River Cafe
On the River Torrens, on War Memorial Drive. Underneath the excellent Red Ochre restaurant.
…of slow braised young goat, fregola salad, chilli, preserved lemon & saffron yoghurt.
The meat tastes like lamb, and has a nice chew to it. The meat's sauce is a fairly unexciting tomato substance, and the giant couscous salad also has a fairly monotone taste - MINT!
The saffron yoghurt on top of the whole thing is the important bit. It's yoghurt, but I can tell there's some other potent flavour in there, they makes it not taste like yoghurt.
When I combine all these three elements, the result is a nice meaty, savoury taste. The only problem is physically combining these onto the same forkful. There are many small goat bones in here, and giant leaves of mint lurk in the depths, just waiting to leap out and overpower an unsuspecting fork.
There are zingy and tasty bits of orange and preserved lemon, but it's hard to spread these out, and not accidentally get a mouth full of ten pieces of lemon rind.
Vanilla & chai panna cotta with eggless blueberry gelato & pistachio wafer.
The panna cotta is very rich and sweet, and has a taste akin to tea. It's a slightly weak flavour, but the sweetness and texture make up for it.
The blueberry gelato is rather odd. It has a crumbly texture, half way between gelati and crumbs. It's full of bits, and it has some zingy candied lemon rinds on top. The gelato isn't really sweet enough to support the rinds. In a dessert, I want lemon to be accompanied by something very sweet. Here, it just makes the already-odd gelato slightly sour. It's still not unpleasant, however.
My feedback about the main course earns me free gelati! Waiter informs me that they don't get much useful feedback.
I'm happy to oblige.
There's a very strong taste in this raspberry gelati. It tastes like… sausage! It's not an unpleasant taste here, but it's very strange. There's also a pervasive fine grainy texture to this. There's something wrong with this, but I can't put my finger on it. I'm expecting a gelati taste here, but the odd sausage flavour and graininess are hiding the gelati taste underneath, which is probably unusual because it contains a significant amount of actual fruit.
The white gelati doesn't have the problems of the pink one. It tastes like sweetened condensed milk. This isn't a bad taste, but it's not a gelati taste. I'm not sure whether I'm eating gelati or custard. Both are fine, but an intermediate is not.
(This item is not counted towards this restaurant's score.)