RESTAURANT REVIEW # 1- THE FRENCH OLIVE

Headed to the French Olive for a Friday lunch with family. As one can derive from the name, the restaurant serves both French and Italian cuisine.

Walking into the restaurant, the first thing that caught my eyes were the cleverly designed interiors with the right combination of being airy, spacious yet providing a warm cozy ambience.

Greeted by smiling faces, we surely felt warmly welcomed and the fabulous service was definitely one of the major highlights of the restaurant.

The manner in which they even treated the little guests with their personal colourful cutlery and a plate laid out for my one year old instantly put her in such a good mood and us at immense ease almost immediately.

Coming to the food, we were initially served with a bread basket along with red pepper pesto. The breadsticks were especially excellent. Then we had a mixed greens salad with portobello mushrooms to which I also got the grilled chicken added. Both the quality and quantity was not definitely worth the price in my opinion.

For mains, we had the chicken cacciatore, ricotta-spinach ravioli with sage butter sauce and pine nuts and a chicken-mushroom pizza.

Chicken cacciatore can be described to be an aromatic, hearty dish and was served along with toasted garlic bread. We enjoyed dunking the garlic bread into the gravy and scooping it up. The flavours were definitely spot on. But I personally would have liked the chicken to be cooked a tad more so that it would be tender and falling apart. Having said that, my husband however loved the dish and found it to be the best of the lot.

The ravioli looked and tasted quite good. The pine nuts added a nice crunch to the sage butter sauce. But I couldn’t qualify it as a main as the quantity was quite little and could definitely not satiate a very hungry person.

The pizza was quite nice with its thin crust and with just the right amount of cheese. Although I personally liked the pizza the most among the main dishes, would have to say frankly that it wasn’t the best pizza that I’ve tasted in Doha.

For desserts, my husband ordered the hazelnut and the mango gelato, which infact had just been launched the very same day. Flavours of both gelatos were spot on and tasted light and creamy. The tuile biscuits served with them were also fabulous. Unfortunately, I was unable to click any pics of the dessert. 

Overall, I wanted to love the food a lot but just couldn’t. Would I go back? Definitely yes, because I want to give them another chance by trying out their breakfast fare which has got quite a number of rave reviews and for their extensive selection of desserts especially macarons.

Criteria	Weightage	Points given	Overall
Food	50%	3.0	1.5
Service	20%	4.8	1.0
Ambience	20%	4.8	1.0
Value for Money	10%	3.5	0.4
Final Score			3.8

VERDICT: GOOD / J