Veggie Bites

This was a take away experience, and it was every bit as good as the experience we had when we ate in a couple of weeks ago! We skipped an entree this time and ordered 3 main dishes instead, a red veggie curry, tofu with basil and chilli and a vegetarian pad thai (which was not on the menu, but they were happy to make it up for us). The food was great! I think the tofu with basil and chilli was one of the best versions if this I have ever eaten! I commented to Martin that I could eat a whole serve of that by myself! The red curry was also good, not too hot and full of veggies. The veggie pad thai was also good, not too many extra veggies (as I have commented before that I am not a fan of that), but sadly they were a little heavy handed on the bean sprouts and the sauce was the smallest bit bland… It would be nice if they had a couple of vegetarian noodle dishes on the menu, instead of having to ask them to adapt a meat based one, but the food is great and we will definitely go back!!

Montezuma’s is always a good place to go for a few margaritas and dinner before heading to a show at the Canberra Theatre or the Playhouse – which is what we were doing on this night! When we arrived we were informed that they have a new menu with 31 mains to choose from. This is all very good, however, I think that maybe that amount of choice is a little too extensive! Thank goodness I don’t eat meat, or I might still be sitting there trying to decide what to have! On top of that, the font used for the menu makes it very hard to scan the dishes and what is in them, so you have to read everything in depth to figure out if it is a possibility or not! We started with the dip combination, which we ordered and ate while we were still trying to decide on mains. The dips were good as always, however extra corn chips would not have gone astray, especially since we ended up with quite a few small broken bits on the plate which you were lucky to be able to pick up, let alone dip in something… We finally decided on our mains and they arrived fairly quickly… I had the vegetarian Montezuma’s Delight, while Martin had the ‘San Diego’ – two different types of vegetarian enchiladas. Our friends ordered meat based burritos and enchiladas I think. We were told at the beginning of the meal that sour cream, guacamole etc does not come with any of the main meals unless specified, so we also ordered a side order of guacamole. I have to say, I think this is a con – especially since most of the sides were a minimum of about $4 each – it seems to be purely a money making exercise! Anyway, I was surprised when our mains arrived, I expected mine to be bigger, however, as I was eating I realised that there was no way I could have eaten it if it was! The menu said it came with salad – which turned out to be mainly raw brocoli, cauliflower and red cabbage chopped up finely. It was nice, but probably not something I would order again (which would mean that I would have to spend more time reading the menu!!). Martin said his was a bit on the oily side, and I have to say I would agree with him… We finished with some desserts – chocolate mousse (not very Mexican I know!), Mexican date cake (which looked delicious!) and Mexican flan (which wasn’t really Mexican and looked like it was one of those creme caramels that you can buy from the supermarket slopped messily onto a plate (with a big chunk that had fallen out) with some nuts and honey or something drizzled over the top). We also had a couple of jugs of lemon margaritas – what can I say – these are always good!

We used to get take away from here quite a lot many years ago, and I can’t remember why we stopped… maybe it was around the time that we stopped getting take away from anywhere! Anyway, we decided to eat here because it was close to a friend’s work and we were after a quick dinner before heading to the AIS Darters netball game. I was a bit surprised when we arrived as it is very small inside. I was also surprised that the menu was fairly small, but then, for such a small restaurant, it would probably be silly for them to have an incredibly large menu! There were five of us for dinner, so we ordered samosas for our entree – they come as a serve of two and when we ordered three serves, we were asked if we would prefer to only have five instead of six, which was a very sensible idea! While our friends ordered mainly meat dishes, Martin and I ordered Bombay Potatoes and a veggie kofta (veggie balls in a yummy sauce), both of which were fantastic! The veggie kofta was a bit surprising – I think I expected something curry-like – more like a veggie korma, but the kofta were well made, sweet and held together beautifully and the sauce was delicious! There was also a dahl on the table, and we shared some raita and all had a garlic naan and it was all great and reasonably priced… I am sad that we forgot that this place existed, and I think we will go back in the future!

