The Lion Restaurant

The Lion restaurant on Urbanspoon

I'm giving this place a second go. If I said I liked it last time, I'd be lion. ;D

This place is very fancy for a hotel that contains bars, pokies, and other non-fancy stuff.

This place is super expensive. Main courses average around $40.

Milk fed lamb pot-au-feu
4/10

With baby turnips, fennel, cabbage, Dutch carrots and dark sherry broth.

This pot-a-feu is lamb done three different ways.

The lamb cutlet is fatty, but beneath that, it has a kind of an interesting rubbery texture that doesn't match how cooked the meat is. The tea taste of the broth isn't really a pleasant or appropriate addition to meat.

The little curled up piece of soft meat has the very strong taste of salami. I need to check that it's actually meat. I don't know if I like this matured taste as part of a main course, but it's a very interesting contrast to the other meat.

I take a break from the meats, to eat some of the vegetables. They're almost raw. The carrots just have a touch less crunchiness than raw carrots. I also munch into a small rock, but my molar defeats it unscathed. The fennel recreates for me the experience of a jaguar or other animal biting into some raw, fibrous fennel in the wild.

I bite into the cabbage roll. The third species of meat is in there. It's extremely fatty, however, and contains both gooey fat and crispy greasy burnt fat, neither of which is a taste I like. I remove some fat, but eating very-cooked lamb with a stringy cabbage leaf is still not very exciting.

I was given a spoon specifically to drink the "broth" at the end. I do so. It's like scooping up slightly dilute soy sauce. Saltastic!

Not sure if the waitress appreciates me demonstrating the crunchiness of the carrot while I'm giving extensive negative feedback on this dish. :)

Blackberry pudding
8/10

With poached rhubarb, walnut mascarpone and Seville orange marmalade ice cream.

The pudding itself is very moist, and light and fluffy. The pourable custard sweetens it just enough to negate any sourness from the blackberries.

The dob of walnut mascarpone is bitter and savoury. I'm not sure why it's here at all. It doesn't even try to be dessert.

The scoop of marmalade ice cream is sour, but it perfectly translates the flavour of orange marmalade into an ice cream.

The mascarpone and ice cream seem like they should be sauces, but neither are sweet enough. Nothing on this plate really goes together, but most of the pieces are good.

:( :(
Parking