Redsalt
Seated, assigned waitress. Been here for 5 minutes now, and not been approached since being seated.
I order main course and Diet Coke.
Israeli couscous & chickpea salad, salsa verde.
Will take quite a while to cook. That’s okay.
Drink takes five minutes to arrive, but at least I get bread, ON A SLAB OF ROSE QUARTZ. Fancy.
This place blends into the foyer of the Crowne Plaza, so I can go walkies while my food cooks.
The lamb shanks are nice and soft, and evenly cooked, except for a little patch that fails my “NO BLOOD” request. The salsa verde is very verde, but doesn’t have a strong enough taste. I pile lots of it onto one lamb shank, and then can just taste a mild, salty, planty flavour. The couscous is interesting. It doesn’t have any strong flavours. (I expected a tangy vegetable or some kind of mayonnaise.) The chickpea-sized pieces of couscous are soft, but have a slight burnt taste.
Another wait before my table is visited to take my dessert order.
Poached peaches, sable biscuit.
I’ve seen this problem before. With a very flat dish, the amount of surface area increases drastically, relative to the amount of filling. The toffee crust here would’ve been fine on a different-shaped bowl, but here it was too much. A toffee crust is interesting, but multiple large shards of sugary toffee in every mouthful detracts from the dish. The lemon flavoured custard was novel and tasty, but there was no other real taste present. The consistency was a fair bit runnier than most.
The poached peaches actually turned out to be pear, which were infused with an almost alcohol-strength spicy flavour. Easily the nicest part of the dish, even though they weren’t related to anything else.
The shortbreads were mild and pleasant, but with their slightly tart fruit sauce, it was a strange combination. (If I combined things incorrectly here, it wasn’t clear.)