I got incredibly lucky with my personal food choices, both the starter and the main were very good – unlike everyone else, whose experiences seem to have been uniformly meh (would love some details, actually). I have to say, though, I think I ordered the aubergine souffle mostly because it was the restaurant signature dish and by that stage I was desperately and subconsciously trying to curry favour with the management. Sigh. It was very good, though – very light, frothy aubergine with a centre of melted goat’s milk cheese.

The duck was lovely – basically curried, with a sort of blackened spice crust, and falling off the bone. Surprisingly good flavour combination, actually, and not what one expects with duck.

I have to say, the various sauces and reductions and what have you were good, but not as innovative and flavour-explosive as the Ginja versions.

In fact, even if you can find it they won’t say you can only bring two of your own bottles. They’ll say you can only bring one of your own bottles for a table of four (the sommelier said that explicitly when she arrived to chastise us). The second bottle was a great and grudging concession. Ptooey.

In comparisons with Ginja definitely Aubergine definitely comes off the loser.
With a capital Loo.

• My biggest problem was the attitude of the waiting staff.
  When the waiter came back and looked down his nose at us and asked:
  “Do you have any questions about the menu?”
  it really felt like he was offering to explain the big words for us.
  Compare this to the guy we had at Ginja (David?) who used exactly the same words but pitched it much more nicelyer.

  Also: how many waiting staff does one table need?
  We must have seen about six different people.
  We, the SC club, decided that the ones that scuttled to and fro from our table dishing out the food and clearing the plates away were kept locked under the stairs somewhere in the restaurant.

  The lady at the door was nice enough, but seemed out of place.
  We decided she was sneaking the aforementioned slaves scraps of food to keep them going.
  Also – she smiled. Did anyone else notice that none of the other staff smiled?

• I also found that speed of the service was a bit slow.
  We waited ages after the starters had gone.
  And the bread. Dagnammit, how hard can it be to be bring bread in a timely fashion.
  We came in, sat down, had some wine, scared off the people at the table next to us, had some more wine, had new people arrive at the table next to us, they order wine, they got bread, we had some more wine, then we got bread.
  I was about to call the waiter over and ask him to take away the mound of butter.

• Also, from our “things that make us laugh at the time and forget to blog about later (although obviously not this one since: here it is” department: inventing new swear words.
  Get snibbed!
  Rumour has it that the table next to us was eavesdropping and chuckling.

• The BYO wine issue was a pain.
  If you’ve got the cheek to charge R50 for corkage, it’s a bit off to also say you can only have one bottle.
  They weren’t happy to let us drink two whole bottles of our own wine, but they were very happy to charge us R100 for the corkage!
  The main problem was that it was handled so badly, and it was right at the beginning of the meal, so it soured the evening right from the get go.

I was chatting about this with Jimbob and he says he’s been there before with Architect boss and other Archies, and that he had a good experience there, and that boss man goes there quite regularly and likes it a lot.
I’m wondering if it’s a bit like the freemasons.
I think that because we’re new there, and we didn’t get introduced (or, better, brunged there) by an existing secret-handshake-knowing member, we basically weren’t welcome.

Interesting how this one bad experience has made us write lots, but we were relaitvely quiet on the good ones, no?

I say this as someone who has gotten heartily sick of being told how great London is for dining out when frankly, I am used to better.