Well, I didn’t really eat here, but I did have a hot chocolate and the people I was with ate (well some of them did!), so that is my justification… This review won’t focus so much on the food, rather I have a few comments about the whole experience! We ended up here for cake and coffee after an exciting night at the AIS Darters netball game. There were 10 of us so we rang ahead to check they had the aforementioned cake and coffee and to book a table. The point here is that they knew we were coming! After we ordered, the various coffees, teas and hot chocolates started to arrive. To everyone’s surprise, a peppermint tea arrived as a cup of boiling water with the teabag on the side. To be fair, I can see the point of this – the drinker may like their tea at a certain strength, however, it seemed more than a little odd that this basically presented beverage was charged at the same price as some of the more fancy coffees that were ordered. Between the 10 of us, 5 desserts were ordered, 4 serves of the chocolate hazelnut torte (which I am told was delicious, although more like a mousse than a torte) and a panna cotta pistachio (which I tried and found it to be too sweet with a weird aftertaste). The panna cotta and 2 of the tortes arrived fairly quickly after the drinks, however, those desserts had been finished for a while before one of the people still waiting for his dessert decided to get up and mention it to the waiter. Once he did this, we realised we were actually missing 2 serves and updated the waiter. Finally one more torte arrived, and after yet more waiting, it was decided to cancel the final dessert. While we were keen not to hang around for too long, our decision to leave was brought forward by the fact that one of the staff (the owner?) had donned a head set microphone, set up the dodgy karaoke background music and announced that he was going to sing because “that is what they did”. We finally managed to request the bill, and each put in the exact money due to the rather loud comment of “I don’t want them to have a tip” which I think really just voiced something the rest of us were all thinking. I don’t mind waiting for my food – however, to wait for that amount of time (and who knows how much longer had the final dessert not been cancelled) and to have to ‘remind’ them that food is missing is unacceptable. And on top of that, we did not receive any form of apology for having to wait for so long, and as I mentioned above, they knew we were coming, so I would have thought that they could have been more prepared – what would they have done if all 10 of us had ordered the torte? I think we might have still been sitting there waiting!

We have been going to try this place a few times, but I have always held back because I thought it was run by the same people who run Two Sisters. However, Martin told me that he thinks they are run by different people, so we decided to try it before we saw Tap Dogs. And I am so glad we did – the food was great. I can’t wait to go back and try some more dishes from their enormous vegetarian selection… This restaurant might just be my new favourite Thai place! The only disappointment is that there is only one vegetarian entrée on the menu – Tawhu Tord (deep fried tofu with satay sauce). It was pretty good, but I do like Thai veggie spring rolls and curry puffs. There are almost 30 vegetarian main meals on the menu, so we had a bit of trouble deciding what the second dish would be. Of course the first choice was always going to be Gaeng Mussamum Mun (Mussamun potato curry) which was really good and very tasty. I am keen to try a different curry next time – maybe a red or green – because no matter how good a veggie mussamun curry is, it always reminds me a bit of the meat version! While there is a lot of fairly standard veggie dishes on the menu, we decided to try something that is probably not authentically Thai – Paad Ped Ka Chai Tawhu (spicy fried beancurd with beans, zucchini, capsicum, basil and ka chai). And it tasted really, really good. The other thing that impressed us was the presentation of the food. The minute it hit the table, it looked so good on the plates that my mouth started watering! We considered dessert, but the only thing they had was ‘Iced shape’ (pineapples, water chestnuts, black jelly and palm seeds in syrup and crushed ice) – sticky rice was off the menu because mangoes are not in season. What I really wanted though was bananas in coconut milk – sadly not even on the menu… If only they could expand the entrée and dessert sections to be as varied as the vegetarian main meals, then I would be very happy indeed! The other thing I wanted to comment on was the service – the food was obviously cooked freshly and quickly and it was on our table within minutes… Also there was only one waitress and the restaurant was more than half full, and she did an excellent job of seating people, taking orders, bringing food out, clearing tables and accepting bill payments… We’ll definitely be going back!

I have eaten here once before, a long, long time ago, so when a friend and I were looking for somewhere to have lunch in Garema Place I suggested we try it. They have a pretty good menu, with quite a few veggie options. Since I was starving, I ordered an Olympus pizza and it was good! Although, it had to be eaten with a knife and fork as it was a little on the sloppy side. They also heavily promote these cute little Dutch donut-ty things for dessert which we didn’t have, but I think I would like to go back and try them in the future!

