Tin Cat Cafe
This place is most noticeable for its 60's decor. Apparently it's reopening night, but it seems really quiet.
With pork belly, stonefruit, radicchio.
Well-cooked duck tends to taste a lot like well-cooked chicken. This was only a shade away from chicken. Not bad chicken, but chicken nonetheless.
If there's any sugar here, I can't taste it. Maybe it refers to the stonefruit. The peaches don't have much flavour, and when combined with fennel and red cabbage, which also have no strong taste, the whole mouthful doesn't really taste all that bad …or good.
After a while, I give up on eating the competently cooked—but plain—meat, and stop hewing through the expanse of peach, fennel and red cabbage salad.
I usually give feedback on poor or very average food. Turns out the menu is new. There's an art to giving negative feedback without being aggrieved. Staff are often very apologetic, but I'm pretty used to average food, and have high standards, so I try to make it clear I'm not just a cranky customer. :) I could definitely exploit this to get myself free desserts and main courses almost everywhere, but I don't.
Restaurants are used to 95% of their customers telling them their food is amazing, and the remainder being cranky about their crappy food. My intermediate feedback is sometimes misinterpreted at first. :)
Dulce Leche, fraiche and sorbet.
I don't taste any booze here. The banana cake is fine, but as a dessert, I expect a fantastic and moist banana cake, not a reasonable cake-stall banana cake.
The thick caramel sauce isn't particularly warm, and doesn't have a particularly strong taste. The thick cream us fine, but nothing amazing, and the sorbet is completely irrelevant, though it has a nice lemony taste. Cake and sorbet obviously don't go together.
There's also a streak of golden syrup across the plate. I'm not sure these four sloppy components are a good match for a banana cake. One would be enough.