Sunday 7 October 2007

Would you like bacon with your creme brulee?

We went out for dinner with friends last night, and had a whoopee time - as much of a whoopee time that you can have when you need to be home to relieve the babysitter at 11pm. It was plenty of whoopee for me - I spent most of the day in bed with a very sore head. Any more whoopee, and I would still be in bed now instead of typing this.

The original plan was to have an outside table at this restaurant, but the weather conspired against us and they had to move the table inside. Inside was a bit squeezy for a table the size of ours, and it presented all sorts of problems for the waitress serving us. She also had lots of problems serving us that had nothing to do with the table - I think she didn't really have any idea of what her function was or how to wait on people.

I'm glad we had all the wine we needed on the table at the start of the meal. If we had waited for her to notice that we needed a drink, and then came and got our orders, and then worked out how to screw the top off the bottle, I never would have ended up as drunk as I did. And that would have been a tragedy.

We started with some bruschetta and some garlic pizzas with dips. The bruschetta was ok, but nothing marvelous. The pizza crust stuff was covered in a good mix of dried spices - like a zatar mix - and was quite tasty. It came with three dips, which were interesting but badly thought out.

Dips should be made out of things that produce a thick, gooey consistency - something that can be scooped up onto bits of bread, and will remain on that bread whilst you transfer it to your mouth. Leaving a restaurant with dip spread all over your shirt makes for a less than ideal eating experience.

The three dips we were presented with made no bread-sticking properties. Yes, you could dip bread into them, but nothing would stick to the bread. One dip was bits of chopped up tomato. Excuse me, but you try dipping a bit of bread into chopped up tomato and see how many chopped up bits stick to your bread. If your answer is more than zero, you have cheated and painted your bread with glue.

Think of all the classic dips - hummous, baba ganoush, gaucamole etc - they are all gluggy. They stick to things. You can fling spoonfulls of it onto the ceiling at a party and it will still be there when you attend the next party a year later.

Another dip was a coriander pesto. I love this stuff, but it was 50% coriander and 50% olive oil. There was nothing in it, like pine nuts or parmesan cheese, to cause it to goop up into a goo that will cling to bread. The only thing for it was to put some of the "pesto" on a spoon, suck the pesto out of the spoon and then gobble a bit of bread. The only thing "dipped" into the "dip" would be the spoon.

That said, it was a very nice coriander and oil combination. It just wasn't dip. I'd call it a "marinade".

The final dip was something made with sour cream or yoghurt. It also went well with the spicy pizza dough. But like the other two dips, it suffered from some problems not yet mentioned. The dips were served in a very groovy triple headed bowl (I should have taken a photo) that looked fantastic, but held little more than a few tablespoons of each dip. The size and shape of the dip holders was such that they were too small for you to really 'do' some dipping. You don't really dip bread into dip anyway - you scrape the bread or cracker through the dip, like a road grader, and pick up dip along the way. For that, you need a large surface area, and a shallow bowl without a high lip.

This thing featured a narrow, deep bowl. Perfect for holding candles perhaps, but useless for dip. The triple headed dip bowl was also a nightmare to pass around the table. In short, a waste of space.

The main courses were good. The restaurant offered pizza as well as some meat and fish courses. Most of us had blue eyed cod, with others having lamb racks, fillet mignon and pizza. Those that had the lamb and beef said it was very good. Most of us that had cod liked it, apart from the bones that the chef forgot to remove. I fished out five after swallowing one. The chef was also a believer in serving crispy fish, which meant that the bottom was very well cooked and brown and crispy, which is a nice effect with salmon with the skin on, but not so good with skinless cod. The result was a half dried out bit of fish, and the fish was not that big to start with. It needed to retain all the moisture that it could. Mine had the look of a rather juvenile cod - it completely failed to cover the small mound of vegetables that it was sitting on. If you are going to pay $28 or so for a bit of fish, you want more than just a bit of fish. You want a slab or a chunk of fish. You want a whale of a fish. We got the whitebait end of the cod spectrum.

The pizzas were not a big hit either. We brought both home in doggy bags, fired up the oven tonight and cooked them for a further 15 minutes. After that, they were quite edible. Last night, they were doughy, undercooked and less than fine.

Dessert was in a class all of its own. To start with, they had run out of sticky date pudding. The restaurant was only half full, and they'd run out. Unbelievable. They had also run out of some other dessert as well, which meant that most of us were stuck with creme brulee.

Now I like creme brulee. I went through a phase of trying to make it at home, and was very chuffed when dad bought me a gas gun for use at home in producing a crispy top to my creme brulee. It never worked, because I was hopeless at making them. I have made every mistake possible when making creme brulee. I have resigned myself to only eating them in restaurants, where professionals make them.

The chef is clearly still in the same phase I was in when I gave up making creme brulee. The top was nice and crunchy, but the custard was little better than curdled scrambled eggs. He'd completely fucked it up. It was full of air bubbles, which to me is a sign that the custard has scrambled and then an attempt has been made to bring it back to life. They were all the same. If you took away the sugar and vanilla and added bacon, it would have made a delicious breakfast.

The afogato was also something of a joke. Afogato has three ingredients - icecream, a liquer and coffee. Their version had two - icecream and coffee. There was no liquer, like frangelico, to be seen anywhere. Thankfully, the barrista overheard our conversation and came to our rescue, replacing the coffee muck whipped up in the kitchen with proper coffee, and finding some frangelico from somewhere. That allowed the afogato to get a pass mark.

So the service was poor, the food ranged from bad to quite good and the drinks service just failed to exist. They had bad music playing, a huge TV above the door playing distracting TV stuff and some wierd decore. But dinner was only a bit over $40 a head, and we combined to produce a really funny table. Although the restaurant did everything possible to ruin the night, it turned out to be bloody good.

We'll have to go back.

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