Well, if you read this regularly you’ll notice that we have eaten at Antigo’s twice within a few weeks – however, we ate completely different things! And it was purely a coincidence, we had planned to come here this time, however last time, we were simply looking for somewhere that we could get a table without having to have booked in advance! Again the food was really good, this time we started with a variety of breads (and hooray, the waitress told us how many slices come in each serve and we were able to figure out how many serves we needed for six of us!), and for our mains, Martin and I both ordered the pumpkin risotto with caramelised onion and a creamy white wine sauce. Yum – the risotto was great, cooked perfectly and the creamy sauce was a really nice change to ‘ordinary’ risotto. For dessert we shared the sticky date pudding, which came with a huge chunk of toffee (my favourite) and was absolutely swimming in the caramel sauce. I think that the pudding itself was a little dry, so the sauce didn’t actually last very long! The food here is good and reasonably priced. However, in two visits we have managed to exhaust the vegetarian selection as well as the dishes that can have the meat easily removed…

This was an interesting meal, that started out with great entrées, went downhill for the mains, but kind of ended ok considering the problems we had. Well, that is a cryptic opening statement, so let me explain… There was actually much discussion as to whether we should actually eat here or not as in the past they have been a little slow to bring out the food, but considering it was after 9pm, we finally decided that it should be ok, and it was, the food was brought out quite quickly after we ordered. Even though there were carnivores among us, we decided to make it a vegetarian night and started with the veggie samosas and aloo tikki chat (spicy potato patties – which are my favourite!). The veggie samosas almost had more peas than potatoes (and yes, I spent ages picking them all out)! And the aloo tikki chat were great! As I said, great entrées, so I was looking forward to the mains. We had ordered aloo curry (potato curry), veggie korma, saag panir (spinach and cheese) and dahl with five types of lentils, along with basmati rice, raita and garlic naan. The dahl was ordinary and almost had the consistency of glue or paste, the saag panir was pretty good, the veggie korma was also pretty good but full of peas and the aloo curry came with rather large chunks of chicken in it… When it arrived we thought it looked meaty – beefy rather than chicken, but put it down to chunks of potato covered in the curry sauce. However, the chicken was soon revealed. We returned it (we had to take it to the counter as the wait staff seemed to disappear as soon as we had our food) and it was replaced with a non-chicken version which was almost too spicy to eat… Three different people apologised to us for the mix up (there is a chicken and potato curry on the menu that obviously uses the same curry sauce and the chef must have misread the order) and eventually we were told that we would not be charged for that dish – which was nice. So, a good start, downhill for mains and an ok finish! However, even if I ignore the problems with the chicken in our vegetarian potato curry, I didn’t think that the food was incredibly great, and I doubt that I would go back again, especially considering there is a large number of other Indian restaurants in Canberra.

This place used to be called Backbenchers, but has changed its name to Cafe in the House (Yo, yo!). It still seems to serve the same food and has some rather entertaining wait staff! When we arrived, it was dubious as to whether we would eat here as it took the waiter quite a while before he decided that there actually was a spare table! We ordered gourmet sandwiches and wedges. At this point I should say there are not a lot of vegetarian options on the menu, there was the soup of the day which sounded a bit odd (cream of mushroom with some cannelini beans), quiche (boring!), something else with mushrooms and goats cheese pesto (although this might have actually listed proscuttio on the menu) or a sandwich. The sandwich filling was suppposed to be roasted capsicums, artichokes, babaganoush and roasted pinenuts. Not being a fan of artichoke, I asked if they could substitute that with cheese and tomato. I ended up with a cheese, tomato and roasted capsicum sandwich – I have no idea what happened to the babaganoush and roasted pinenuts… oh well… To be honest, given there is little variety and their inability to make a simple substitution (I wonder what would have happened if I had ordered a dish without the meat!) I wouldn’t go out of my way to eat here again… but if you are at Old Parliament House and are hungry, then it would be worth a visit. Oh, and I almost forgot… we had to ask what something was that was listed on the menu – and the answer was quite surprising! So, if you know what cornichons are (without looking on google!) or if you have a highly amusing answer, then email Lucy!