Eating out has always been a pleasure for me. Now that it’s also my business (with the restaurant guide) there are times when the pleasure is challenged by the riot of mediocrity that’s out there.
The last few days were unrelentingly grim in food terms. Thursday lunch at Blues, that seaside icon. They’ve changed their menu (“modern Italian”) and the chef. They still seem to need to change the carelessness that still pervades and makes this gem underperform so consistently. Poor pasta, substandard ingredients, polenta like wet rubber – this is not modern or Italian. Dinner that night in a new place, one of these pan-Asian joints “Su-Bar-Shi”. It’s got it all on the menu but that’s where it stays. Flavour, especially, never makes it onto the plate.
Friday lunch: Basilico, a neighbourhood Italian in Newlands. Chilli in the pasta so that the pasta is a mere substrate to pain. Pizza with slices of “parma ham” that look like sides of venison. At least the pumpkin soup was drinkable and they had some cheap Italian wine that’s low in alcohol. Friday dinner: Bertha’s in Simonstown. This place is a catch-all family and tour bus joint that serves coffee from a table at the door. I could go into more detail, suffice my description of their “Chocolate truffles” – chocolate icing sugar extruded into something not unlike a dog-dropping. They didn’t mess up the rocket salad with “parmesan” and pine nut, because that’s all that was on the plate.
The best about all these places is that people eat there, go back, and never complain. Well, I guess that’s why you have journalism.
0 Responses to “The misery of eating”