The Market, Mushrif Mall

After years of talking about it, at last, ‘The Market’ at Mushrif Mall finally opened on April 30th. I was keen to have a nosy and see what it was all about, so we meandered on down on Friday morning to take a look.

On entering, you walk into a large open spaced entrance hall, with three separate sections off the main corridor – one for fish, one meat and one for fruit and veggies, each with its own entrance.

Inside the farmers market – fruit, veg, dates and even cheese are on sale

Inside the farmers market section you can find all sorts of fruits and veggies – many of which are from local farms, dates and even cheese from Al Ain is on sale.

Inside the farmers market

The meat market is probably the smallest section, although is still pretty huge as you can see from the picture!

The meat market hall

There’s butchers galore with every type of meat you could imagine or ever want… South African’s and lovers of South African food take note of the Springbok butchery with a range of meats, boerewors and more specialities to remind you of home.

Also, as you might expect there’s a pretty good range of traditional Middle Eastern delicacies from lambs head and trotters to animal hearts, brains, liver, kidneys, tripe and even testicles…

All sorts of local delights await!

Lambs head anyone?

If those more traditional cuts aren’t for you, don’t be put off – there’s still plenty of choice for every type of carnivore. Fresh steaks, mince, burgers, sausage, rabbit, lamb, chicken and all the usual suspects. There’s even a few places that offer up ready marinated meats and chicken so you can get shish tawouk, chicken tikka and a wide choice of many more delicious flavours with nothing left for you to do but cook them.

Smiley butchers with some fabulous marinated meats

Entrance to the fish market from the main corridor

Just inside the entrance to the fish market is a live seafood area where you can pick up live lobster and huge hammour.

Live seafood section – lobster

Inside the fish market

Sturgeon

Inside the main part of the fish market – which I should mention is run by the Abu Dhabi fisherman’s co-operative society, the same people that run the fish market at Mina Port – there’s a huge range of fish from local and international waters.

One of the many fish stalls

It’s also not limited to fish, there’s seafood of almost every type you can imagine – prawns (big and small), lobster, crabs, oysters and more.

Lobster, crab, oysters and more

Hand picking some lovely prawns

Whilst it’s great to have this fantastic market finally open, one of the thing we were disappointed to see was such large amounts of hammour and other heavily overfished species available. Even my lovely Lulu supermarket now displays and embraces the traffic light system, and it’s about time other supermarkets and markets started to catch on too – or rather, catch less of the most overfished types.

The Market is open every day from 7am to 11pm.