Ba Ban at W Muscat
The W Muscat's Asian restaurant, where avant-garde flair lifts plant-powered plates: Hidden Carrot dumplings and shiitake rice among the standouts.
Ba Ban sits inside the W Muscat, the cool, contemporary luxury hotel, and it brings the same confidence to the plate that the address suggests. The kitchen draws on Asian cuisine, but its chefs are not afraid to add an avant-garde flourish of their own, and the results are both genuinely delicious and quietly beautiful to look at.
It is not, strictly, a vegan restaurant. But the plant-powered plates here hold their own against anything else on the menu, and on a good night they edge ahead of the meat dishes entirely. That is a rarer thing than it should be, and worth seeking out.
The ordering advice is straightforward. To start, the Hidden Carrot Fried Dumplings are the pick. For a main, the stir-fried shiitake mushroom rice is the standout: the sort of dish that lingers in the memory longer than its modest description suggests. And to finish, the restaurant’s signature sorbet reliably hits the right note.
The room itself matches the cooking: sleek, contemporary, with the kind of considered styling that the W brand does well.
For a traveller in Oman looking for a dinner that is plant-forward without being defined by it (somewhere the vegetables are treated as the headline rather than a courtesy) Ba Ban is among the city’s most rewarding tables. Come hungry, and order the dumplings.
