Royal schmoyal

Another night, another feed at the pub. This time it was the Royal Oak in Balmain.

The Oak is a good pub, and it has a good pub menu. They even had a nice selection of steaks, including proper bernaise as a side option.

Just one small problem - they took my fillet steak, which was very nice steak, and then dropped it in a bucket of salt before cooking it to rare perfection. I like just a bit of salt, not a solid salt crust. The bloody thing was like something from the Dead Sea. I was half tempted to send it back, but it was one of those order-and-pay at the counter places, so it's not like there were a lot of waiters running around where I could do a "Garcon, my compliments to the chef. Please feed this thing to the dogs and do me another one".

I'll be going back again, but next time I'll have to remember to tell them that I am alergic to salt, or have high blood pressure or some other such baloney.

The meal came with the option of a $5 side salad plate, which meant they give you a little kidney shaped dish and you can go up to the salad bar and refill as often as you want. The salad, to put it mildly, was not too flash. A red bean salad with a touch of chilli, frozen in big blobs of what looked like Philadelphia Cheese. I am not sure what it was. You had to pry the beans out of a pinkish goo that was set like concrete. Had one or two beans and left the rest.

A Caesar salad that was a pretty poor imitation of a salad. Croutons that were .... ugh. Little bacon strips that probably came out of a packet. Shavings of cheap, dry parmesan. Manky lettuce. Topped off with an indifferent dressing. A good Caesar is largely the product of excellent dressing - coddled eggs, an anchovy and good olive oil. Cheap white shit out of a bottle is not the same. A Caesar dressing really should be something else. It should have punch. So should the parmesan. The Oak served up indifferent white goop.

The pasta salad is just not worth thinking about. Little undercooked bows of pasta with some sort of green sauce scattered over it. Ick.

Dessert was good - we had a sticky fig tart with butterscotch sauce. The tart was excellent. I wasn't too fond of the coconut icecream that it came with, but that's just my taste and not a fault of the quality of the icecream.

The other meals looked good. The service was good. The atmosphere was pretty good. It's just that my steak was fucked and the salad should be avoided at all costs. The bernaise that came with the steak, and the chips, were excellent. The bernaise had a good tang of lots of vinegar and plenty of tarragon. Next time, I will try to fish and chips and avoid the salad.