Riverside Restaurant
Slumming it at the Intercontinental Hotel this evening. :)
With smoked eggplant and mixed mushrooms, a white wine cream sauce, and herbed Parmesan crumble.
I was going to order the lamb, but my very explicit coriander check returns a positive reading. The waitress returns to ask me if I'm allergic to coriander, or just don't like the taste. I play it safe, and order something else.
Maybe in future, I'll say I'm allergic to coriander. :)
I have a nibble of the smoked eggplant atop this dish. It's the awful combination of sloppy texture and burnt taste. It might be more palatable once mixed into my pasta.
The pasta is pleasant, and the basic creamy (but more oily) sauce is passable. Among the pasta is a variety of mushrooms. These have a variety of odd and squishy textures, but they don't really add any taste to the fairly unexciting pasta.
When I eat pasta, I want to eat it with tomato, or some other strong flavour.
With vanilla bean ice cream.
I was hoping the waitress would recommend this one.
The meringue is almost like sweet cream. Underneath is the banana layer. It has a fairly weak banana taste. The pie crust is very similar to a delicatessen custard tart base. It's sweet and crumbly. This is all reasonably pleasant, but there's no real taste.
I never want to eat creamy stuff with other creamy stuff, but I eat the ice cream with the meringue tart anyway. Even the ice cream lacks flavour. It's very similar to Black and Gold vanilla ice cream (which is quite reasonable.) I taste no vanilla bean. Actually, I just taste milk.
I almost forget that there's supposed to be Baileys in here. I carefully taste each component, but never detect any trace of Baileys. In my book, that's not a strong flavour.
Even the little piece of irrelevant chocolate has almost no taste!
Update: The Baileys was in the banana! I guessed it was in the meringue. Sneaky Baileys.
The waitress is very apologetic about the food. She asks if there's anything she can offer me to make it a better experience. It's a nice gesture, but I'm about to go. It's also open-ended, requiring me to suggest something I think is appropriate. An offer of a free coffee, or refund on dessert, would've been most appropriate here. I don't think it's warranted here, however. This food was just average, not terrible.
Update: The bill has a 10% ($4.90) deduction on it. Most places would refund the dessert. This discount is both small and arbitrary.