Restaurant Meal: Rye Hotel Bistro

Seafood platter and banana split

Rye Hotel is at 2415 Pt Nepean Road, Rye 03 5985 2277

This is a restaurant that positively encourages you to bring kids, it has an indoor playground that has been carefully planned for little and big kids alike.

The menu is pub bistro standard, order at the bistro counter type stuff, covering a vast array of things with chips and salad. I ordered the seafood platter which consists of several gourdons of battered and deep fried fish, a battered and deep fried scallop (with coral, yum!), a couple of deep fried calamari rings, a spring roll filled with prawns, a beautifully cooked piece of squid, a chilli prawn on a skewer, a couple of battered and deep fried prawns, chips and a green salad with a lemon vinegarette. The squid was just perfect, tender and tasty but the rest were fish'n'chips shop standard; a bit of a disappointment.

The banana split however was another story altogether, it was simply divine if completely oversized (it was americanesque in it's enormonity). The deserts at the Rye Hotel are prepared by the person taking your order at the bar and in my case the order taker was a frustrated desert chef, she literally took 10 minutes to make this masterpiece and it consisted of banana (carefully sliced into 3 pieces, two bananas were discarded after peeling as less than perfect), vanila ice-cream carefully formed into quinelles, a tasteful smear of chocolate sauce, an artful sprinkling of crushed peanuts (which she crushed on the spot from a jar of pre-roasted nuts) and the only grating item was the addition of those premade tublar wafers. All in all the masterpiece was a joy to consume, except for the guilt of leaving some behind due to gastro-intestinal fatigue.


Cost of meal: $30 (25 for the seafood platter, 5 for the divine split)
Time to serve: About 10 minutes (how long can it take to pull something from the freezer, deep fry it and then whack it on a plate prepared with salad)
Rating: 8/10 if you have kids, 6/10 if you don't.

Restaurant Meal: Water and Grass

Char grilled boned quail, crisp polenta, shaved fennel, orange and parsley salad; aged porterhouse, potato fondant, roasted shallots and red wine jus; and chocolate, banana and cardamom beignets with vanilla bean anglaise

Water and Grass Restaurant is at 32 Bourke Street in Melbourne, 03 9650 7020Just as well I didn't get any photo's of this meal, there is no way I could fit that title in the layout I use. This restaurant was really sad, it was well presented with a nice ambience, it is well sited with a really nice menu and it still couldn't seem to get a customer. I went in there with a group of 17 and the commis told me they did 25 covers for the night. That's rough for a 200 ish seat restaurant on a Friday night, even more so when it's extremely handy to the theatre district in Melbourne.

The food itself was tasty and well sized, but it seemed to be missing that zing that a great restaurant manages to add to every meal. The guy that organised our event tells me it used to be a Crotian themed restaurant and changed owners a couple of months ago. Perhaps they just haven't managed to tune up the menu yet, *shrug*.

Unfortunately I have trouble recommending this restaurant to people as it was on the medium to high side for prices, but just didn't return the value I'd expect.

The title covers the ingredients so I won't bother to cover them again, but they did have a malee root fired char grill to cook the steaks on and it did a pretty good job, even if the dude driving it had trouble with what rare means.

Cost of meal: $70 ex drinks
Time to prepare: As you can expect in an empty restaurant the response from the kitchen was fantastic.

Restaurant meal: David's at Santa Clara Golf and Tennis Club

Seafood Tortellini in Chardonnay Cream Sauce











Medium tasty and over priced. Came with lots of bread to soak up the excess sauce.

Detectable Ingredients:

• Mussels
• Clams
  
• Prawns
• Scallops
• Calamari
• Cheese Tortellini (appeared to be not restaurant made)
• Cream
• Chardonnay (not really detectable, but it was in the name)
• Napoli Sauce (that's the brown stuff, sorry the colours are off, it was really red)
  
• Garlic
• Salt
• Pepper

Time to prepare: 10 minutes
Cost of ingredients: $US 15.95
Number of serves: 1
Recipe Inspiration: very little.

Restaurant Meal: Santa Clara Yan Can Cook

Shrimp Pad Thai

Photos will return, I promise. A very tasty meal with just the right amount of chili, only problem was the size of the serve. It was ridiculous. I like a large serve of food, but I had trouble finishing half of it.


Detectable Ingredients

• Noodles, flat rice
• Peanuts
• Thai basil
• Shrimp
• Chili
• Bean shoots
• Soy sauce
• Lime juice
• Green onions
• Coriander
• Fish sauce

Time to prepare: 15 minutes
Cost of ingredients: $US 9.20
Number of serves: 2
Recipe inspiration: Who the heck knows what's going on in Yan's mind.

Restaurant Meal: Terminus Hotel

"Bangers and Beans"


No photos again, I asked at the bar and they said that they didn't allow photos inside the pub? WTF? Anyways, I had a very tasty Kransky sausage on a bed of cannellini beans, tomato and chorizo.

Detectable Ingredients:

• Kransky sausage (they claimed free-range, but I've never seen a sausage gamboling in a paddock under the bright yellow sun)
• Cannellini beans
• Tomato
• Garlic
• Chorizo sausage
• Parsley

Time to prepare: 15 minutes
Cost of meal: $14

Restaurant Meal: The Dava

Baked "American Style" ribs

Holy smokes they didn't mess about, an entree serve was 14 (yep 14) ribs. Very tasty sauce, very mediocre meat. What the heck, yum.

Detectable Ingredients:

• Beef ribs
• BBQ sauce

Open Yiros

Another monster serve, this time char grilled (within an inch of shoe leather) lamb, piles of tomato, onion and lettuce, all mixed up with tzatziki on a pita.


Detectable Ingredients:

• Lamb
• Oregano
• Tomato
• Lettuce
• Pita
• Tzatziki

Time to cook: about 20 minutes (entree was up in 5 minutes, pays to be the first in the restaurant)
Cost of meal: $29.90
Number of serves: 2 (I ate both)

Restaurant Meal: Billie Chu

Nasi Goreng

Gotta be my favourite quick meal, this one was grabbed at the Billie Chu "restaurant" at Adelaide airport, quick tasty and cheap.

Detectable Ingredients

• Rice
• Egg
• Bean Shoots
• Capsicum
• Spring Onions
  
• Prawns
• Fish cake
• Squid
  
• Curry powder
• Soy sauce

Time to cook: about 5 minutes
Cost of ingredients: $9.90

Restaurant Meal: Zucca

Greek Meze Extravaganza


No photo tonight the restaurant wouldn't let me. Ingredients are a little tough too, but you can probably assume everything had garlic in one form or another in it.

• Saganaki
• Deep fried whitebait
• Meat balls in tomato sauce
• Char grilled octopus
• Lamb roulade
• Vine leave dolmades
• Chicken souvlaki
• Prawn souvlaki
• Braised pork belly

Time to cook: Took 'em about 2 hours

Cost of ingredients: $44.50