackened beef fry is boisterous, thrums with coconut oil, black pepper and woody spices like cinnamon and clove, scooped between hunky pinches of porotta. It’s a hallmark dish revealing Kerala’s pluralistic society where not even the cows are safe.
Our tawny brown Alleppey chicken curry and milky mutton stew were lustrous and soft, as the meat is slow-cooked to muscular dystrophy. The hot neyy payasam is a warm blanket of rice pudding laced with dark jaggery, flecks of pistachio and lashings of glossy, rich ghee that is the stuff of Last Meals. Ask for the jaggery ice cream because life is short, and this payasam will ensure it. Two rounds of salty lime sodas and Jeeraka water may help stave off the gout.
Yet, we waited for dishes for so long, my beard grew back in real time. The aromatic allium and ginger backbone to the fish moliee is meek, nearly undetectable. The mutton stew comforts but never confronts, feeling one dimensional and shy. The sea bass Pollichathu is a crashing disappointment after ceremoniously unfurling its banana leaf gift wrapping. The sea bass is pan-seared and then steamed to a rubbery shoe sole made vaguely tolerable by a lick-the-banana-leaf-clean coconut and green chilli marinade that, in my view, could be further improved with a whomp of nostril-tingling curry leaves.
Dishes that benefit from time and little else deliver here in spades, but some palates may feel underserved by South India’s accents of sour, silk, sweet and spice. Calicut Paragon is accessible, middle-lane cooking that never speeds and rarely falters, which will suit many, but is that what it means to be “Legendary”?
Calicut Paragon, Would I Return?
I had a good time, but Sri Krishna Bhavan remains unthreatened as my favourite South Indian restaurant in Dubai. Still, Calicut Paragon is a place to start one’s journey. A place for large groups with mixed ambitions–where some feast on kurathi kozhi while others anxiously cuddle red rice and Greek salad.
Calicut Paragon, Who Should Go?
Budget dining seekers. The South Indian curious. Large groups with disparate interests.
Review information
Number of visits: 1
Number of dishes: 8 dishes, Alleppey Chicken Curry, half portion, 26 dhs; beef fry, 27 dhs; fish moilee, 28 dhs; mutton stew, 28.50 dhs; seabass pollichathu, 55 dhs (market rate); wheat porottha, 2.75 dhs; noolputtu, 2.25 dhs; tender coconut pudding, 16.50; hot neyy payasam with ice cream, 20 dhs.
Licensed: No.
Drinks: 4, lime soda, 13.50 dhs; lime tea, 3.25; small water, 3 dhs.
Total spend incl. taxes ex. tips: 230.48 dhs.
Calicut Paragon, Mattar al Rayar Building, Al Karama, Dubai. Visit Calicut Paragon’s website, Instagram or call +971 43358700 for more information.
Written by Liam Collens. Read more reviews here. Liam is a restaurant critic, food and travel writer based in the Middle East. He owns EatGoSee and contributes to other publications. You can find Liam on Substack, Threads, Instagram, BlueSky or Facebook.
A table of two halves really. Talks to the point of context, I suppose. I obviously enjoyed it like the second coming of Ram - its almost time for Diwali and all that.
Ha ha ha - I never equated consistency to boring, there you go, I learnt something new to think about today!